Sarah Ball is the Real Deal
A conversation with editor Sarah Ball (WSJ Magazine, Vanity Fair, GQ, more). Interview by Rachel Baker & Maggie Bullock/The Spread
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THIS EPISODE IS MADE POSSIBLE BY OUR FRIENDS AT COMMERCIAL TYPE AND FREEPORT PRESS.
Ball, center, with Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Molly Gordon
The word ‘unicorn’ gets thrown around a lot these days. But in our book, Sarah Ball is the Real Deal. The editor of WSJ. Magazine is a student of old-guard, in-the-trenches, work-on-a-story-for-years magazine making, which has earned her cred among the Jim Nelsons and David Grangers of the biz.
She’s also a digital native with a flare for experimentation and a new media scrappiness. Sarah spent her career bridging those divides predominantly at Vanity Fair and GQ where she helped those titles join the digital revolution—much more stylishly and convincingly than many of her competitors.
Arguably more than any other editor of her generation, she brings print-era rigor, and also the romance of the whole magazine-making endeavor to digital-era reality. That's why when the Vanity Fair editor-in-chief job came open last spring, Sarah was right at the top of The Spread’s list for who should get the gig.
The wind blew a different way, as we all know by now, and she’s happy at WSJ. But when you listen to our chat, we think you'll get why our money is on her.
There’s a lot of pessimism in journalism these days for good reason, but we challenge you to listen to this conversation without getting just as swept up as we did in Sarah’s passion for magazines. It's almost enough to make us believe that print is not in fact dead. Not yet, at least.
Maggie Bullock: Where are you now? What are we looking at behind you?
Sarah Ball: Physically looking at me at WSJ HQ. So I’m in the Journal’s newsroom in the Magazine, and Style and, kind of, Weekend corner.
Rachel Baker: So your empire.
Sarah Ball: I wish. In modern media there are no corner offices. I’m in a little cubby off of a beautiful bank of windows. And you’re seeing some magazine photography behind me and the trappings of the lady editor over here: a mirror and …
Maggie Bullock: Is this the job you always wanted, Sarah? Not to just jump in with a big question. Is this it?
Sarah Ball: Maggie! Such questions!
Maggie Bullock: Did you get the dream job?
Sarah Ball: I thought I got, like, a courtesy, a few softballs.
Maggie Bullock: Yeah, we don’t really warm up around here. We like to pull a hamstring on the first question.
Sarah Ball: Is this the job I always wanted? It’s a great question. It’s a thrilling job that I honestly didn’t think I would get. I started as a reporter many moons ago now, and I think my dream when I was in college, in high school was to be, not like a swashbuckling correspondent, but I wanted to be like a really tart, borderline mean writer for the Washington Post Style section.
That was my dream. I was raised on Sally Quinn's Washington Post Style section. When I left college, I mostly applied to newspapers all over the country. I was like, this is what you do. You cut your teeth writing for a really small city newspaper somewhere in the US and then you work your way to New York City.
That’s how I thought it worked. And I applied to one magazine and that one magazine is the only place I got an offer, which might tell you that maybe my clips were just screaming “magazine” and not cops and courts.
Maggie Bullock: Where were you coming from? Where’d you grow up? And what was that magazine?
Sarah Ball: I grew up right outside of Washington DC in Alexandria, Virginia, two very southern parents. So I always feel like I was raised in a southern-bubble household in the DC/Mid-Atlantic area.
Rachel Baker: I told Maggie, I was like, “You’re going to love Sarah. She’s basically southern.”
Sarah Ball: I know. I’m honorary. So, Mississippi mother, South Carolina dad. The kind where extended family were always around. So until I actually went to kindergarten, I sounded like Rachel Baker.
Maggie Bullock: Well, so did I. And Rachel has a Mississippi mother and I have a South Carolina dad, so there you go.
Rachel Baker: We’re all family. We’re all related.
Sarah Ball: Basically. We probably actually are. Let’s not push that too hard. I went to school also in the south. I went to Duke University, which didn’t have a journalism school. I fake went to journalism school by being one of those people who lived at the college paper. I co-edited the college magazine with my now husband. I married my co-editor. That’s how little I left the office.
