The Last Celebrity Magazine Editor
EDITOR’S NOTE:
Welcome to a very special episode of Print Is Dead. (Long Live Print!).
For our first pod-nership we’ve teamed up with The Spread, the brainchild of two former Elle magazine editors and “work wives,” Rachel Baker and Maggie Bullock, who, in 2021 found themselves wishing for the perfect women’s magazine—at the exact moment when women’s magazines were irrevocably going down the tubes.
Each week, The Spread rounds up juicy stories, big ideas, and deeply personal examinations of women’s lives—from The New York Times and the Atlantic, to Vogue and Elle, to N+1 and The Drift. It’s no surprise that The Spread is now a cult favorite of media insiders—as well as the media-curious.
We’re excited to follow The Spread into the world of women’s magazines, starting with today’s interview with the ever-quotable former Cosmo editor, Joanna Coles, who Rachel and Maggie call “the last celebrity magazine editor.”
Maggie Bullock: It’s 2016. Rachel and I are sitting at our desks on the 24th floor of the Hearst Tower working at Elle magazine when the glass double doors blow open—or at least that’s how I remember it—and a vision of white-blonde hair, metallic pants, and checkerboard platforms, breezes into the office speaking in a commanding British accent to two or three minions in her wake.
There are no cameras in sight, but it’s as if we’re watching a grand entrance and a reality TV show. You can almost feel the wind machines in the air, which is what it’s like pretty much any time you witness a Joanna Coles appearance in the corridors of Hearst. There’s just something cinematic about her.
Rachel Baker: Joanna started her career as a reporter in London, moving to New York in the late 1990s to be The Guardian’s New York bureau chief. Next, she shifted into editing. First, as an articles editor at New York magazine, then over to More magazine.
By 2006, she grabbed hold of the editor-in-chiefship at Marie Claire, part of Hearst, and in 2012 became the editor-in-chief of the company’s largest title, Cosmopolitan.
Maggie Bullock: By the time she strode into the Elle offices in 2016, she was much more than an editor. She was also a reality TV star, a television producer, an author, a public speaker, a driving force of the “girl boss” movement, besties with Sheryl Sandberg, and a celebrity in her own right, who famously ran meetings from the helm of a treadmill walking desk.
Rachel Baker: The Jo-Co who walked into our office in 2016 had been newly-crowned as Chief Content Officer of Hearst Magazines—the first to hold the title—and tasked with consolidating the creative side of the 100-year-old publishing giant in the new digital-first era.
Maggie and I are a longtime print editors, so you can imagine how that sounded to us. But even through our fear goggles, we could also see that Joanna was ready to do the necessary surgery that other print editors didn’t have the stomach for, so that legacy magazines might live to see another day.
Maggie Bullock: Joanna was certainly the most famous women’s magazine editor at Hearst at that time. But what wasn’t clear back then, and is undeniable now, is that she was the last of her breed. There was a rich history of iconic women’s magazine editors that came before Joanna, but can you think of an iconic, larger-than-life one that came after her?
Rachel Baker: Joanna left Hearst in 2018, roughly around the same time that both Maggie and I did, and today she’s a board member for major tech companies like Sonos and Snapchat and an executive producer for major Hollywood projects, including an upcoming Amazon series starring Priyanka Chopra.
And she is, as ever, a baller.
Setting up our interview, with what lesser individuals might call a “personal assistant,” but Joanna has anointed Chief Get-It-Done Officer, when we met JC via Zoom, she was without pretense or treadmill desk. She was disarmingly down to earth.
Maggie Bullock: And yet somehow she still emanated that chutzpah or moxie—or maybe we should bring back the word “pizazz” to describe it. The X-factor that, in a 44-floor media empire brimming with big egos and considerable talent, made her one of media’s biggest stars.
Miley Cyrus on the cover of Coles’ first issue of Cosmo.
Maggie Bullock: Joanna, we’re going to go full Spread on this podcast, so we thought we would start off with a question about you and the world of men.
So, from where we sit, you seem to be preternaturally comfortable in male dominated—traditionally male dominated—spheres. You came from the world of British newspaper reporting. You’ve conquered Silicon Valley, you rose to the height of the Hearst Tower, which was traditionally run by men.
Do we have this right? Do you think that’s true of you? That you’re somebody who has, I don’t know, a special chutzpah in that realm?
Joanna Coles: I’m trying to think of an industry that isn’t dominated by men. I mean, I love the work and you go where the work is and you want to work with the best possible people you can find. That’s always been my mantra. And honestly, most of the time, when you’re working with really good colleagues, you don’t notice if they’re male or female unless they do something egregious and then their gender might become relevant.
But for the most part, I don’t think of it like that at all. I just think all industries are dominated by men. And so you have to get on with it, don’t you?
Rachel Baker: Still, it’s like you have this reverse imposter syndrome. (We mean that as a compliment). You have the ability to walk into any room and kind of claim a seat at the table. Where did that come from?
Joanna Coles: First of all, I love this version of me that you’ve created. It doesn’t feel like that. But look, the ability to ask questions, the ability to be interested. And, God knows, at this stage in my life, I’ve been in a lot of rooms. So you get pattern recognition about how people behave, who wants to be pandered to, who wants to be asked questions. And then you take it from there.
Rachel Baker: Let’s wind it back a little. You grew up in Yorkshire—home of the pudding and the Brontë—which is pretty different from Manhattan.
Joanna Coles: I’m so good at making Yorkshire puddings, by the way. My Yorkshire puddings are excellent. I use the Gordon Ramsey recipe and they’re very good.
Maggie Bullock: So glad we worked in the pudding. Right now I’m feeling very happy about the pudding.
Joanna Coles: The secret, should anybody be listening and care about this …
Rachel Baker: Yes, please!
Joanna Coles: … Is animal fat in the pan, which you heat until it’s absolutely smoking. And then you pour in the batter as fast as you can, slam the door and then just watch them. And actually, I don’t like the American version, which is a popover, which they sort of fetishized somewhat at Hearst actually, because they make them very crisp.
A real Yorkshire pudding should be soft at the bottom because it’s just so much more delicious and it should never be cold. You should eat them warm and you can eat them with gravy or my favorite: You can eat them with golden syrup.
Rachel Baker: Maggie, I know what we’re going to do at our next spread retreat.
Maggie Bullock: I feel like I should explain to the listeners that in the fancy, fancy Hearst 44th floor luncheons, you always had the Good Housekeeping popover. That was like the signature—maybe it still is—the signature accoutrement to your meal.
