Former editors of big glossies dish on what a shitshow that place is. The magazine is dead, long live the magazine, etc. Lots of gossipy drug stuff etc in here. I kind of skimmed it to be honest, but the parts I read were sort of fascinating. My favourite quote is somewhere at the top where they call it the place that puts “the loss in glossy.”
Editors of glossy magazines had status then because their products seemed important. People went to newsstands or physical mailboxes to find bound pieces of paper dropped by postal workers that would tell them who and what was cool, giving them topics for cocktail-party and water-cooler chatter.
Portable phones were these whiz-bang things that folded shut and were tucked away in pockets and expensive “It” bags.
The early and mid-aughts were the Roaring ’20s of magazines, with the looming economic recession not yet imaginable and the disruption of digital media not considered by publishing executives, so infatuated with their pretty print pages and the huge margins that print advertising delivered. No matter that their one real job was to have their fingers on the pulse of What’s Next.
