This month marks the end of an era: The last monthly print edition of Glamour magazine.
Not that we didn’t see this change coming. Especially after Glamour’s publisher Condé Nast hired a new editor-in-chief for the magazine who had never before worked in print.
And the future plans for the brand (remember, it’s no longer a magazine) sound exciting. Condé Nast’s CEO recently described the new Glamour as “an always-on brand that is in constant conversation with its audience on all platforms.” Last week I learned that a former colleague of mine has been tapped to host one of Glamour’s new podcast series.
Still, it’s hard not to memorialize a magazine that has served as a staple for American women for nearly 80 years. I started reading Glamour magazine before I could drive. And while I never worked there myself, many of my friends did.
Friends like Cathy Garrard, who today is a senior editor at Hearst’s Lifestyle Group, producing special publications for brands like Good Housekeeping, Prevention, Woman’s Day, and Men’s Health. Her first job after college was as an editorial assistant at Glamour.
“Landing a job at this iconic, glossy magazine felt like a fairy tale,” she told me recently. “I was a rock star to my friends and family back in Kansas. Getting hired at Glamour was quite likely the defining moment of my entire career.”
While Glamour was a household name, most of the visitors I received while working at Condé Nast were surprised to learn that Glamour was also the company’s most profitable title – not Vogue or Vanity Fair – and hence enjoyed the building’s best office space.
I was a contributing editor at Self magazine (several floors down from Glamour) from 2000 to 2002, and worked with many former and future Glamour staffers, including longtime editor-in-chief, Cindi Leive. Hired to help bolster Self’s investigative reporting, I worked on stories about our nation’s critical nursing shortage, the impact of malpractice insurance on obstetric services, the deleterious effects of the United States’ Mexico City Policy on global reproductive health, and more.
But no matter how weighty the topic, as a women’s magazine reporter, I was expected to always write in service to the reader. Tips, how-to’s, reviews, guides – beyond the news, we strove to make information useful to readers.
Once relegated only to consumer magazines, service stories are now journalism du jour. Today’s digital media darlings – everything from BuzzFeed to LinkedIn – have made a fortune on this formula.
Even headlines from the New York Times now read like cutlines we might expect from an old Glamour cover:
“9 Questions to Ask Before Booking a Wedding Site”
“Four Simple Words to Help You Live Well”
“The Gear You Need for a New Year (and a New You)”
(These are all headlines I found on the New York Times site today.)
It’s been a new strategy that has helped the venerable “paper” (I can’t remember the last time I actually held a newspaper) boost subscriber numbers and encourage repeat visitors.
So while Glamour and Self and many other magazines are no longer in print, the style of reporting they helped popularize is enjoying a renaissance. And I suspect this trend will continue to grow for some time.
In part because there are only so many stories about, say, the White House any one person can stand – or any one outlet can report and promote. (Service stories are often cheaper to produce and less tied to any given news cycle.)
And in part because so many of us are hungry to lead our best lives possible.
On its new site, the Glamour brand is described as one that “believes in the power of women being themselves and stands with women as they do their own thing: honestly, authentically, and awesomely.”
Long live Glamour.