Joanna Coles: That’s right. You always got one on your plate instead of a bread roll. And everybody would be fascinated by them because they were huge. They were the size of a baby’s head. They may have reduced them now with inflation, but they were the most enormous things. And they were almost impossible not to eat, and not to eat the whole thing.
But actually, it always felt to me very much like a popover and not a Yorkshire pudding. Because the Yorkshire pudding would be warm. It would be soft at the bottom, not crisp. And it would be a third the size of a baby’s head. Not the whole head.
Maggie Bullock: Okay. We won’t spend the whole hour talking about popovers, but I always thought it was an interesting litmus test, which of the female editors were actually eating the popover in the Hearst 45 …
Joanna Coles: I would often not eat it only because it would make me homesick for a proper Yorkshire pudding.
Rachel Baker: What kinda childhood did you have and how did it lead you to decide to leave, to get out of there?
Joanna Coles: Well, if you grew up in Yorkshire in the 1970s, believe you me, you wanted to leave. I mean, partly there were constant brownouts at one point and blackouts with minor strikes. But the north of England at that time, and I’ve spoken to lots of people who left Yorkshire at that time, it really wasn’t what it is now, you know?
And at the time, it really felt like the UK was very much a city-state, and that city was London. And all the sort of centers of the industries that I was interested in, which was media, and politics, and the arts, were all really focused in London. There’s been a huge effort to disperse those industries now.
And you’ve got, you know, Channel 4 has now got a big—I think it’s even headquartered in Leeds, which is enormous. And the BBC has enormous facilities now in Salford and Manchester. But at the time that wasn’t the case. And you had to get to London if you wanted to do something in the industries that I did.
And I’ve got mixed feelings about it. I’m always fascinated when I hear Kevin Plank, the founder of Under Armor, talking about Baltimore and how he went back to Baltimore and really rejuvenated and worked on it. And I sometimes think, “Gosh, perhaps I should have done that.” But it’s been fun to move to America and I’m an American now. My kids are American. So there you go.
“Most of the time, when you’re working with really good colleagues, you don’t notice if they’re male or female unless they do something egregious and then their gender might become relevant.”
Maggie Bullock: You wanted to be in the newspaper business really early on. Is that true? You started writing as a child, right?
Joanna Coles: I started writing for the orchestra post when I was 10. They had a brilliant section that I used to read doggedly every Saturday and their evening Saturday Yorkshire Post, called Junior Post, which was about kids, and what other kids were doing, and things for kids. And I just thought, “Well, I could write for this.”
And so I used to send in unsolicited things, which, amazingly, they would pay me two pounds for! And I got very excited about that and thought, “This is fantastic! I can earn a living doing what I love.”
And my hobby at the time was making dolls, clothes. And I had a series of dolls and a series of trolls, and I made all sorts of clothes for them. I loved doing it. So, actually, when I ended up editing a fashion magazine, it was a weird combination of things I really had always enjoyed as a child.
And I think sometimes, and I know I felt like this, if you are looking for clues as to what you should be doing in your life, going back to your early childhood years is very helpful to find the things that you were just naturally gravitating towards before having to think about how to make a mortgage payment or whether or not you could get into the right college to get the right training.
You know what actually ‘blew your skirt up’ as they say.
Rachel Baker: Who was supporting you? Who was your champion, and helping you mail out your writing to the, you know, the section?
Joanna Coles: My parents, like most English parents, just really believed in, sort of, benign neglect. So I just had a lot of time on my own. So what do you do? You fill it. You fill it with the things you enjoy doing that bring you satisfaction.
And I had a neighbor who was my age. We were born within 21 days of each other, and she helped me. We would work on things together, which was really fun. She was called Anna and her mom was a professor at the local polytechnic.
And she would get involved or my parents would read things. But essentially, kids were left to their own devices in those days. And you got on with it. I remember Anna’s father helping us make photocopies of our first magazine and we just posted it to our neighbors. You just sort of got on with it then.
Rachel Baker: So in 1997, after being a reporter at The Telegraph and The Guardian in London, you made the leap to the US to be The Guardian’s bureau chief. What was your beat? And what did you love about being a reporter?
Joanna Coles: Well, often my beat was British people in America who were doing bad things. My beat was really anything in America that I thought British people would be interested in.
And British people, for the most part, are pretty interested in almost anything in America. So we had two big stories while I was at The Guardian. The first was Louise Woodward, the British nanny, who was an au pair, unfortunately under whose care baby Matthew Eappen died. And it was a terrible story to cover because there were absolutely no redeeming features of anything to do with the story.
The parents got hammered for both working. They were a mixed race couple, so they came in for a lot of racism. Louise Woodward herself was a relatively unsophisticated girl who’d got absorbed by this American family, but clearly wasn’t enjoying looking after two children because it’s really hard looking after two children, especially if they’re not your own.
So it was a very complicated story with a brilliant Barry Scheck from the Innocence Project who was running the defense team. And it was a very long and dramatic court case. And there are a couple of elements I’ll never forget. One, when they came in with the guilty verdict and you had 12 security guards standing between the public gallery and Louise and the lawyers, because I think they were terrified something was going to happen.
And you had Louise breaking down in court and hyperventilating and weeping and saying, “Why are they doing this to me?” And it was the most extraordinary human drama. Still one of the most amazing things I’ve actually covered.
And then you had, amazingly, about six weeks later, the judge coming back and giving her a sentence of time served, which I had never seen before. And it was very provocative and, I think, really humane sentencing. And she left and then went back to the UK.
So I covered that story. And then, of course, there was the Monica Lewinsky story that broke—to another young woman. Not much older. And so I spent a lot of time covering both those stories and thinking how vulnerable young women can be.
Coles served as the mentor for Project Runway All Stars for two seasons while running Marie Claire, a longtime partner of the fashion design competition series (the winner receives a fashion spread in the magazine and a yearlong position as contributing editor).
Maggie Bullock: In America or in general? Did you find anything about that to be specific to this country?
Joanna Coles: I think the enormity of the press coverage—this was all pre-social media, so this was ’97, ’98, the Lewinsky story. It was just the extraordinary coverage and fascination that people had in those stories. And when they happen to you in America, they’re just bigger than when they happen elsewhere because the audience is bigger. And then the international audience is bigger.
I mean, if those stories had happened in Lyon, in France, really no one would’ve been interested. Certainly no one would be interested in a French premiere having an affair with a young woman, because they all seem to do that. Although Macron might be the exception because his wife is, fascinatingly, 25 years older.
