Condé Nast knows his glory goes beyond fashion magazines like Vogue

Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of Vogue magazine since 1988, known for her iconic fringe, her permanently worn sunglasses and her razor-sharp taste, in many ways personifies the sumptuous history of publishing group Condé Nast as arbiter of style.

Now she’s promoting her vision for the company’s future, in which the editor-in-chief role she helped define will become a relic, and the company has come to operate under a code that includes the motto “exceptional is not exclusive”.

“I think the most wonderful thing about working in the media is the constant change, the power and seeing things in motion,” Wintour said in an interview at Condé Nast’s almost completely empty offices at the One World Trade Center in Manhattan. “Particularly now, when things happen so fast. Yes, things were great in the past, but what happens in the future will be even better.”

Some Condé Nast employees weren’t sure Wintour would be part of that future. In June 2020, company workers asked at a general company meeting if she was leaving the company. Wintour only apologized for his role in a culture that many say has disregarded non-whites, amid a broader reckoning on racial and diversity issues, both within Condé Nast and in the industry. media in general.

Wintour did not intend to leave. Since then, she has been promoted to vice president of global content and is leading a sweeping transformation of the company, in which executives try to leave behind Condé Nast’s legacy as the most important magazine editor of the past 100 years, a it was in which the company took its characteristic form of elitism to its zenith and did not save money on its productions.

I spoke with Wintour (who was wearing sunglasses) and Roger Lynch, the chief executive of Condé Nast, on a cold autumn day, to hear what they had to say about the new Condé.

There is much more at stake than the company’s financial survival. In addition to the existential angst of all the old media giants over whether relevance can be maintained, there is a bigger question: Will Condé Nast be able, now that it’s under pressure, to take real action to correct a culture that many employees describe as a difficult environment for non-white people to succeed, and content that in the past prioritized a Eurocentric standard of beauty? Will an institution that has prospered by devoting immense attention to the superficial be able to effect profound change?

The period has undoubtedly been difficult for the magazine industry. Print advertising has taken a nosedive over the past 15 years and audiences no longer trust traditional brands to tell them what’s hot. In recent years, Condé Nast’s operations have posted annual deficits of more than $100 million (BRL 568.7 million).

In 2018, the company announced that it would combine its US operations with those of its sister company, Condé Nast International, and create a worldwide company. The two businesses had operated almost completely separately in the past, with the European editions of Vogue and the Asian editions of GQ having little in common with their American counterparts. The group’s publications often competed for the same advertisers and the same stars to fill their covers. Lynch was appointed CEO of the new unified company in 2019 to lead the merger, which would involve a consolidation of support operations in order to save money.

“Roger found a company that was facing a really tough billing situation,” said Steven Newhose, president of Advance Publications, the parent of Condé Nast, and a member of the billion-dollar family that has controlled Advance for nearly 100 years.

“Unless you want to look like a museum, you have to change, and change it in a very radical way,” he said.

For the past 12 months, Wintour has focused on the next step in the process: turning seven of Condé Nast’s top publications — Vogue, GQ, Wired, Architectural Digest, Vanity Fair, Condé Nast Traveler and Glamor — into world magazines, each under one leader, cutting costs and streamlining the content sharing process.

“Instead of having 27 Vogues or 10 Vogues chasing the same story, we’re going to have a worldwide Vogue to cover it,” said Wintour. “With that, what we will have will be a kind of world newsroom with different cores”.

The shift in focus from local to global was not well accepted everywhere. Tina Brown, former editor-in-chief of the New Yorker and Vanity Fair magazines, detonated the plan and called it “suicide” in an interview with the London Times in August.

“Obviously there are some stories that the model will work for, especially if you think about fashion, which is a world language, and music, and so there are articles that will work in all territories, but there will also be stories that don’t at all will work,” said Wintour. “It’s something we’re very aware of.”