And the magazine where I got a reporting job out of college was Newsweek, which was at the time owned by the Grahams. Everyone says they saw the last of the Golden Age of a magazine—everyone will have a story about how they personally lived through the last of the Golden Age. But it really felt like the last couple years of, I don’t want to say that was Newsweek’s Golden Age, but it really was the very tail end.
The Grahams put it up for sale right before I left and I actually left the same day, the Grahams divested. It was a really weird tie up, but I left after two and a half years.
Rachel Baker: I’ve always said that Sarah has real EIC energy. Like I’ve been saying this to you, Sarah, too.
Sarah Ball: Listeners: I’m shaking my head violently.
Rachel Baker: For 15 years I’ve been like, “Sarah, of our micro-generation, will be an editor-in-chief.” And look at you now! And you’re in this job that’s huger than editor-in-chief. Can you tell us what all you oversee and how big your team is in this empire that you’re sitting in?
Sarah Ball: Okay. Empire? Again from the windowless—what’s actually really funny, you guys, in a way that you’ll appreciate, because this has been the summer of Condé nostalgia, my office at Condé Nast when I was 25 years old was a nicer office than now I am an editor-in-chief.
I had floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Times Square. Here I am at the Journal HQ and it’s not quite the same as Golden Age Condé Nast. However, it is wonderful. I oversee the WSJ. magazine team, and we have a Style section. ‘Section’ is really the wrong word because we’re not a physical section in the way of the Times or the Washington Post, but we are a team of style, lifestyle, entertainment reporters who feed into the daily coverage of the Wall Street Journal.
So we’re kind of a combo team that serves both. So the reporters who report for the paper and app and site every day on topics of Hollywood and style and lifestyle and the culture also report for the magazine. The editors who edit super long-form muscular enterprise journalism for the magazine are also looking at daily news. So it’s a team that wears a lot of hats and does both.
We’re 50 people and we also have a whole creative side as all magazines do. We have a fashion team and a fashion closet, and that serves, again, not only the magazine and the style coverage, but also helps with fashion and style market for our Off-Duty section, which is a separate section of the paper that is your kind of service journalism.
And then we have photo and design and social and all those sorts of multimedia things. We have a creative team that is our own, that relates to the paper’s visual team, but has a very different flavor and areas of expertise. So we still do huge location fashion shoots, we still do huge-scale cover shoots, and not just the news photography that our peers in the newsroom photo team do.
So we have a lot of different groups, but we work really closely with other sections in the Journal’s overall Weekend and features team. We’re all here together on one floor of the newsroom and it’s one floor down from the floor that’s, like, if you’ve seen The Paper or anything—where there’s a huge jumbotron of stories and phones are—I guess phones aren’t ringing anymore. It’s sad, the newsroom noise has really gone away. It’s a little bit more of a respite down here. This is where all the feature sections are.
Maggie Bullock: So you do also oversee the Off Duty section?
Sarah Ball: No, I don’t oversee Off Duty. It’s run by Dale Hrabi, who edits all of our service journalism. Our team oversees just the fashion market. So our fashion closet calls in fashion for Off Duty for Style coverage and for the magazine. It’s a similar model to a Conde or Hearst, where they’ve hubbed huge fashion closets across brands.
We have that, but we don’t have 10 magazine brands. We just have us, Off Duty, and Style that kind of benefit from them. Pulling in product and photographing it in our little studio.
Maggie Bullock: Fifty people is huge in this day and age!
Sarah Ball: I think it’s funny, it sounds big, but it’s like enough people that—you know, I obviously know and work with everybody. To me, it feels like the right size. I remember when I left GQ it was 75 or 80 or 90 people. And Vanity Fair was way bigger than that. Of course a lot of those people were correspondents who were out, remote or—
Rachel Baker: —and they don’t have those numbers now.
Sarah Ball: And again, WSJ. magazine was not like this before I took this job. But what I like that we have in terms of staffing is that we have staff writers, again, we have reporters. So when I started out, I was a reporter, staff writer for a magazine. And then I went and worked at places that didn’t necessarily have writers around.
They came in—it was amazing when Christopher Hitchens came in, or David Sedaris came in, but they weren’t there with us. It was just editors making special “magazine magic” with copy that came in from outside. And I love a moment when an iconic writer can come in, but I really love getting to rap with the actual reporters and writers who are here and hear their ideas.
