Here is the popular image of The All-Powerful Magazine Editor. The Devil Wears Prada’s Miranda Priestley, editor of Runway magazine. Inspired by a genuinely all-powerful editor, Vogue’s Anna Wintour, and made screen legend so deliciously by Meryl Streep.
But the power any individual editor holds over his or her magazine can vary wildly between publications. And nowhere is this more amply demonstrated than in the high stakes politics of creating a front cover.
I’m specifically talking here about front covers that feature celebrities. I’m sure there’s a whole raft of complex issues that come with putting together, say, a food magazine., that is outside of my experience. But I think even the most stressed out food mag editor would probably agree that it’s a lot less stressful to shove a good looking spaghetti bolognaise on the cover. I don’t imagine there’s ever been a plate of spag bol that flatly refused to come out of its dressing room to stand in front of the camera.
In July 2000, when I was appointed as the launch editor of Glamour - to be launched in April 2001 - it didn’t need to be said that I’d be expected to deliver a hugely famous and popular person to grace that first cover, and every over thereafter. You can read about the fun of that here.
Somewhere around the mid to late 1990s, it became apparent that celebrities were the hottest newsstand draws for magazine readers. Gone were the days when any pretty, anonymous model face would do. And as the demand for celebrity covers increased, it ushered in an entirely new power balance. By which I mean, for a middle market, mass circulation magazine like Glamour, the balance of power lay largely with the celebrity gatekeepers, the publicists.
Something that always fascinated me during my long career as an editor is that while we’re in charge, there are so many other stakeholders who directly or indirectly influence what you finally see on the newsstand. There are a lot of egos that must collaborate and compromise, and more often than not, the process is fraught with delicate negotiations* . Here is a rundown of every other contributor who gets to affect how that magazine cover looks by the time a reader gets to see it.
(*full blown screaming matches).
The publicists
Any celebrity being sought for magazine covers will have a publicist, the person who takes all the requests for photo shoots, interviews, any kind of interaction with the press. Typically they are the celebrity’s sole press representative for the entire world’s media. On any given day, their inbox will be full of requests for photo shoots and interviews from magazines all over the world.
It was my brief at Glamour to make a magazine that would prompt as many people as possible to buy it. To that end, I of course was always chasing the celebrities who I’d decided were ‘bankable’; massively well known and popular and the kind of people who our readers really loved to read about. It was my job to figure out who I thought would be hugely popular in say, three or six months’ time and start pursuing a cover with that person through their rep.
This process takes a lot of patient, hard work. I had a team of three people at Glamour whose sole jobs were to know which people had what film, TV, music projects coming out when, and ingratiate themselves with those celebs’ publicists. They are journalists, yes, but also the job of working in entertainment on magazines is essentially a sales rep job. When a handful of magazines are all chasing the same tiny handful of celebs deemed ‘bankable’, it made for fierce competition. Vicious, sometimes. When I was editing Glamour, I was competing for front covers with every other women’s title - Vogue, Marie Claire, Elle, In Style, Cosmopolitan, Harpers Bazaar, Company, as well as all the newspaper supplements like The Times Magazine or Sunday Times Style.
And it was the publicists who would decide which cover their valued clients would be beaming out from.
If a celeb was hot enough to be stalked by Vogue, my heart would sink. If Vogue wanted someone, the rest of us could basically go suck it.
As the publicists knew how important their clients were for our front covers, they became all powerful and would usually have a say in things like, who would be conducting the interview, who would be taking the photographs and who would be styling. Sometimes, debates over this would derail the whole thing before it had begun. Sometimes I would walk away from the whole thing if I knew the only writer they would accept to interview would do a terrible job. Sometimes, a publicist would say things like ‘You can have a shoot, but only if the photographer is Mario Testino’, knowing full well that Mario was unavailable to me for various contractual reasons. I remember one shoot, with Emma Watson, where it took nearly two months of us suggesting tons and tons of photographers who were all rejected, before they would finally agree on one. Once, a publicist in LA phoned me in the middle of the night to scream at me because I’d emailed asking if we could include a dog in some of the photos with her client.