But it wouldn't have been a story in France. And an au pair in that situation in France, similarly, wouldn’t have had the media attention that the Louise Woodward story had.
Maggie Bullock: Right. So, I went to grad school in London and I interned at The Times of London and it’s such a particular culture, London newspaper culture. British newspaper culture, I should say. So can you put that into your own words? Like, what is so particular about that energy? Because I’m wondering if you brought some of that with you here when you landed stateside.
Joanna Coles: Well, there are two very distinct kinds of energy. There’s the British tabloid energy, which is really a monster if you like. And people say, you know, “they’re going to ‘monster’ him” or “we’re going to ‘monster’ them,” which means that you just throw every single resource you have at a particular story and just squeeze every last drop out of it.
And then you have the broadsheets who pretend that they are superior to the tabloids, but really suck a lot of the tabloid energy and just cover things with longer words. And I loved working for—I worked for The Guardian. I worked for The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, then I worked for The Times.
I loved all of them. You had really smart, interesting people. And what was fun about the job was that you had this permission to challenge—to challenge the powers that be regardless of whatever they were doing. So it could be the police, it could be politicians, it could be writers, it could be people in television, it could be actors, it could be celebrities.
But the British culture is less respectful than the American culture, in many ways, to authority. And, obviously, one of the biggest differences is that when the American president walks into the media room, the media stand up. When the British Prime Minister walks into a room with the British media, the British media basically recline as if to say, “Okay, you know, what do you got for us? Because we know it’s bullshit.”
So, it’s an enormously fun environment to work in. You’re obviously under enormous pressure, deadline wise. It’s incredibly competitive because every morning, if you are a reporter in Britain, or certainly when I was working, you knew that there would be nine other versions of your story that would be out there in the world. So yours had better be the best.
So, whatever you were covering, you knew there would be nine other newspapers that would’ve covered it. And it’s not often that you get that in a job. And I often used to think, if a doctor carries out an operation and it goes wrong, the team around him might know it goes wrong. The family of the victim will know it’s gone wrong. Or the victim, the survivor, if they survive.
But if you get something wrong as a reporter or as a columnist in a newspaper, everybody knows because everybody complains. And so you have to be accurate. And it was always astonishing to me when I moved to America that writers would hand in features with “TKTK,” which means ‘to come.’ Which meant the fact checker was going to fill in the facts.
And I was always fascinated that writers wouldn’t want to take responsibility for their own facts, because that way at least you know your source and you know, you were trying to get it right. Even if it turns out to be wrong. And of course, it’s wonderful to have a fact checker run underneath you catching anything you get wrong. But the idea of letting someone else put a fact in your story always worried me.
“If you are looking for clues as to what you should be doing in your life, going back to your early childhood years is very helpful to find the things that you were just naturally gravitating towards—you know, what actually ‘blew your skirt up’ as they say.”
Rachel Baker: Thinking about swashbuckling British journalists and editors, you know, Tina Brown comes to mind. And you’ve often been compared to her. Who are your media heroes and influences? Is Tina Brown one of them?
Joanna Coles: Yeah, of course. Tina Brown would be one of them, and she’s a fantastic editor. Her versions of The New Yorker and Vanity Fair were terrific. Helen Gurley Brown—the ‘other’ Brown that doesn’t get mentioned as much as Tina—was also an extraordinary editor who really picked up Cosmo in 1963, dusted it down from this little old literary magazine that it was, and understood what was coming down the pike with the evolution of the pill, and created this extraordinary blockbuster of a magazine that really created the modern template for all magazines.
Vanity Fair couldn't have happened without what Helen did to Cosmo. And her ability to understand that the tides were shifting for women was, I think, absolutely extraordinary.
But you know, I’m thrilled to be thrown into any sentence with either of them because they’re extraordinarily powerful, successful editors who had a very strong vision and created a product that was just delicious. I mean, the fun of magazines at their height was they were just this combustible mix of ingredients that was almost as good as the Yorkshire pudding.
Maggie Bullock: Nice. Nice circle back there.
Rachel Baker: Okay, so after The Guardian, you spent a couple years as articles editor at New York magazine. We read an anecdote about how you took that job—despite it being significantly more junior, and it being a huge pay cut—in exchange for sponsorship. Can you tell us that story?
Joanna Coles: Well, I had been here for The Times of London for nearly four years, and the editor called me up and said, “Hey, we want you to come back. We have a job for you,”—what was known as ‘parliamentary speech writer,’ which meant that I would be following Tony Blair and writing every day a sort of funny sketch.
And that’s a, sort of, a specific column in every British newspaper. And it’s a prestigious thing to do, actually. And on the one hand I was excited, but on the other, I didn’t want to go back to Britain. I didn’t feel my tour of duty in New York was yet done. And I knew there was more for me to do.
And I was also pregnant with my second son, and I had an absolute premonition that he would not sleep and I would be exhausted. And I was really anxious about taking a job where I would have to write amusingly every single day. And there would be quite a lot of travel involved if you were following the Prime Minister around.
And so, I decided not to go back. We decided as a family not to go back to London and to look for a job in New York. And Michael Wolff, actually, who, at the time, had a media column in New York magazine said, “Why don’t you come and join New York magazine? You’ll really enjoy it, it will be really fun.”
And I was looking for a job. I needed sponsorship because I didn’t have a visa and I didn’t have a passport. And Caroline Miller, who was then the editor of New York magazine, thrillingly offered me a job. And I was on, at the time, a fantastic foreign correspondent package, which was reduced in half actually, to take that job.
But I did it for three years. I had my second son. I had the pleasure of working for Adam Moss when Caroline left, and so it was actually a very good investment in my American career. I mean, ideally I would’ve done what Tina Brown did, which was come and go straight into editing something. But actually I didn’t have the experience and it was fun. New York magazine was a really fun place to be at the time.
Maggie Bullock: I mean the willingness to take that big of a pay cut—obviously you had all these other factors going on that made it make sense for you at the time—but is there some bigger picture point about being willing to take a pay cut? I guess what we’re curious about when we read that story and talked about it with each other is, ‘How much is Joanna driven by money? By achievement? By getting a bigger platform?” What do you think has motivated you through the many moves of your career? How do these things fit together in your mind?
Joanna Coles: Well, I don’t spend very much time thinking about it, honestly. So they don’t necessarily fit together. But at the time, New York could offer me what I needed most, which was an entry into the American market.