It makes me excited to go to ideas meetings when you have people in there who are literally opening up the notebooks that we still use, reading things that they have gleaned and telling you fun off-the-record ideas. It just feels a tiny bit more higher metabolism, I would say, than, “We’ll get on the horn and we’ll call ’em up and they’ll fax us the ideas and then we’ll discuss them.” There’s something a little more kinetic about it that I love.
Rachel Baker: When you’re assigning stories—because you have the luxury of staff writers, are you sometimes like, “look into this and we’ll see if it’s a story for the paper or the magazine”?
Sarah Ball: All the time. In fact, New York magazine actually did a cover of this story. Luckily we were able to get it out digitally before their cover, and it’s in our next edition. But we did the “crypto bro” kidnapping crazy story. And that was assigned initially as a quick turn paper story and then we realized we would have it ready and could enrich it and build it out as a long read in time to make one of our fall deadlines.
And then vice versa, sometimes we call in something that feels really special and magazine-y. So we just did this like a nine month reporting project where we sent our art reporter to Monet’s gardens at Giverny to embed with the gardeners there because it’s a losing battle to bring them back every year amid climate change. There’s a dieback of species that you can’t recreate that only existed up till the 1880s, but have really fallen off as our world has changed.
And so we embedded her. And this was going to be a kind of a magazine-y story, but more limited in scope. And then we built it out actually into an episodic digital. It feels like a mini series. It’s nine chapters. We sent nine photographers to reinterpret the most iconic landscape in western art. She was embedded with these gardeners. [She got all their gardener gossip. It’s this kind of huge digital journey that ended up running as a four part series in the paper, which we had never done with a little QR code to bring you to the full digital experience.
So that started as, “Oh, wouldn’t it be cute, a picture of the gardens’ and a nice, lovely story and more limited in scope.” And then on the strength of our reporter, Kelly Crow, who’s really amazing at digging it grew into something really digital, big and somehow more special.
Maggie Bullock: That seems really unique, but you correct me if I’m wrong, please, that kind of work seems different from the Wall Street Journal, right? Are you being given more freedom now to do things that push the purview a little or do you feel like that’s always been endemic to WSJ, which is a different beast?
Sarah Ball: I think it’s both. I’ll answer this in a couple different parts. The first thing is I think there has always been size and scope to storytelling here. Not every reporter necessarily is doing that, right? Some people are doing the stories with a chart in them. They’re telling you to pull your money out of this and isn’t private credit kind of sketchy? And not everyone’s doing that, but the Journal has had some iconic sort of narrative nonfiction type writers.
We’re coming out of the summer of nineties magazine nostalgia and I have read Mike Grynbaum’s wonderful book and Graydon’s wonderful book. And both of them talk about, “We got the barbarians at the gate, we got a great iconic Wall Street Journal writer and we just decided to unleash him on a BFE topic.”
I have a thought in this role, and I know Emma Tucker does as our editor-in-chief of the paper, which is, Why can’t you do some of that here? So I think there always have been great storytellers at the Journal. What we tell those stories about has possibly changed and evolved.
So it’s not just Nabisco merger, now it is Monet’s gardens and applying what I think of as the, just like the luxury of general interest, like the two most boring sounding words, but the most glorious editorial mandate that exists is, you know, that Monet story when we started talking about it, there’s a term here called the A-head, and it’s the very jaunty feature that appears in the front of the newspaper or on the front of this sort of scroll every day. It’s a jaunty take on the news. We were talking about it initially in A-head terms and I kept saying what if we, New York this what if we really sang it to the valet, like really projected and used writerly muscles that Kelly doesn’t always get to do when she’s breaking news of, a crazy Rothko record from the back row of a mid-century masters auction at Sotheby’s.
So I think it's a combination of what Emma’s bringing to the Journal and how we fit into that. It’s partly an evolution of journalism, right? I think commodity summaries of earnings are not going to cut it as your sole offering in a kind of AI-inflected news environment. These value added, surprising, enriched stories are.
And then I think what I have really tried to do from this job is that, who the marketplace might say are our competitors are. Like How To Spend It and T, who also have the benefit of the New York Times Magazine and the Financial Times Magazine. But we don’t have two magazines here. We only have one.