I’m often asked if we gave copy or photo approval to celebrities. The honest answer is, it varied. I never ever wanted to give that level of control to people who had a habit of knocking out anything interesting or colourful a celebrity said in an interview. It became a question of how badly did I want this celebrity. The equation was, the more I wanted someone, the more likely I’d negotiate about approvals. If it clear that it was the only way the publicist was going to let you have this person that you thought would sell covers, then sometimes we did it. With photo approval, my argument was always that, we’re all there on the day, the celebrity can see themselves on a digital monitor, so you agree to flag to me there and then if you see something you really really hate and I agree to not be a dick about deliberately running anything I know that you hate.
The celebrities
Funnily enough, they got to have a huge say in which magazine would be lucky enough to feature their sellable mug on the front. More than once over the years I’ve had a publicist say to me, ‘I mean, if it were entirely up to me, Jo, she’d be doing your cover, but, um… she just doesn’t like your magazine.’ Not much comeback from that!
The photographers
Oh lordy. I have worked with many, many wonderful photographers. Amiable, collaborative people who want to work with you to do great things and make sure you, the editor, are happy with their work (see above).
I’ve also worked with some utter bell-ends whose behaviour threatens to derail my entire career and that is… stressful. Basically, a great many photographers see the editor of a magazine as the enemy of style and art. They want to take cool, edgy imagery that looks wonderful on their website. ’Cool’ photos - the ones that for instance might be black and white, or hide a famous person’s face behind a ton of hair - are the kinds of things that die a sales death on the newsstand, so yes, I was always after pretty, smiley, colourful pics to attract readers. So I was often cast as the cheesy old sell-out who wanted to make everything naff.
This causes ‘creative tensions’ let’s say. In my time, I’ve had photographers do things like
Demand I go and sit in the box room next to the studio and not even look at the monitor while they’re shooting my cover
Make a point of not giving me for publication the one picture I’d said I really loved while I was there on the shoot.
Send me, from a full day of shooting, three frames - none of them useable as a cover - and argue that sending anymore choices to me would ‘compromise my artistic integrity’.
Change the eye colour of a model to look like fake green cats’ eyes and then be absolutely outraged that I wanted it changed to her normal colour because I was, again, ‘compromising artistic integrity’.
Phone their good pal, the celebrity being shot for the cover, and then phone me and tell me what they have decided my cover will look like.
Withhold the entire shoot until I have agreed, virtually in blood, to only run the pictures they want to run.
Of course, as a magazine editor I can’t do what a photographer can. I became very good, I think, at being able to identify which photo from hundreds is ‘the one’ that will be a fantastic front cover. But I wouldn’t know where to begin in actually creating that cover myself. So when we found the photographers who produced pictures we loved and who were friendly and collaborative to work with, it was heaven. When you find those people, you want them to bring their creative talents to the party and make an image that hadn’t even occurred to you. I loved to throw ideas around with these kinds of photographers - more often than not they had ideas that either improved on the suggestions of the mag team, or had ideas that were miles better than anything we’d have come up with. I loved the photographers who would take it upon themselves to have, say, a Harley Davidson motorcycle brought in for Britney Spears to straddle. Or drag us all off to a circus for a fun setting. Even with our favourites though, there’d be times when they’d be bitterly disappointed that you didn’t choose their absolute favourite image to be the cover. It’s a painful moment for many when creative genius must be kerbed by certain business realities. And for some reason, even my favourite photographers in the world always tend to hate it when the cover stars smile!
Fashion brands
If you want your magazine to be considered cool and fashionable - and therefore, an attractive proposition for advertisers - then it was expected that your cover stars would be wearing the most current designs available from the world’s most covetable fashion brands. It also tends to be an expectation from celebs and their publicists too.