I had spent three and a half, four years here traveling around America, covering American stories, realizing the American marketplace was much bigger than the British marketplace. And thinking, when I looked out at the spread of magazines on the new stand at that time, “Oh, I could do that and it would be fun and I would enjoy it. And I would like to have a go.”
And so that’s why I took the cut and I started a New York magazine on $150,000 and I had been earning just over $300,000 as the bureau chief for The Times. So it was a significant drop in income. But I started writing a freelance column in London to make up for some of the difference. And I just knew it would be a good investment. I knew that it would be a different network of people and that it would pay off.
Rachel Baker: Right. Okay. In 2004, you left New York to become executive editor of More magazine, which, for our younger listeners, is a dearly-departed magazine for women, 40 and up—which Maggie and I loved even though we were not then 40 and up. Leaving New York magazine to dive into women’s media for the first time is a pretty major pivot. (I did the same thing but not at your scale). What was your thinking behind that?
Joanna Coles: My thinking, when I went for the interview, was, “This’ll be good practice. I haven’t had a job interview for a bit.” And one of the problems, when you move from one country to another—and especially when I’ve been here as a foreign correspondent—was nobody in the American media knew I was here. And nobody had seen any of my work because it had all appeared in the UK.
And now that would feel different because of social media, and you could post it and people would see it here. But that was yet to be invented, incredibly. It makes me sound very old and I’m not that old. But this was, sort of, pre the ability to post your work and get an audience.
So I went. And then what happened was I had a fantastically interesting conversation with Peggy Northrop, who was the editor of More, and I said to her, “What I think I might do…” because I was running out of patience at New York magazine slightly and I was also finding it exhausting. It was one of those places where I felt there was an extra layer of work that I didn’t always feel was necessary.
And I was often staying at the office until 10 or 11 at night, probably three nights a week. Which, with two young children, really wasn’t much fun. So I was tired, I looked terrible. When I go back and look at my photos of myself at that stage, I look absolutely wiped out. And I was.
And so I said to Peggy in the interview, “What I really want to do is probably work full-time as an editor and do some writing on the side and spend more time with my kids.” And she fixed me with a look.
And she said, “You are never going to do that.” She said, “Look at you—so driven. That’s never going to happen.”
And then she said to me, “I want you to come and be my executive editor. The problem is I’ve just offered the job to someone else.”
So then I thought, “Well…”
And then, weirdly—and this is going to sound very strange—she pushed a bowl of fruit across the table at me, and there were all these sticks of fruit and there was a stick of jicama in it, which I had never had before, and I bit down on it. And it was this extraordinary sort of texture and flavor. And it was completely new to me.
And I had this thunderbolt of, “You need something new in your life. This will be new for you.” And so I said, “All right. Well, look, I’d love to come and figure this out. Let’s see what happens.” I think the other person didn’t accept the job or whatever.
And so I moved in as her executive editor and learned a ton from her. And she said to me, “If you give me 18 months, I’ll make sure you go on and edit a magazine.”
And that’s exactly what she did. So I moved from More to Marie Claire with a really good set of skills that Peggy had shown me, and one from Adam Moss. Because when Adam Moss joined New York magazine, he literally stripped it down completely to its sort of bare bones. And we spent a lot of time talking about, “What should this magazine be?”
It was a very useful exercise, which I then did again at Marie Claire and Cosmo. So by the time I got to Marie Claire, I felt really well equipped to take on a women’s magazine and try and do something new with it.
Rachel Baker: Joanna, what is it that you really love about the magazine business? You mentioned earlier about Tina Brown and how it’s so combustible and exciting. I think about, for me, I love magazines because of the collaboration. And, like, the magazine ‘theater.’ And battling with the art department. And all—just kind of the ‘guts’ of magazines. What is it for you, then and now, like looking back?
Joanna Coles: I like the mashup of ideas—of short, fun ideas and longer, thoughtful ideas. I love the journalism in it. The long, narrative pieces you can’t find anywhere else which change someone’s life, or change an agenda, or change a political direction. I love the fact you can really change the agenda around something with a really thoughtful piece. I like the fact that you can have really thoughtful, interesting conversations with celebrities and show different sides of them.
And I like when you pick up a good magazine that you feel well equipped to face the next month. We used to spend enormous amounts of time thinking about, “What will be the subjects that people are interested in in three months? In six months? In nine months? What are the things that are going to be in the culture that we’re all going to be talking about?” You know, like The Last of Us? How would you know about that? Well, you would’ve heard about it from HBO. You would’ve watched early versions of it. Someone would’ve read a script on it, you would’ve talked to the director. So you can say, in three months’ time, “This is worth spending your time on. This isn’t.”
And I think the tragedy of what’s happened to the media now is there’s so much information out there, but so little of it is curated. It’s very hard to know what to watch, what to read. And more than ever, a magazine is needed now, but the cadence of them doesn’t make any sense for our modern life.
And you can’t really compete with the cellphone. The cellphone is so exciting. It’s one person versus half a million engineers. There’s no way you are ever going to be able to compete against that as a humble collection of paper put together. We have to think of different ways of keeping that value alive.
Maggie Bullock: Do you have the answer?
Joanna Coles: I’m definitely working on something which I’m very excited about. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this. I spent a lot of time with a couple of really senior people in the news business. And we kicked the tires on a few news ideas. And the struggle there is really just revenue and not being beholden to advertisers.
And then I’ve sort of pivoted slightly and I don’t want to talk about it yet because, a) it involves other people and, b) we’re not quite ready to. At some point I will, but I’m very excited about what I think could be a solution.
Maggie Bullock: So that is … please, you have our number.
Joanna Coles: I will! I’ll definitely be calling you because it’s going to require people with that magazine skillset. And when I was growing up, I always felt like when I got my weekly magazine as a child, and then, as I got older, and I was getting monthly magazines as well as weeklies, that it felt like a finger from the future beckoning you towards it.
And that was what was exciting, that you knew there was something bigger than your own life and you could be a part of it. And this was a window into how you would be part of it. And then, I would throw whatever magazine it was across the room and be full of energy and excitement about embracing the month ahead.
And you don’t feel like that when you’ve scrolled through TikTok. You don’t feel like that when you’ve sodden yourself with Instagram Reels. You feel listless, and insecure, and bubbling over with FOMO.
Maggie Bullock: Yeah. A hundred percent. Okay, we’re going to go back because where we left you in the timeline of the story is that you had become an editor-in-chief at Marie Claire. That was your first editor-in-chief role. Then, in 2012, Cosmo came knocking. The biggest magazine in the Hearst Tower. At the time—and possibly still—the biggest women’s brand in the world. And a magazine that also, at the time, was best known for sex tips.