So to me it’s a bit of a false choice as a reader. I read both the FT Magazine and I read How To Spend It. I read T and I read The New York Times Magazine and I think we’re put in the box of having to do both things with one, but it’s also a really fun challenge because as a reader, I like to see immersive beautiful interior shoot or fashion location shoot next to super surprising enterprise that’s going to give me something to talk about in the group chat.
So I think it’s us using this vehicle a little bit differently. Certainly Emma’s fingerprints are all over the Journal. And then also I think lying in wait, a lot of talent here maybe wasn’t unlocked on those kinds of stories before at the journal.
Rachel Baker: You just demonstrated my next question, which is that the thing about you that’s so cool, and I think so singular, is that you’re this digital native, you’ve worked online since your Vanity Fair days in your early twenties, but you’re also a student of the great legacy print magazine editors like Tina Brown and David Remnick and Graydon Carter. Can you tell us how you got this way? I feel like you’re, like, this unicorn.
Sarah Ball: How did I get this way? I feel like this goes back to the question: do you like your job? And what are you doing with your life? How did I get this way? First of all, I think you guys are the same. I think there’s people who are really students of magazines and love magazines but also are the age we are, which of course we have an appreciation for the power and sophistication of digital tools and let’s be honest about where most of us are getting a lot of our news and entertainment.
I think that being in denial of that has always been something that it’s a bummer to see when you start your career and you see so much resistance to digital change and think that it means you have to sacrifice wonderful storytelling. So I would say from the beginning of my career, I’ve always been dissatisfied with the answer that it’s either/or, that you either have to have really enriching, beautiful, playful, funny, joyful visual storytelling, or you can be digital. It felt like the RSS feed of what we run in print and the afterthought.
I just, I really had a kind of… I can’t describe it any other way than like a pirate’s mentality of being often assigned to or part of digital teams and seeing how the idea was, oh, you’ll write the blog, you’ll do the reacts, you’ll summarize at the time of aggregation, which is when I started my career, was the beginning of digital men aggregating other sites all day long. What. Was. That?
So I’ve always had a real like fire in my belly, I would say, to prove those in authority that, that is like, there’s two sides to every brand. There’s the, over there, the digital team and over here the like, wonderful, excellent print team that were really smart, wonderful people.
I always was like, But what if it was one? What if they were both? Every job I’ve had some part of my role has been to push the two sides together initially, informally, and then over time I just started to accrue the roles that were formally putting these groups together to work on things.
I think that my reverence for print media comes from just being an obsessive reader from the time I could read and reading everything I could. I grew up in a very periodical dense home. Like a hoarder, piles of all different kinds of magazines, four newspapers a day, just a really media saturated environment
Again, I feel like anyone you’ve ever had on your podcast, made my own little magazines, experimented with that, like loved printed media, but also just felt like, I’m not going to be one of these people who is functionally Mr. Peanut, being like, “There is no internet. I refuse to—” I’m sorry you guys can’t see. I’m doing a fake monocle.
Maggie Bullock: Really? I appreciate the monocle.
Sarah Ball: There’s no, why would we ever look at a video? Like I just, I refuse to go down with the ship, in a tweed blazer, being like, there’s no internet. So I think that’s the general feeling. You can see my heatedness coming through. Who told us it’s a choice? I reject that it’s a choice.
Rachel Baker: There was that tension, real tension between the print side and the digital side and you were one of the few people who got along with everybody. Was that weird?
Maggie Bullock: Let’s be specific. Because you really started doing that at Graydon’s Vanity Fair, right? Yeah. So bring us into that situation.
Sarah Ball: Sure. So I was hired from Newsweek, I’d been a reporter covering film and television, writing mostly for Newsweek, print and editing, mostly for Newsweek digital. There was, I was a little bit of a merger in a person there, and it was very separate there. And I somehow managed because culture entertainment was not a core priority of the magazine relative to politics, world affairs.
When the Grahams put Newsweek up for sale, pretty much everyone was scrambling for other positions. And I applied to work at Conde Nast and in those times they rotated me around a couple different interviews at a couple different magazines. So my life could have gone any number of ways depending on which roles I’d taken.
But the VF role that was open was a digital editor role covering I think Hollywood and politics, which was a little bit of a strange, but I thought this would be great. By the time I started there, another editor actually left, so it ended up being Hollywood, politics, royals ... I just basically got the—
Rachel Baker: Those are all the verticals there!
