A conversation with Vanity Fair editor in chief Radhika Jones

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Radhika Jones was named editor in chief of Vanity Fair in November 2017, the fifth editor in the magazine’s storied history. Her hiring was met with some surprise, and more than a little skepticism. The Guardian called her bookish, as if that’s an insult.

She arrived at Vanity Fair from a path that included stints at The New York Times where she was the editorial director of the book section and Time magazine where she managed the Time 100, as well as The Paris Review, Art Forum, Book Forum, and Grand Street.

Now, more than six years later, Jones sits at the center of a massive media ecosystem that encompasses digital, social, print, video, and experiential platforms. The magazine has been called the curator of American culture, and sits under the flagship of Condé Nast. The good news is the numbers, including print, are not just good, they’re up across all platforms.

We caught up with Jones after she had put Vanity Fair’s flagship Hollywood issue to bed, but before the whirlwind of events that culminates in the very famous party the magazine hosts once the Oscars are done. The Hollywood issue is out today.

Arjun Basu: I guess this is the calm after the storm—and before the storm, in a way.

Radhika Jones: Is there ever a calm? I don’t know. Yeah.. It’s a busy time of year for us. At Vanity Fair, we have closed our print Hollywood issue, and we will launch everything digitally this week, which is a lot of fun and a lot of work to get all of that material ready to be seen on social through video. On the site, all of it. And we’re also obviously in the run up to the Oscar party. So it is indeed a very busy time.

Arjun Basu: So is the Oscar party like a culmination?

Radhika Jones: It is. It’s a celebration of the movies in general, and it’s also a celebration of the specific films being honored that night at the Academy Awards. Those actors, those directors, writers.

And so it’s a really wonderful moment for us to be able to host and be a part of, because people have put in so much work, not just on the films, which obviously can take years to incubate and to shoot and then to release into the world and to promote.

It’s a celebration of all of that, and it’s also the end of award season. So for those actors and producers, directors who’ve been out campaigning wanting their films to get that recognition, it’s a slog. And it goes through festival circuits and panel discussions and lunches and dinners and parties and all of it.

And after the Oscars, it’s all finished. And so people can come to our party and relax and let their hair down. And it’s a lot of fun for that reason. It feels very cathartic.

Arjun Basu: So you’ve been there now, what, this is your sixth Oscar party?

Radhika Jones: Yes. Correct. With one exception, we didn’t have a live party in 2021 because of COVID. But yes, it’s my sixth year.

Arjun Basu: How has the Hollywood Issue, which is such a tent pole for the brand—how has it changed in the time that you’ve been there? How has it expanded or just morphed?

Radhika Jones: The answer, I think, dovetails with how the industry has moved and changed in that period of time and beforehand, even. The classic Hollywood issue, the first one, 30 years ago, it’s characterized by that print gatefold. It’s a three panel gatefold and kind of the star power of it and the convening power that the magazine has to gather people together and photograph them as a set, some kind of representative of Hollywood in that moment.

And that print function still continues, but it’s now one of many parts of how you can represent Hollywood at a particular moment. And in a funny way, it’s still very significant because our print reader, we have a very loyal audience for the magazine who consume it in all forms and the print form is still very important.

And so people want the experience. I want the experience of being able to unfold that gatefold and see who’s there and what that group portrait looks like this year. But of course, we’re used to looking at things like this. I’m holding my phone up for those listening. And that’s a vertical screen. That’s not three panels wide.

So when we go into making the Hollywood issue now, we are designing it for multiple formats. And we want it to have a similar impact on each format, but you have to design them and conceive them differently. Because literally the shapes are different and the experience is different if you’re looking on your phone versus on a newsstand, versus on video.

And this year we brought on Gordon von Steiner, who’s a director of film and video, to make the cover because we wanted it really to be video first. So that’s a big difference from, certainly the 1990s but also from five years ago, the way that we think about it. We want to go into it knowing that the first time a lot of people see it will be on Instagram or it will be on TikTok or on YouTube. Maybe on their desktop, more likely on mobile, and only then will they see it in print.