Well, first of all, how did that happen? Did they come to you? Did you go to them? Did you seek out Cosmo and know, because it was this big giant brand, that it was the … golden … what is the golden thing?
Joanna Coles: The brass ring.
Maggie Bullock: Did you want them or did they want you?
Joanna Coles: Well, I had lunch with David Carey, who was then the president of the magazine division, and he said, “We’d love you to take on Cosmo.”
And I immediately said, “Oh, no, no. I’m completely the wrong person for Cosmo.”
And I immediately suggested three other people that I thought would be better qualified to do it. And then I thought about it for a bit and then realized that it was, by far, the biggest magazine in the stable and that it would be mad not to try. And it stood for a lot of the things that I was excited about.
And it had a fantastic run, obviously, under Helen [Gurley Brown]. It had been crazily successful and really contributed to that glorious Hearst Tower on the corner of 57th and Eighth Avenue. And then Bonnie Fuller had had a very brief run at it. And then Kate White had given it 14 great years where it had been commercially incredibly strong.
And by the time I got to it in 2012, the world was beginning to change and the sort of second, or third, or fourth wave of feminism was clearly bubbling under. And so it felt like a new opportunity to create a different kind of empowerment with Cosmo. I mean, there was so much more sex available online, and yet women were still underpaid and they were still underconfident and they still weren’t negotiating in the ways that they should, and, I think, now feel much more confident to do so.
But that wasn’t the conversation in 2012 that was still bubbling under. So I felt we were able to ignite that conversation. And so it felt really fun to have that audience.
“The biggest life-changing perk going to Marie Claire, was getting my own full-time assistant. For a working mother, having a full-time assistant was unbelievably liberating. It really changed everything.”
Rachel Baker: Speaking of money and negotiation, you were so candid a minute ago about your money situation at New York magazine. Going from executive editor at More to editor-in-chief at Marie Claire and then Cosmo—what was that like? Like your first editor-in-chief salary? Was it life-changing? Was it double the salary? Was it crazy perks? Like, did your life totally change once and then change dramatically again?
Joanna Coles: The biggest perk going to Marie Claire, the biggest life-changing perk, probably was getting my own full-time assistant, because that just meant that you didn’t have to sweat a lot of the small stuff, which, weirdly, takes up a lot of brain power.
And also, if you’re like me—I was listening, the other day, to an interview with a comedian who said how much he enjoyed going to the post office. And he said he loves filling his days with going to the post office and small errands. Right? And I thought, “Why aren’t I the kind of person that wants to go to the post office?”
And so actually for a working mother, having a full-time assistant was unbelievably liberating. It really changed everything. Having someone give me a clothing allowance was fantastic for the first time I was able to go and really buy some nice clothes, which I was so excited about.
And also, as a journalist, I’d always dressed in essentially the same thing, which was a Navy blazer and navy pants and a white shirt because you just want to blend in. And now I had the opportunity to explore fashion and figure out, “What should I wear? What expresses me?” Which I loved.
And I’ll never forget my first trip to Paris and going into Prada on Rue Sainte-Honoré and buying a suit. That was all very exciting. But what was really exciting was just the opportunity to create something in your own image that you felt would feel relevant to readers. And it was a bit up and down my first year, but then we hit our stride.
And the increase in salary was very nice. I wouldn’t say it was entirely life-changing, but what it made me feel was secure, which was very life-changing because then you are not worried. And you’re not scrambling with a side hustle to fill in the gaps. You know? You can relax into it a bit.
Rachel Baker: I remember so vividly in 2013, Maggie and I were both at Elle, and Joanna Coles had taken over Cosmo. And then there was a 20-page excerpt in Cosmo of Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg, who was not a household name at that point. It seemed like kind of an unlikely partnership. What was that like for you?
Joanna Coles: Well, I had read a very early edition of Lean In that Sheryl had given me. And I’d gone to see her at the Facebook offices because I had gotten to know her and she, slightly shyly, pushed this thing across the table and said, “Look, I’m writing this book, do you want to take a look? I’d really appreciate your comments.”
So I went off and I, my heart sank and I thought, “God, it’s going to be some tedious business book about Silicon Valley. I really don’t want to read this.” And I’d gone to the Palo Alto Mall to buy a Michael Kors ribbed sweater that I had been tracking and had found in this mall.
Anyway, I got there and tried it on, didn’t like it, went off to have a cappuccino, and started reading this book. And I couldn’t put it down. And when I looked up, the mall had closed around me, and I just thought, “This book speaks to me. It speaks to my generation.”
And what she really did—I know there’s been some ups and downs about Lean In since—but the real thing she did, which nobody, crazily, had done, was to put all the data together and show that men and women were going to college at the same time in the same numbers, and the minute they came out, there was a disparity in what they got paid when they were hired.
And the first management jobs would go to men, not to women. And women were one step behind them. Then they were three steps behind. And then they had a baby and then they were five steps behind. And they couldn’t catch up. And the research was extraordinary. I still think it’s an excellent book for young women to read.
There’s a brilliant chapter about negotiating in it and about the differences that men and women feel and are judged by when they ask for things. And the thing that it taught me, which was really depressing, but a very valuable lesson, is that actually nobody really likes women. Women don’t like women, and men don’t like women in the workplace.
And you often hear women saying the worst bosses they’ve ever had have been female bosses, which was so not my experience. But that’s part of the culture now that we sort of deride women in the workplace. And it’s something which really worries me.
And part of why we wanted to do The Bold Type, the five season show that came out of editing Cosmo, was to show women that you can like each other and still disagree in the workplace. You can have conflict in the workplace as a drama, but it doesn’t have to be between the women. It can be outside and the women support each other.
And that was based on my experience. You know, Cathie Black was running Hearst when I got there and was a fantastic supporter. She hired me and she wasn’t easy to deal with because sometimes she was right. Sometimes I fucked up and she told me in very direct terms. And that was fine. You’re much better off with someone telling you.
Ellen Levine, who died recently, but who was the editorial director at Hearst when I was there, was a fantastic mentor. Super supportive and frequently critical of what I was doing, but in the nicest possible way. And I really learned a lot from her.
My best friends have all come from work. And so I felt that Lean In pointed out that it’s much harder for women. And I just don’t think we’d ever acknowledged it until that point. We knew it, but we didn’t know the empirical evidence that pointed to it. We didn’t have a solution.