Sarah Ball: I know! Now they’re all verticals. Now there’re, like, 20 editors to do those topics, but at the time they were like, “Come do this thing.” Juli Weiner was there. She had been hired maybe a year prior from Wonkette—RIP—although it might still be around, but RIP—the satire and politics sites. And she was doing daily takes and so it was, “Come help edit daily coverage on all these topic areas, work really closely with Juli,” who was a treasure who’s still making amazing, hilarious content for the world in the form of television writing.
And I joined this theater troupe of digital people that Graydon wanted to interpret the energy of Vanity Fair, and also, frankly, a little bit of this Spy energy. So waiting for me at my desk—you guys will love this—this is my first day at Vanity Fair, here’s what was on my desk: An autographed copy of the Spy book, which is a coffee table book.
Rachel Baker: Oh, we all have it.
Sarah Ball: You all have it. This book is like the I Ching for me—this is like my favorite reference. If anyone listening to this podcast ever wants to do an ideas memo for any job, I feel like that book is the most inspiring magazine making book that has ever been created.
It’s just glorious. And so many people talk about the inspiration that was Spy, but I somehow think people seem to remember the same two or three stories, but this book really reminds you that it’s like the breadth of their targets. It’s really just pure joy.
So the Spy book was there. A fountain pen, a Varsity fountain pen. Everyone in the staff used them. They’re disposable fountain pens. You can go on Amazon and order that. And they were the Vanity Fair pen. A Vanity Fair style guide, which had incredible usage, like how we use Bichon Frisé in a sentence. All of Graydon’s banned words were on this list, like a Vanity Fair style guide. And then a fake gold bar, like gold bullion, like a gold bar made out of wood that had been used behind Michael Douglas for a shoot, an homage to Wall Street. The film shoot, there were all these gold bars and everyone apparently got a gold bar as, like, a paperweight in their desk. This is what was waiting for me when I got here.
Rachel Baker: Welcome!
Sarah Ball: So I was like, This is going to be the most fun job I will ever have. And in fact, it was. And I think the reason it was so fun is because Graydon ... this was like this magical time that was post-slight digital investment, so there were 15 or so people making a site, as opposed to two. But it was pre-KPI, so the only goal was to be funny, interesting, amusing, read.
So it was like a real bootcamp in the mix of, I don’t know, it’s like “high/low” is a little overused, but it really was like one day we’d be working with Maureen Orth and her editor, Wayne Lawson on a piece going back into the Woody Allen saga and reigniting that as a debate.
And then the next day we would be sending a photographer on a Royal tour and getting images of Kate Middleton engaged to Prince William and figuring out what to do with that. And then the next day we’d be writing just silly blog posts. We would dress up as Gumby and go down into Times Square and be like, “What is the experience of the Times Square characters?” Like, that was a week. Do you know what I mean?
Rachel Baker: You were really set up for success. I just imagine you weaseling your way in with the gray beard print people and nobody can resist Sarah Ball. Was there some of that?
Sarah Ball: The print editors there at Vanity Fair under Graydon had beautiful offices, they had assistants out front. Graydon always had everyone—I have them now, I would turn you around to show you—I have lamps with silk shades on my desk. We always had to have a lamp. It was a very lamplit environment. So each editor under Graydon still felt like a king or queen of an incredible portfolio of writers. I just would imagine it like the book world where every editor almost ran their own imprint.
So it would be Aimée Bell, who now runs an imprint, Wayne Lawson—they would have these incredible rosters of writers. So you did have to learn how to communicate with each of them if you wanted to work with their writers. I just found them all a joy. Like even ones that, oh, this one doesn’t get along with that, or this person’s specialty is not really what my personal specialty was.
I just loved going in there and getting to hear the war stories, I loved when their writers came in, what a privilege again, to see Christopher Hitchens smoking in Aimée Bell’s office, or to see Michael Lewis come in and talk to his editor Doug Stumpf. Maureen Orth is an icon to me. That’s like a celebrity to me—to see Maureen Orth or Carl Bernstein.
Getting to know those editors and getting to know their portfolio, they were like, “Oh, there’s a gal on the web who we could call.” And I was like, I just love being a student of what you do. And they would, in some cases editors who I was really close to, would bring me in and show me manuscripts and talk to me about how they were editing stories, or spitball ideas.
