New Glamour Editor Prefers Direct Approach
If shown this magazine cover line, “Doing it! (Sex) do’s & don’ts: 100 women’s secret sexual agendas--Who wants what, how bad and how often,” you might guess it was from Cosmopolitan.
You would be wrong, but close.
The line appears on the cover of Glamour, whose January issue is the first to reflect the very direct approach of Bonnie Fuller, who recently left the top job at sexually frank Cosmo to become Glamour’s new editor in chief. Yes, sex has long been a part of Glamour’s vocabulary, but Fuller seems to have turned up the temperature.
“ ‘Direct’ is a good word,” Fuller said this week. “I wanted to make the magazine more direct by reaching out and talking more directly to the reader and luring her in. Tone is a very important tool in talking to the reader and you establish that tone in your headlines and pull quotes [highlighted quotations].”
Fuller’s arrival in August, like all changes in magazine editors, led to a number of high-level departures from Glamour after the long tenure of Ruth Whitney, who retired after a tenure of 31 years. Identifying herself in an editor’s letter as a longtime reader of Glamour, Fuller goes on to say: “I was a big fan of Ruth Whitney, and I know how much Glamour helped me--I hope I can help you!”
Although Cosmopolitan and Glamour both compete aggressively for young women, Fuller said in the interview that the Glamour reader is “a little more introspective, more fashion- and beauty-driven. She also likes the breadth of coverage in Glamour.”
Indeed, under Whitney, Glamour became the cash cow of the Conde Nast Publications Inc. by combining journalistic enterprise with the fashion and service pieces. Fuller countered a report in media circles that one journalistic staple of Glamour, coverage of women in Washington, will no longer appear by explaining that political news now will run in the new “Watchworthy Women” section when these developments do not warrant longer pieces.
Readers of the highly profitable Glamour may care little about the names on the masthead, but it will be curious to see what impact Fuller’s editorial touch has on business over the long term. At Glamour and Cosmopolitan, where Kate White succeeded Fuller as editor in chief, changes at the top are seismic because of the financial stakes involved.
If Glamour is the cash cow of the Conde Nast magazine empire, Cosmopolitan may be the oil well of Hearst Corp. In an examination of Conde Nast published in July, Fortune reported that Cosmopolitan “makes nearly as much money as all of Conde Nast put together.”
Cosmopolitan’s circulation was nearly 2.6 million during the first half of 1998, up 2.2% over the same period last year. Glamour’s circulation was 2.2 million, rising 6.9% over the first half of 1997.
Cosmopolitan leads Glamour in ad revenue, according to estimates of the Publishers Information Bureau.
Old Books Made New: Sometimes the old, even the ancient, can be made new again by the press of contemporary events.
The popular 1996 film version of Michael Ondaatje’s “The English Patient,” in which the Ralph Fiennes character holds close a volume of Herodotus, prompted Knopf’s Everyman’s Library to print 10,000 copies of a handsome, new hardcover edition of Herodotus’ “The Histories.”
More recently, the lead character in Tom Wolfe’s new bestseller, “A Man in Full” (Farrar, Straus), comes to extol the Stoicism espoused by Epictetus, and Wolfe himself has been discussing the Roman philosopher in TV appearances promoting the novel. As a result, HarperSanFrancisco has dipped into its so-called backlist of previously published titles and given fresh printings to two of them: Epictetus’ “A Manual for Living,” which is an 88-page primer on the philosopher prepared by Sharon Lebell, and Epictetus’ “The Art of Living,” a 114-page hardcover that also echoes his views on the happy and meaningful life.
HarperSanFrancisco, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, is adding to a total of 70,000 copies that were already in print.
A fourth book, originally published when Richard M. Nixon was facing possible impeachment in 1974, has been resurrected by Yale University Press as the House Judiciary Committee considers articles of impeachment against President Bill Clinton. The book is “Impeachment: A Handbook,” a $6.95 citizen’s guide written by legal scholar Charles L. Black Jr.
“Impeachment,” which sold 30,000 copies during the Nixon period, later went out of print, despite occasional media references to Black’s much-admired work, before Yale University Press commissioned a new introduction and went back to press.
Paul Colford’s e-mail address is paul.colford@newsday.com