And her chapter on negotiating is excellent. Was it aimed at wealthier, educated white women? Yes, of course it was. Have there been revisions since then? Yes, there have. But it’s hard to think of a better book to give a young woman to prepare her for what it’s like in the working world.
Maggie Bullock: You really elevated Cosmo by marrying together the sex positivity of Cosmo and the Girl Boss era, right? That seemed to be the formula. Maybe I’m wrong, but that seemed to be the two major components of the Venn diagram that became your Cosmo. You had said earlier when you set out, like, ‘What should this magazine be?’ That process of ideating and putting it all on your Pinterest board or whatever. Was that your vision?
Joanna Coles: No, I think what I was doing was trying to sniff the culture and understand where it was going. And I was talking to lots and lots of young women, and I would go out to campuses, and I would talk to young women in the workplace, and I would hear they didn’t know how to ask for a raise. They didn’t know how to ask for an orgasm. They didn’t know how to ask for what they wanted.
And the explosion of internet porn had really impacted the behaviors that they were experiencing in the bedroom from violence, choking, spitting, slapping, hair pulling, anal sex when they didn’t necessarily want it, had all become conversations among young women that weren’t really being addressed. And the explosion of internet porn is still something that we haven’t really addressed in our culture.
And I think it does a lot of damage to men and to women. That’s not actually what real sex is like. And it’s not the benefit of real sex. And we don’t talk about the benefits of real sex. Why not? Because there’s no money in it. I think in American culture, you always follow the money.
And there’s no one telling you that if you, you know, make love to your partner, and you are married, three times a week, you’ll stand a better chance of surviving as a couple than if you don’t. And that the physical act of having sex is incredibly empowering in a relationship, assuming you both like each other. And you may not always feel like doing it, but you usually feel much better after you do. An orgasm for either partner is a great release emotionally and physically. And these were things that I didn’t feel were getting quite enough attention.
And in the grandiose scheme of things—when we weren’t just simply hustling whatever celebrity we could to do the cover that month because someone had just let us down or their show had gotten postponed or something—was that sense of encouraging women to ask for what they want and feel confident in that conversation.
So I wouldn’t necessarily say we elevated it. I would just say we broadened it to encompass other things.
Rachel Baker: Okay, so you reimagined Cosmo and you promoted it as a newly-feminist enterprise, and your own brand grew at the same time. It was not since Helen Garley Brown herself had an editor at Cosmo, been considered a media star, and then suddenly you’re being talked about in the same breath as a Graydon Carter, Anna Wintour. You were so famous and respected—at least within the media bubble. What was that like?
Joanna Coles: I’m hoping I’ll have another moment [laughs]! You know, you don’t really think about it in those terms. You are just like, “Who’s going to be on the cover next month? What can I do? What’s the next Lean In? Where am I going next? How is Cosmo going to show up?”
We did a TV show called So Cosmo that took a year to get off the ground. We did The Bold Type. That took three years to get off the ground. You’re always working on things. So my thinking about myself or my own relative celebrity took very little of my consciousness, really.
And the odd thing is, funnily enough, I was having lunch the other day with someone, and during the lunch, three people came up to me—they were all young women or women in their twenties—and they all came up and said how much the work I had done had impacted them. And that felt pretty good.
So when you, when it comes back at you in ways like that, or when you see people that you’ve had who’ve gone on to great careers, that’s sort of exciting. But the celebrity of it didn’t really interest me. And that’s not what energizes me.
What energizes me is doing the really, really fun work, and working with really good people, and talent spotting. And the thing that was good about magazines was they were great laboratories for imaginative people who needed some structure, perhaps. But when I think about a lot of the people I’ve had who’ve gone on to good things, that’s how you feel that you’ve had some kind of impact.
Maggie Bullock: But suddenly cameras are focused on you a lot more than they used to be in your prior life. You talked a little bit about coming to Marie Claire and having the freedom to develop a personal style, but I also think when you’re in the public eye, you need a kind of armor, right?
You need either an armor or a system for how you present yourself. Did you feel like you needed to develop that for, I don’t know, your clothes, your hair—just the ‘you’ that is taken out into the world where now there’s going to be, probably, some cameras and a lot more people looking than there were previously?
Joanna Coles: I don’t honestly. I was always, because my initial training was as a journalist, I was always interested in looking at other people. So if people were looking at me, I was trying to figure out. “Who are they? What are they thinking? Where are they from?” I wasn’t thinking about me. It’s not interesting to think about oneself. It’s much more interesting to sort of observe what’s going on in the larger space.
And also, I would go to fashion shows or I would go out to things and I would just be looking for clues for the next issue, really. There was no question that Hearst wanted me to have a bigger public profile. And they told me that. Which is partly why I was very much encouraged, with all the support system from Hearst, because they could see that it was good for the business.
And it was definitely better for advertisers and sponsors if you’ve got an editor who’s got a higher profile because they’re more interested in talking to you. And it gets you into bigger rooms. It gets you invited to better things, more interesting things. So from that point of view, it’s a very useful thing to have. But I wouldn’t say it impacted me as a person either way, because I got it fairly late in life.
You do see younger people getting a certain degree of celebrity and behaving really badly with it. And I saw a lot of editors behaving badly and stamping their foot and literally saying, “Do you know who I am?” When they didn’t get the seat at the fashion show they wanted. And I always thought, “God, I never want to be that idiot. I never want to be that person.” I would so be fine sitting on the sixth row.
And, it’s much nicer to fly business class than it is economy. But I will tell you, when I do fly economy and I do from time to time if I can’t use miles or I’m not going on someone else’s dime, you always end up talking and having a great conversation with a person next to you, which you never do in business class.
“The explosion of internet porn is still something that we haven’t really addressed in our culture. And I think it does a lot of damage to men and to women. That’s not actually what real sex is like.”
Rachel Baker: I’m just thinking about, you mentioned So Cosmo and you mentioned The Bold Type. I watched every episode of The Bold Type. I loved it. But when you were working on those shows, you also made the leap to executive producer. You were a ‘business person’ on those shows. What was your instinct on being a producer? What did that mean? And did you sense that maybe that would be your next life outside of magazines?
Joanna Coles: Yes, I think so. And if Covid hadn’t been so dramatic, I hope I would’ve had a few more shows done at this point. I’ve managed to get one on air and I’m working on another at the moment with Amazon, which I’m incredibly excited about, which is a version of Tanya Selvaratnam’s book, Assume Nothing, which I am executive producing with Priyanka Chopra, who’s going to star as Tanya.