“What is the underlying tone and voice of Vanity Fair? It’s sharp, it’s witty, it’s sophisticated, it’s knowing.”

**Producer Jermaine Johnson, Jones, and writer-director** **Cord Jefferson** **(*American Fiction*) attend *Vanity Fair*’s party at Bar Marmont to kick off awards season, hosted with Amazon MGM Studios.**

Arjun Basu: Yes. That leads me to a question that I was going to ask later, but it’s just like there’s so many different entry points now and the timelines of everything are also very different. When you have a print product, you’re obviously thinking about things months, sometimes years in advance. And then when you think about TikTok, that’s a completely different idea. And then I look at your YouTube channel and that is a world unto itself, pretty much. How does an editorial meeting even—what does it entail now?

Radhika Jones: It’s such a good question. We’re actually in the middle of revamping some of our meetings because you have to stay nimble about them, right? You have to have ideas flowing. At the core of it is an idea. A story idea.

And the story idea has to correspond to the voice of the magazine. And I think the voice of the magazine is what enables us to exist on all of these platforms in any kind of cohesive way. Is that the question of what is the underlying tone and voice of Vanity Fair?

It’s sharp, it’s witty, it’s sophisticated, it’s knowing. It’s the voice of someone who’s a little bit ahead of the curve and wants to bring the audience along with them. And you can do that in all of those different places in different ways. You can be a little—you can exercise your wit on YouTube, and it’s a little bit tailored for that platform versus say, print, but you can have that underlying tone and voice that all represent Vanity Fair.

So in terms of how we manage the flow of ideas across all of those platforms, for me, in my tenure at the magazine, it’s been a very exciting process to, over and over again, keep distilling our sense of what a Vanity Fair story is. Because we get a lot of pitches. We get pitches from outside, contributors, from our own staff.

We were thinking about ideas constantly. What are the stories that are out there in the world? What can we report? How can we move the needle? But these days, I think, because there’s a lot of noise and there are a lot of stories out in the world, the best value proposition for your magazine is to think about it in terms of what is the story that only Vanity Fair can execute or that we can execute better than anyone else.

What is a classic Vanity Fair story? And so sometimes a pitch will come in and I’ll think, “Oh, that’s a great story. I’d like to read that. But it’s not a Vanity Fair story. I hope it will find a home in some other magazine. But it’s not a Vanity Fair story.” And so we work very hard in all of the places where we exist to make sure that we’re doing the things that we can do best, that we feel speak to our voice and our role in the culture.

And together they create this kind of sense of what the magazine is. And I’ll give you a little example. You mentioned YouTube, “the world unto itself.” We have this series called Lie Detector, which I’m very fond of.

“The best value proposition for your magazine is to think about it in terms of what is the story that only we can execute or that we can execute better than anyone else.”

Arjun Basu: I just watched one this morning with Donald Glover and Maya Erskine. It’s hilarious.

Radhika Jones: Yeah, it’s fun. And it’s funny, it’s deadpan. It has that kind of Vanity Fair spirit to it. One of the reasons that I love it is it has this whole other level, I think. In a world where, just, think in the last decade, the function of the lie in our culture. The idea of truth, alternative facts, what these are powerful tropes that we think and talk about in the body of politics, in our culture at large.

And I’m saying you don’t have to be thinking about that when you’re watching Donald Glover and Maya Erskine have fun on Lie Detector. But there’s a kind of undercurrent, I think, of “This is actually a big idea.” It’s a big idea that’s being distilled by Vanity Fair in a humorous way, that ties it to a new TV show or a film or someone who has a great voice in the culture. But it also has layers.