This was peak royals, so I could see how well it was doing digitally. It wasn’t as crazy and played out I think as it is now. Harry and William were just becoming adults, and it was fun to spitball from my young person’s perspective, here’s what I would do with this coverage.
Or the day that I saw that the Woody Allen, or the original Mia Farrow story, was overperforming in our archive. Like it was going crazy, this traffic, because a sort of message board within Kinja, Gawker’s comment section, had found it. I went in and told Wayne. And he was like, “I never would’ve known this.”
And I think he then talked to Maureen about covering that again, and it felt like, Oh, I can give them something. And they are definitely giving me something, which is like an education that was really incredible. And I still treasure, I still see all of them, which is its own gift.
Maggie Bullock: This sounds totally unlike the experience of virtually any other fledgling digital editor entering the hallowed halls of Condé Nast or Hearst at this time. It’s pretty amazing.
Sarah Ball: Just because of the, like, gulag mentality of, like, flog, get traffic, get traffic?
Maggie Bullock: Yeah. And just because being kept in a second class citizen position.
Sarah Ball: Oh yeah.
Maggie Bullock: It sounds like you were really embraced by the establishment, whereas like we saw many digital editors who were. Either feared by the establishment or just not understood. Certainly not embraced or treated as a peer, a younger peer in any way. But we also have heard that maybe this is just the magic of Sarah Ball because we’ve also heard that Jim Nelson, the long-time editor of GQ also really loved you, took you under his wing, you were a star of his GQ.
Sarah Ball: Jim is so wonderful. I just described what VF was like for me, and it was really hard to leave. I didn’t really want to leave. I think what I’m describing to you is, the topics I felt I was so interested in personally, I loved editing. I loved that Vanity Fair was ... a lot of the Condé magazines were this at this time, but a real editor’s culture where craft and editing and making a story better was a thing you spent time on.
I just loved that. I really thought I could grow there, but I also felt like I needed to almost go through something harder. I thought I would be more challenged in some ways going to GQ and an editing role opened up there that was what I’m describing, which was a more senior version of what I had been, which was a go-between, between like Jim’s aspirations and dreams for what his site could be and the site and how do you program it every day.
And I think Jim very famously comes from a kind of double-threat background, but not a fashion background. And GQ is positioned in the marketplace as a kind of fashion facing publication. But he came from a news background with Harper’s and CNN, but also a lesser-known comedy writing background with writer’s rooms in LA.
So he had this really great combination of incredibly culturally curious and very funny, but also super serious about enterprise journalism. And I knew from friends there that he really pushed editors to refine everything, every idea, every sentence, every headline, that it was its own super intense editing bootcamp.
And I craved that development. I really did. I felt so trusted at VF and I loved it. This is something I know I’ll never have again because as many people have pointed out, the economics of magazines have changed. But the quality of what VF brought in, like the level of writers you were constantly getting, yes, there’s real craft to the editing there.
I’m not saying there’s not, especially when you get a reporter who’s a pure reporter who’s maybe turning in like literal notes and there are some of those for sure, but you’re also getting amazing copy that you’re not melting down and having to think super critically about flow and structure.
And I thought that Jim could teach me a lot of that. And also I thought it would push me out of my comfort zone. I thought that I had a real comfort zone. At Vanity Fair everything was in my comfort zone. And I thought that the change in audience and also the younger audience, I thought, Oh gosh, I know how to speak so well to the Vanity Fair older audience, but this will force me to be a young person.
I think that was a little bit in my head versus like amazing Kennedy stories or Marilyn Monroe. I thought, oh, this is going to force me to learn how to be a great editor and writer. And I’m still writing a lot then as well on the culture in a real way. And so I went into this combination role.
I was working for Jim, I was working for Michael Hainey, who was overseeing all of digital at the time and who’s obviously still who’s very much in the Graydon, he was at Spy and now is at Air Mail, so I was working for the two of them. Michael helped bring me over and I got to know Jim and yeah. It was everything that I thought it would be.
It was really hard, but it really taught me how to be obsessive about certain things, to make stories great. I think, honestly, I think it’s good for a part of your career to be put into an environment where you’re really challenged and it’s hard, but it’s still fun. And I think that’s what it was for me.
Ideas meetings were—I’ve heard them compared there to the Frazier writer’s room, like the most famous writer’s room, like you could hear a pin drop if someone pitched a bad idea or set a joke that was stupid. I really learned how to speak up in a meeting at the right time.