[The Bold Type] was just an interesting new way of storytelling for me. And my role in it was to invite the writers and Dave Bernad, the executive producer, who’s since gone on to do the White Lotus series, to come into the office to spend some time with the staff, to absorb my diaries and my anecdotes, and turn it into something, which is what we ended up doing.
And it just spoke to people. It’s had a great afterlife. It’s been huge in odd places like India. In fact, oddly, someone told me all the countries with “I”—India, which has an enormous population of young business women who don’t have anything to look at, in terms of role models, Italy, and Israel—I was told it’s very popular in, as well as the UK, which has been great. And, obviously, here. And it’s on Hulu here and it’s on Netflix internationally.
But I think it hit a vein. It hit the vein that Lean In hit, which was a group of ambitious women who really weren’t addressed in popular culture, by anyone acknowledging their ambition, in a way that wasn’t just horrifying. And, oh my God, she’s the most ambitious person you’ll ever meet. And she’s the nightmare.
It was very different. That had a different feel. So it was partly the project I was excited about, and then having a slightly different creative role in it. And it definitely made me understand the power of television more, which is fairly obvious and I’d understood from having done a couple of seasons of Project Runway All Stars.
But it’s fun to create a project from scratch and put it out into the world. And television has such a big impact when you do it well.
Tilda Swinton’s character in Trainwreck was based loosely on Coles.
Maggie Bullock: You’ve created shows and you’ve produced shows, but you’ve also been portrayed in various onscreen iterations, including Tilda Swinton’s editor-in-chief in Trainwreck. So we wanted to know what you think of that character. What was that like for you?
Joanna Coles: I mean, it was pretty hilarious, actually. So Judd Apatow came into the office to talk about This Is 40. It was a fantastic role for Leslie Mann. And I loved that movie, and I feel like that movie didn’t get enough attention, actually. And I know he is working on This is 50, which I’m dying to see.
But she was so good. And the bit where she is told she’s pregnant and she’s not expecting to be told she’s pregnant is, I think, one of the great women-acting-being-pregnant scenes of all time. So I’m assuming he sort of picked it up from there.
And he was working with Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner, who I’d spent some time with. And Tilda Swinton and I, actually, we don’t look alike. I have a picture of the two of us standing together and we really don’t look alike. But our hair is similar. So I think people put one and one together.
And there’s the wonderful scene where she says, you know, it’s something to do with, “Can you give someone a blow job and find out if their semen tastes of garlic,” or something. Which was the sort of mad thing that we would occasionally come up with at Cosmo. I thought the movie was hilarious. Anything with Amy Schumer, bow down. And I was thrilled.
Maggie Bullock: So in 2016 you were promoted to Chief Content Officer of Hearst. I think that’s, I mean, that was not a preexisting condition…
Joanna Coles: ‘Condition’ is right! ‘Condition’ is exactly right.
Maggie Bullock: Yes. ‘Position’ I should say. And so, this being about print and whether or not it’s dead, it seems to me that at that time you were tasked with staving off that death. Can you talk about what the media landscape was at that moment and what your mandate was in that role?
Joanna Coles: Well, if you were in magazines, it felt very much like you were standing on a train track. And you could see the train. And the train was coming straight at you. And, initially, you looked at it and you thought it was a long way away. And then you suddenly realized that if you didn’t get out of the way, you were going to be splattered against the tracks.
So part of my job was to try and think of new creative projects, and we did think of some. And part of my job was to begin to consolidate departments because we couldn’t afford to carry on as we had been. And certain magazines were declining faster than others. And obviously digital was growing, but it couldn’t grow and make the same amount of money as fast as the legacy brands were declining.
So it was a very frustrating time. And Hearst is a fantastic company to work with. We had really smart, interesting people there. But, ultimately, it’s very hard to fight all the new media that’s available on your cellphone.
And I stopped reading magazines. I just didn’t find them as interesting anymore, because the phone is just like this extraordinary box of magic tricks in your hand, as is your laptop, or your iPad, or whatever device you carry around. And the magazine felt less and less relevant. Which doesn’t mean magazines don’t still have value, but the cadence and the urgency of them just isn’t the same.
Maggie Bullock: Right. So then, two years after being named Chief Content Officer of Hearst, you were up for the job of president—which actually seems like a job that not everybody would want at this point. And that would’ve been a fully executive role and taken you out of the creative magazine-making piece of it, mostly. Beyond just ascending the ladder, what about that job appealed to you?
Joanna Coles: Well, actually I wasn’t really up for it. I suppose it’s fair to say that I felt I had to kick the tires off it, because if you don’t, then it looks like you are not taking these seriously. Or you are not taking the company seriously.
But the truth is, I would’ve been terrible at it, and it wasn’t where my strengths lay. So I never seriously thought about it, and I don’t think they seriously thought of me for it because it was obvious. My real abilities lie in content and that’s not what the job is.
The job is about trying to make sense of the changing media landscape and balance budgets and figure out ways of holding onto a media business, which is being attacked from every direction.
“I had lunch with David Carey and he said, ‘We’d love you to take on Cosmo.’ And I immediately said, ‘Oh, no, no. I’m completely the wrong person for Cosmo.’”
Maggie Bullock: But I think that when you left Hearst, it was perceived that that was because that job had gone to Troy Young. You seem to be saying that’s not the reason.
Joanna Coles: No. To be fair to Troy, who, as you probably know, left a couple of years later, I had been at Hearst for 12 years at that point. I’d done two years as chief content officer. It wasn’t clear to me that I could have as much impact as I’d already had. And by this point I was on the board of Snapchat. I’d written a book, I had a TV show, and I felt like being more entrepreneurial. And my kids, actually—and this is a really important stage in any work in women’s life—my kids were basically done with school. My oldest son was at college, and my younger son was about to go to college.
So I didn’t feel I needed a stable job in quite the way that I’d had before. And so it felt like a really good time to make a move. And there was no secret that I didn’t get on with Troy and he didn’t particularly get on with me. So it wouldn’t have been a fun proposition to work with him.
And so it was a very nice mutual parting of the ways. I had a fantastic 12 years at Hearst. I really had a great time.
Rachel Baker: What was it like to be like, ‘I’ve been at this company for 12 years. Now I’m no longer with the company.’ Like, what’s next? Reevaluating. And now you do so many things. It’s suddenly like Silicon Valley! Hollywood! The world is your oyster.