And so I like the idea that wherever we are, whatever platform we are, we’re doing stories. They can feel slight. Sometimes they’re for entertainment, and that’s something to be proud of. I think we need to entertain people as part of our job. We also do investigative journalism but we can do both of those things because at the core of it, we’re trying to grapple with some of the big ideas that happen in our culture.

And I think that’s really important for a magazine to have that kind of North Star.

Arjun Basu: What is a magazine now? The magazine and the brand, let’s stick to Vanity Fair, it was obviously one in the same, it was the sun in that solar system. But now the brand is the sun, obviously, and the print magazine is like a planet. Or am I doing this wrong?

Radhika Jones: I’m just unpacking your metaphor to see how far it will go. Do the planets have moons? I don’t know. How complicated is our solar system?

Arjun Basu: And is the print magazine Jupiter, or is it Earth, or is it Neptune?

Radhika Jones: Yeah. Look, if we’re going to go along with your space metaphor here…

Arjun Basu: My tortured metaphor, yeah.

Radhika Jones: Our little galaxy is always expanding, right? A larger media universe is always expanding. And our little solar system is expanding and we have to think expansively about that. So I don’t know. I don’t worry so much about whether there’s one bit that’s primary. It’s more just are we doing the right thing in the right place at the right time?

Arjun Basu: In essence, it’s words and pictures.

Radhika Jones: It’s words and pictures. It’s voices. Yes. And sometimes the pictures move. And sometimes the pictures are with words, and they’re limited series, with the Vanity Fair Studios logo. And they take our reporting and spin it out over five television episodes. Or sometimes the pictures and words are red carpet reporting from the premiere of Succession. But yes, that’s the combination.

Arjun Basu: So much of the internet just feels like it’s reactive or uncurated. The word curator has shown up a lot in my research for you. And Vanity Fair as well as a “curator of American culture.” Can you do that with TikTok or am I just a fuddy-duddy and TikTok is just as important as everything else. Is there planning and thought, and…?

Radhika Jones: There's thought behind how we present ourselves, for sure. Because again, we have to do things that are right for our voice. But some of them are, again, it’s like we can have fun with it.

And I think we, because we’re Vanity Fair, we try to have fun wherever we’re showing up. And by that, some of the fun stuff we’ve done on TikTok has been around our office, who was the worst boyfriend on Sex In The City, a topic about which I have strong feelings.

Some of it has to do with how we curate our presence on TikTok. And so part of that comes from our voice and then the other thing is well, what’s key to Vanity Fair? It’s our access so when we’re running short clips and we’re making our presence felt on Tik Tok: Are we in a Vanity Fair kind of place? Are we on a red carpet? That’s a good place for us to be as Vanity Fair. Are we at a party? It’s like we can use those sort of signifiers and the kinds of questions that we ask. emphasize this is who we are. We’re where we need to be.

And now we’re also on TikTok and so you can come to know us. But that’s the entry point. Because that’s different—I think it’s commonplace now for some people to say the influencers, those are the people who have the ability to get people to buy something or get them to understand the news or what have you, but they’re sort of in their own universe.

Whereas we’re able to create paths among people who have a certain institutional standing, whether that’s a Hollywood star or a politician or a tech billionaire or whatever it is, like we have access to those people. And that’s the thing that kind of sets us apart. So that’s what I would say, but it’s an interesting question.

I think you want to have that kind of essence of what Vanity Fair is wherever we are. And it has a lot to do with the people we’re talking to. So, if the question is, what do you mean by curate?

Arjun Basu: That’s a good question too.

Radhika Jones: Yeah.

“The storytelling impulse is a constant and that gives me a lot of faith in our ability to evolve and change with the times.”