Wintour is also ensuring that the likelihood of new Anna Wintours emerging is slim – it’s the end of the era of the imperial editors-in-chief, each with their manor, a position she herself helped create as an elegant but demanding guardian of fashion and culture. The brands are now run by “world editorial directors,” most of whom are based in New York, with regional content heads reporting to them.

“Before, you created articles for publication, the magazine came out once a month and everything was great,” she said, describing the old domain of an editor-in-chief. Now, the world’s editorial directors and content heads work across multiple platforms that include “digital videos, short and long, social events, philanthropic endeavors, partnerships, consumption, e-commerce,” said Wintour.

“Many different worlds are involved,” she added. “Honestly, who would want this post?”

Executives at Condé Nast are, to a large extent, desperately trying to leave behind the sumptuous glory days of the past. No one wants to focus their attention on limos, epic expense accounts, or the legions of assistants who accompanied their posts through the company’s golden years.

Wintour says he doesn’t feel any sentimental attachment to the past, and is serving as an example of leadership in leaving the old Condé behind. But when talking about the question of the good old days compared to the present, she betrays some nostalgia. Wintour recalled his appointment of Hamish Bowles as editor-in-chief of World of Interiors magazine, Condé Nast’s influential design publication.

“What came to my mind when we were looking for the person for that role is that we were talking about a title that people file and keep, it’s a top quality publication, an amazing magazine, and it’s like the standard bearer of that world specific,” she said.

“The feeling is that print is our catwalk,” she said, adding that “magazines should be collectibles. They should be things people want to keep.”

But the days of print media in general are long gone. Lynch described his company to me as “a largely digital company”, with more money coming from digital advertising than print media. But he is eager to reduce reliance on advertising of any kind, and to cultivate other sources of revenue. At the moment, most of Condé Nast’s revenue comes from advertising; revenue generated by consumption (including subscriptions, associates and e-commerce) accounts for 25%.

Executives also mentioned having the ability to execute global social media plans now in order to distribute interviews and fashion shoots with celebrities that have international appeal, such as a cover that featured Adele on Vogue’s US and UK editions in the same month.

The new strategy may seem like a way to translate the old successes of the past to the web, which shows the slowness with which the company has adapted its magazines to the digital world.

Janice Min, media executive and former editor in chief of The Hollywood Reporter and Us Weekly magazines, said Condé Nast magazines and similar publications were trying to strike a balance between having enough scale to compete with Google and Facebook in the searching for advertisers and maintaining the “right” audience to attract those advertisers.

“I think that without that perfume of elitism, that old way of looking at the world from the top down and telling people what to wear and what to think, Condé Nast runs the risk of becoming just another generic web content factory,” she said.

The company adopted the “Condé Code” in September 2020, a five-area set of values ​​that states that “diversity is our strength” as part of its efforts to address concerns about racism. At about the same time, a global vice president of diversity and inclusion, Yashica Olden, was hired and the company released its first diversity report. (A spokesman for Condé Nast said a second report would be released early next year. About 40% of the company’s new hires in 2020 and around half of its top editors in the US are non-white people, added the spokesperson).

At the same time, company employees are battling for broader changes. Four Condé Nast publications – The New Yorker, Wired, Ars Technica and Pitchfork – have unionized in the past two years, joining NewsGuild, which also represents employees of The New York Times and other media organizations. Condé Nast recently reached agreement on collective contracts with three of its employees’ unions, after contentious and public negotiations that included a protest outside Wintour’s home in Greenwich Village.

Now, employees of other company publications, including Vogue, are organizing and plan to announce the formation of a union soon, according to two current employees of Condé Nast and a former employee.

Now that the company’s employees are starting to return to the offices, a completely voluntary return, they are finding a company structured differently than their pre-pandemic organization. And they are also discovering that Wintour, 72, has resisted all rumors of an imminent departure from his post, has consolidated his power and is in office almost every day.

“Right now, my focus is on today,” she said, when asked if she had any plans to leave the company soon.

“She is not allowed to retire before me,” interrupted Lynch, laughing.

The New York Times, translated by Paulo Migliacci