Joanna Coles: It was fun actually. It’s fun not having to get up and go to the same place every day. And it’s fun having different people to talk to and time to, at that point go to the gym in the middle of the day. And it felt nice. It was the first time in my life I’d not worked, or it was the first time for 20 years when I hadn’t really worked incredibly hard all the time. I’d had a period in my early 30s where I was writing a column for The Guardian and I was doing a program for the BBC and I had a bit of time in between. And that felt like a very nice lifestyle.
So actually it felt pretty good. And I wanted to spend more time on the West Coast. I’m really interested in the West Coast. I’ve never lived there. And so I’ve certainly done that. I joined a series of boards. I joined the Sonos board, I joined a couple of private tech company boards. I joined a private equity company. So I just had more opportunities to be more entrepreneurial, and I found that really interesting.
Coles was an executive producer for The Bold Type, a scripted series airing on Freeform and starring Melora Hardin (The Office) as Jacqueline Carlyle, a strong-but-kind editor-in-chief at a high-end women's magazine, and was inspired by the life of Coles.
Rachel Baker: So when you’re a producer on all these projects, what does that mean your role is, exactly? I know producer can mean like a bunch of different things. But like in the Priyanka Chopra project for Amazon, and then you also mentioned that you are even producing a Broadway play. That’s so interesting.
Joanna Coles: What I like doing, and what I’ve been able to do, is identify projects, often early in their process. You asked about Assume Nothing, the Priyanka Chopra project. I left Hearst and did a development deal with ABC Signature, which is a terrific producer of really creative TV shows. And I ran into Tanya Selvaratnam at NeueHouse. And she said, “Oh, I’m just finishing a book. I’d love to send you a draft. So she sent me a draft that afternoon. I read it that night. I couldn’t put it down. And I thought, this is an amazing story.
And it’s her story about going out with the Attorney General of New York, Eric Schneiderman, who, at the same time as he was trying to bring charges against Harvey Weinstein for sexual assault, was actually sexually assaulting Tanya in their private relationship.
And it was such an extraordinary story. She’s a very good writer. She’s the sort of woman that in the book is very relatable, you know. She went to Harvard, she’s been very successful. And she said, “I’m the kind of woman that if someone had asked me, ‘What would you do if a man hit you?’ I would say I would leave immediately.”
Well, she didn’t leave. She stayed with him a year and she became, essentially co-opted almost, in his violence against her. And it was an extraordinary story of intimate violence, some of which we’d actually written about in Cosmo.
And actually, I remember going to talk to Valerie Jarrett at the White House about it and saying, “This is a really important subject that we need to get politicians much more focused on, because it’s much more common than we think.” And in fact, at the time, they were dealing a lot with unwanted sexual violence on college campuses and consent, which we’d also spent a lot of time thinking about and writing about at both Marie Claire and Cosmo.
So I read Tanya’s book and I just thought, “This is extraordinary. We need to option this book. I want to option this book. I want to turn it into something.” And then it became clear if we did that, we needed a really strong actor. Tanya is from Sri Lanka. We definitely needed an Indian or a Sri Lankan actress, and obviously, you know Priyanka Chopra. We had met when I was editing both Marie Claire and Cosmo and had stayed in touch, so I reached out to Priyanka.
She read it. She has a production company Purple Pebble, run by Mary Rolich, and they came on board. They were like, “This story is extraordinary.” There’s something in that story that speaks to so many women, many of whom have not gone through the extent of the horror that Tanya went through, but have certainly gone through degrees of it.
And so we then, with the support of ABC, went to Amazon. Amazon bought it and we’re now in the process of writing the script. And it’s been a long process because Covid intervened. But we kept it going and I think it’s going to be a very powerful project.
“The thing that was good about magazines was they were great laboratories for imaginative people,” says Coles, seen here in her Cosmo office in the Hearst Tower.
Maggie Bullock: So how involved are you in the script process and, like, the hands-on work of making the storyline?
Joanna Coles: Well, I found the galley. I bought the option, or ABC bought it on my behalf. I pulled in Priyanka. And then we went through a series of interviewing writers, which is an incredibly long and laborious process. We talked to probably eight to 10 really serious, successful female writers. And then we finally found the one that we all agreed on, Mimi Won [Techentin], and she is now writing on it. So I’m very involved in it.
I’ve read the initial outline. I talk to Mimi. Obviously, I talk to Priyanka. So I’m very engaged in it. And then you get great executives from both ABC and from Amazon, who have much more experience of television shows than I do. And so we’re all in the room or we’re all on Zoom screens together, talking about where we want it to go.
Maggie Bullock: And so, if you’re working on the scripts now, just give us a sense of do you expect to shoot it in 2023, and then we might see it in 2024, or is that too fast?
Joanna Coles: It may not be too fast. It will all come down to Priyanka's schedule and what she can figure out and when the scripts get delivered. But, I would hope that you would’ve watched it by the end of 2024.
These things take a long time to make well, and we also have to cast Eric. And we want the scripts before that. But I think it’s going to be a really powerful, interesting—you know, it’s a dark psychological thriller. And if you think of the Dirty John series, it has a version of that.
But it’s at a much more elevated level in that he was the most powerful law enforcement officer in New York, and he was threatening to have her followed. And they met at the DNC. And he seemed like this charming, incredibly sophisticated man. And they were hanging out in the Hamptons with the Clintons, and yet she was dealing with this secret violence and this private shame that, as an intelligent woman with her own means, she was being swallowed into his madness.
And actually what was fascinating was there were times when he was struggling with alcohol and he was struggling with Ambien, according to Tanya, in the book, at least. And there are one or two times when I remember actually seeing him at a press conference and he had a cut above his eye. And the story was he’d fallen when he’d gone jogging, but that’s not the story that’s in her book.
So it’s fascinating when you watch the juxtaposition of what he was doing going over Harvey Weinstein and then battling his own private demons.
Rachel Baker: Okay, are you ready for the Print Is Dead Billion-Dollar Question?
Joanna Coles: Let’s see what happens.
Rachel Baker: Okay, if Laurene Powell Jobs gave you a billion dollars to start a new media venture, what would you do with it?
Joanna Coles: What would I do? God, it’s a great question. I would definitely want to do something in the news arena because I think we are ill-served by our news. I think we are made anxious by it. I think it depresses people. It focuses entirely on conflict and gives us a completely different sense of the world than the world as it is. And yes, of course there’s bad things going on and conflict going on, but we shouldn’t have to feel like that every day.
And I think it’s one of the reasons people feel so anxious and so depressed and so out of control. And so we have to free it from the pressures of advertising. Otherwise otherwise we will drive ourselves crazy. We are in a spiral around news of despair and it has to end.