Arjun Basu: You also talked about—I think it was with Marc Maron last year—you talked about the need to modernize nostalgia, which I thought was a very interesting turn of phrase. I used to tell my kid that he suffered from “instant nostalgia,” that the minute something happened, he longed for it. And that was the same thing I’m thinking about entry points—I’m thinking about the audience that, obviously, reads the print but also someone that may just follow the YouTube channel or follow you on social media. And just the different entry points and the different audiences that are there. But they’re all hovering, revolving around this brand obviously, but there are different types of nostalgia, different levels and it’s age-dependent. So how do you not turn someone off? And pop culture is such a powerful force in it. We remember things. The older you get, the more you’re amazed by how old you get. “Oh, that was 40 years ago. Darn.” And I just think if my parents had pushed something that was 40 years old on me, I would have rolled my eyes. But all that nostalgia needs to be relevant to most of your audience. And as the audience expands, which is what you need, as a business how do you level the playing field?

Radhika Jones: I see it as an opportunity. And I think maybe it’s partly just a function of getting older and realizing that you go from being the young person in the office to realizing that there’s suddenly not one but two generations of working people below you. And that’s bracing.

But then what you also realize along with that is that the collective memory changes. I think about one of the defining moments in my teen life, my early teen life, was the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle. It was devastating at that time and it was very visible. Everybody saw it on TV.

If you asked a young person today about that it wouldn’t be on their radar at all, but partly that’s because they have other collective traumas that they witnessed. So nobody’s to blame for that. It’s just a function of moving through the world.

But I do think, coming back to seeing it as an opportunity, that what that means is that there’s room there to tell those stories because they’re in this little blind spot between what’s history and what’s memory is how I think of it. And the farther away you get from an event the more it finds its place in some kind of arc of history.

But when it’s something that’s close enough to be actively remembered. I think it’s harder to figure out what its place is.

I’ll give you some examples. I’ve been struck over the past few years by the power of a series like the Chernobyl series that was on HBO. Again, a huge event in my childhood. Not necessarily something that is on the radar for young people now. Again, they’ve had their own big disasters, but an extremely compelling story, and I thought the series was phenomenal, an extremely compelling story about a man made tragedy, a cover up, an attempted cover up, the literal global fallout of that.

And again, this question of the lie and like how far can you push. Not to mention issues of public health and national security and all of which are extremely relevant and came through in this very textured narrative around something that, yes, really did happen. I’ve encountered young people who had never heard about it.

And so I feel like there’s for us, as magazine editors, which now also encompasses people who are launching podcasts—you think of the Slow Burn podcast—that looks back at these moments in recent history and makes sense of them. It’s almost impossible to look at something like that and not see threads of that experience in our lives today.

And when you start to unravel them, you see those connections. So I think with a kind of magazine mindset, the telling of a story, finding a narrative arc in character and event, and giving that story room to breathe, which I think is what a magazine story does on every level, whether that is a limited series or a podcast season or a story in a print magazine, I feel like that’s something we can do, even as we’re also telling people what’s new and exciting and what’s coming up, in terms of the culture today. The moments when we look back, I think there’s so much connective tissue there. I think it’s a really powerful function of what we do.

Arjun Basu: That’s interesting.

Radhika Jones: You see it in things like fashion, the way things are cyclical. But nothing comes back the same way exactly. It’s always reinterpreted. So it’s not like you’re just excavating the past, you’re seeing it through your contemporary frame. And I’ve always been very compelled by the power of those kinds of narratives.

And I think about those stories from the eighties, nineties, even the aughts. There are things we can learn. I was struck the other day—I live in Brooklyn—and I was walking along the promenade and I was looking at One World Trade Center. And, I was struck that the Twin Towers have been gone almost as long as they were upright in the first place. Which you know, it’s one of those things that it just makes you think, to your point, you get older and you think about time in a different way. And I like to try to think about storytelling in that way too, like it’s generational.

“To tell stories and to tell them in formats that allow them to breathe is pretty universal. I think it’s very human, specifically human.”

Arjun Basu: Speaking about Chernobyl, I just read a story where the wolves that live in the decontamination zone may have evolved to be immune to cancer.

Radhika Jones: That would be a silver lining!