And as celebrities have publicists, so too, do fashion houses. Like celebrity publicists, fashion PRs have very definite ideas about which publications are right and wrong for their brand to be seen in and on. So if we were phoning, for example, Prada or Dolce and Gabbana, they want to know who will be wearing the clothes we’re sending. Sometimes they would hear the celebrity’s name and be absolutely aghast, darling, at the very idea of that person being seen in their designs. Then there’d be times when, yes, they’d love to send you the clothes but on the condition that their clothes, and not some rival brand’s, are the ones featured on the cover. I remember an early cover where a designer made a bespoke dress for a celebrity. Someone - not me, I don’t know who - promised it would be the cover look. A gamble that did not pay off. The celeb didn’t like the dress on her. Rages and awkwardness ensued.
The politics involved in getting clothes for the cover could be unbearable. If the fashion house in question thought they’d be getting a Vogue cover they would not lend the same clothes to us. If a rival magazine had got wind of us trying to get a particular ‘look’ and it was currently sitting in their cupboard, they might ‘accidentally’ forget to send it back to the fashion house. The fashion magazines considered to be the most ‘major’ are often allowed to hold samples in their vast fashion cupboards for months on end just in case they fancy shooting it, because these credits are the most valuable to brands.
You might be thinking, ‘Bloody hell, just go to Zara and buy some shit to put the celeb in, we don’t care.’ And that thought crossed my mind many a time. But the celebrity also wants to be flattered by being dressed by these big fashionable brands. Often they would send word ahead of the shoot of which labels they loved and, more importantly, which they loathed. In more recent times, more celebrities are careful to be eco-conscious and want to know that everything they’re wearing on the shoot is sustainable fashion.
My employers
People are sometimes surprised to learn that editors have bosses. But yes we do. At Glamour it was my job once a month to take my cover to a committee of senior execs at the company - the managing director, the finance director, the circulation manager, the marketing manager and the publishing director. This meeting never failed to wind me right up. This is an important group of people who are all excellent at their jobs, for sure. But I liked to think I was excellent at mine too and of everyone present in that room, I was always the only one who knew exactly what had gone into getting to the point where I can finally present a cover. All the ups and downs and fights with everyone else already mentioned in this piece. So when someone who’s never had to grapple with a day of that might pipe up and say something like, ‘I don’t really like that necklace’, or say something like ‘I don’t know, do enough people really know who Taylor Swift is?’ when it’s taken me a year to get Taylor Swift onto the cover, I had to swallow damn hard on the rage.
I was very lucky though in that for most of my career there, my managing director, Nicholas Coleridge, was a former editor who absolutely understood how hard covers are. He would critique it from a place of understanding the newsstand and offer up valid concerns about type size of cover lines or the crop of the picture. He would sometimes tell me the image wasn’t his favourite or he wasn’t familiar with the celeb in question but he always ended by saying, ‘You’re the editor, the decision must be yours.’ That changed a lot after his departure which was monumentally depressing.
So, once all of these people have had their oar in, then the editor can get on with making a cover what he or she would like!
What are your thoughts on this? Any of this a surprise to you? Any follow-on questions? Let’s chat.
I love this column Jo. It takes me right back. The interesting thing for me was when i went from editing a 'mass' magazine like Cosmo to a 'luxury' magazine like ELLE. On Cosmo so few celebrities would do our cover (namely because of all the sex content- who wants 10 Ways To Blow next to their head? Even though I NEVER used that coverline) that we were rarely fighting with anyone. The fight was to get someone. And fashion houses would never lend us any clothes. But at ELLE, as you so perfectly capture, it was a jigsaw puzzle of fashion/photographer/publicist being on your side ..with often one pice of the jigsaw missing. I miss a few things about my magazines days but not this. Bring back the models was what every editor really wanted...but even then that gets complicated with the bigger girls!
I have always wondered how a particular cover was determined and chosen. So interesting to read your article Jo. I too seek out the articles identified on the front cover over the cover photo, however, I am drawn to the cover photo first.
Thank you.