Anna Wintour and a new CEO plot the future of Condé Nast. reeveswiedeman reports
Illustration: André Carrilho “It’s dreadful,” Anna Wintour said in early October, looking out the south-facing windows of her 25th-floor office in One World Trade Center, which has been home to Vogue and its publisher, Condé Nast, since 2014. It’s the neighborhood she hates — corporate, sterile, and encumbered by security.
Condé Nast’s future is now being charted by Wintour’s new boss, Roger Lynch, the former CEO of Pandora, the music-streaming service he ran until it was sold to SiriusXM in February. Lynch is Condé’s first outside CEO in its 110-year history, replacing Bob Sauerberg, who’d been at the company since 2005 and was steeped in the genteel-magazine model.
Many of Wintour’s current and former colleagues consider her indispensable, someone whose eventual departure — she turns 70 next month — will spell the company’s doom. Others have watched Condé’s decline since she took over as artistic director and wonder how she’s still in charge.
The answer, in part, was that it never really had to. For decades, within Advance, the company that houses the broader Newhouse empire, the newspapers were the profit engines: In the ’90s, a Condé executive said that the Staten Island Advance alone probably made more money than all of Condé Nast. “It was such rarefied air they had no idea what was going on in the real world,” an executive who signed on after the recession said.
For years, the Condé magazines operated like warring clans on separate islands in a posh archipelago, all of them firing their golden cannons at each other as often as they aimed them at Hearst or Time Inc.
In an attempt to compete with tech-company perks, the 33rd floor, home to Co/Lab, had couches, Ping-Pong tables, and excellent snacks. “Word got out,” one employee told me. “They had seltzer, string cheese, good beer, packets of hummus and guacamole, Chex Mix. There were containers of walnuts and almonds and those really good pretzel chips.” Editorial employees started making their way from other floors “like ants marching up and down.
In the early years of her artistic directorate, Wintour meddled far and wide but was careful to respect the independence of a few titles, including GQ and Vanity Fair. Now both of their long-standing editors were out. Jim Nelson, at GQ, was replaced in January by Will Welch, who had been at the magazine since 2007 and spent much of the past decade pushing it to target a more fashion-obsessed demographic, a vision that had been embraced enthusiastically by the company’s sales side and Wintour.
This approach requires fewer editors, too. One told me that he wasn’t sure how many people still worked there after many rounds of layoffs in recent years but that GQ hadn’t been able to field a softball team this summer. Others said they felt a sense of renewed purpose after the constant cutting. GQ’s focus, however, not only risked alienating a huge chunk of its readership, which is roughly 40 percent female, but also brought with it the dangers of myopia.
Jones wasn’t oblivious to the expectations for the magazine. “At a base level, there’s a reason our trademark event is a party,” she said. Every new editor, Brown and Carter included, had suffered an early adjustment period, and Jones wasn’t able to throw money at the problem as they could. Jones had to cut at least $14 million from Vanity Fair’s 2018 budget, according to several employees.
The company’s biggest bet is Condé Nast Entertainment, a video-production company launched in 2011 after several articles from Condé titles had been optioned to become movies — Brokeback Mountain originally appeared in The New Yorker, and Argo was a Wired feature — without the company receiving any money.
The most promising stars in Condé’s video universe are the cast of Bon Appétit employees who have successfully turned the company’s test kitchen into a film set.
Which brings us back to the Newhouses. Today, the family is richer than it’s ever been, with a net worth well above $18 billion. They have since been exploring new industries, investing in Stealth Space Co., which launches low-orbit satellites, and they bought Turnitin, the plagiarism software, for $1.7 billion. They have also been off-loading parts of the empire. In 2016, they sold a cable company for more than $10 billion.
When I relayed the story to Steven, he said he didn’t recall saying this and doesn’t get involved in editorial matters. He explained that he and others in the family “admire the incredible journalism and creativity” of the company’s editorial teams but that Condé wasn’t a vanity project. “We’re not in the media business to enjoy it like owners of sports teams,” he said. “We’re in the media business because we’ve been in the media business for 100 years, and we take it seriously.
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