Arjun Basu: Yeah. But that’s how long it’s been, right? I do remember it. That and the Challenger. I mean, we’re probably the same age, so everything you’re saying is resonating for me. So what do you think the model is moving forward now? Technology is moving—although I’m convinced that it’s actually stagnant and we’re just shuffling the deck chairs. But where will the brand, where will Vanity Fair go?

Radhika Jones: Where will we not go? I don’t know. I think that the storytelling impulse is a constant and that gives me a lot of faith in our ability to evolve and change with the times. You learn to think differently about how to execute an idea. But at the core of everything we do is still story, words and images, as you say. That hasn’t changed.

Arjun Basu: Which is eternal.

Radhika Jones: Which is eternal. As is audio. It’s not the way we’re doing it over the internet, but I’m very sanguine about that part of it because I think that to tell stories and to tell them in formats that allow them to breathe is pretty universal. I think it’s very human, specifically human, not the product of artificial intelligence. I think humans crave it. And I think that the trappings of those stories can change. But I just don’t think that they’ll go away.

And so I think that for those of us who are wedded to bringing those stories into existence there are always going to be ways that we can do that. And specific to Vanity Fair, I think there always has been and will be an appetite for the kinds of stories that we do, which can be unabashedly complex they’re about systems of power, and big personalities, and scandals, and the ways that we live, the ways we are entertained. We can take big swings at those topics and that’s what we try to do.

Arjun Basu: Yeah. They do feel permanent and eternal. So we can end with this question. What’s on your radar now in terms of your own consumption? What are three things that are exciting you now? It can be media, any kind of media and magazines.

Radhika Jones: I actually just read a book of short stories by Hilary Mantel. I had read the Wolf Hall trilogy and others of her novels. I didn’t know she wrote short stories and they’re called Learning to Talk. They were absolutely exquisite. And it gave me so much faith in style, in writerly style, literary style as something that will always have a home with humans.

And with reading short stories, it’s akin to a magazine piece. It’s like you can accomplish so much in a short frame if you are very intentional and specific about your language and your imagery. So that was lovely. It’s funny. It’s been a while since I’ve read a book of short stories. So that was really nice.

But I have also been thinking in a similar way. I’ve been thinking about smaller magazines. I got my start in the media world in New York City. I worked at a newspaper in Russia. And so that was a news environment in the mid-nineties and it was a very tumultuous time. And I got the news bug kind of adrenaline rush that comes with a deadline and all of it.

But when I started my career in New York, I was working at this little magazine called Grand Street, Which was art, and poetry, and fiction, and nonfiction.

RADHIKA JONES: THREE THINGS

Arjun Basu: It’s a little magazine, but it punches way above its weight.

Radhika Jones: And a lot of them do. And sometimes I go through periods where I go back to my little magazine roots. I sit on the board of The Paris Review and so I keep up with The Paris Review and I’ve just been loving it lately. They published a story last year by James Laston that I just thought was—it just bowled me over. It was terrific.

I love the interviews, the Writers at Work series that they do, which is a great gift to literature because it has a kind of archival quality to it. And I’ve also been looking at The Yale Review, which is a very interesting publication. Again, it punches above its weight.

I think a lot about the ways that we talk now about how social media has diminished or cheapened our public discourse. And I think that it has in a lot of ways. But it would be a mistake to think that there are no places in which a true discursive, open-ended, open-minded thinking is happening. And I feel like it’s happening at The Yale Review. I was intrigued by a lot of the essays that I encountered in it.

And then I’m also very fond of the magazine called Racquet which was founded by an old friend I used to work with at Time magazine. It’s about tennis, but in the way that tennis is about everything. I love her project because it has that wonderful small-magazine ability to focus, but there’s a way to be expansive within that world. And, yes, I wear my Racquet sweatshirt with a lot of pride.

So yeah, I’ve been thinking about small magazines and short stories and just the amount of thinking and the energy and excitement that can happen in those places, it makes me feel very good about our future.