By the way, the tip is always go after someone whose idea’s bombed. So I still do that. I’m still like, Maybe this is a tense meeting. I’ll wait till someone’s idea is not connecting with the audience in the right way, and then maybe I’ll speak my silly idea. So I learned a lot and I love Jim. Jim is a genius. There’s just no other way to say it.
Rachel Baker: You got promoted by him, like, 10 times or something?
Sarah Ball: I had a Season One and a Season Two. I was there, I got promoted, I started as a senior editor, mostly over culture stuff that’s straddled between digital and print. So I had a couple of sections in print and then I did a lot of daily culture coverage editing it for the site.
He eventually asked me to help him to edit his site. So I was the—I don’t even remember what it was called—executive digital editor or something like that. At that time, Condé was handing you a big check to go create a digital team for real this time.
There are KPIs now. So we hired 35 people to be on gq.com and it was like, there were 10 when I got there and there were 35 within three months. Then I worked with Mike Hofman, who you guys might know. He was on the strategy and business side. And the two of us built up gq.com and we hired all these people and we hired a lot of women, which I was really excited about.
I called us “She Q” because I thought the perspective of a woman who works at a men’s magazine was very—Nora Ephron, that kind of really playful voice, is something that I was like, a mood board voice to me. There were a bunch of those writers that I was lucky to smuggle in. And then I left and I went to London for a little while and worked for Condé UK for a year, as a kind of circuit breaker.
And then Jim brought me back, in a couple of more senior roles. I think I ended up as the editorial director. So Will Welch was, at the time, the creative director and the two of us worked for Jim, just helping execute his vision across all the different things that went into the brand.
Maggie Bullock: So now at WSJ you are really running, as we’ve said earlier in this conversation, it’s a lot of different things in one magazine, but it is presented as a fashion magazine, right? Certainly to its advertisers it is very much a fashion magazine. So did that feel like a leap for you? Did you have some kind of, like, Anne Hathaway moment?
Sarah Ball: It was for sure a leap. I think when I left GQ again, I think it was more driven by a life change than anything. I was eight-and-a-half months pregnant when I started at WSJ, which is a crazy time to start a new job.
Rachel Baker: I did not know this. I texted a friend of ours before this and I said, “How old are Sarah’s children? And he said, “Eight, five, and two.” And I’m like, “Shit!”
Sarah Ball: 7, 5, and 1. I was eight-and-a-half months pregnant. And Kristina O’Neill, who was the editor-in-chief, was hiring a digital director and wanted, again, the same thing that Rachel was very accurately and playfully describing, which is the position of somebody who can come in and help do digital, but to a standard or pedigree that doesn’t feel like it’s aggregation and there’s a brand heritage here and how do we translate this thing for digital.
So she was looking for that role and I was, at the time, Jim’s editorial director, which was a great job, but really demanding and really did involve things like: “It’s Tuesday. On Thursday we are flying to LA. There will be an event. It starts at 1:00am for the NBA All-Star game.”
Like I could not—I knew that I didn’t know anything about being a mother. I knew that I didn’t know anything about what it was going to be like to recover from having a baby, but I definitely knew that it probably wasn’t going to come easily at one in the morning, at the NBA All-Star Weekend after party. Just … I had a hunch. And I was bummed about that because again, at that point, I’d spent five years at GQ and I felt really comfortable. I knew what a GQ story was. We had some really high highs that last year I was there.
The magazine had won a Pulitzer Prize for the first time when the Pulitzers opened themselves up to magazines. It felt like a great time for some of the work, and yet a really tough time for Condé and a really bad time to be on maternity leave.
It just felt unstable. And at the time, Condé also offered, like, four minutes of maternity leave. And the Journal is competitive with the Times and offers a really, really nice maternity package and really a lot of support for working mothers. So I thought, I’m going to go work for a working mother, that’s what I’m going to do.
So I came and I worked for Kristina and it was wonderful because again, it was a team of—just as GQ had been a team of primarily men except for the digital side, which was from 50/50—this was a team of mostly working moms. And I think I really needed that to adjust and to learn how to be a parent. But I’m getting off base of your question, which is not about—
Maggie Bullock: No, but actually you’ve gone into very Spread territory. We like where you’ve headed.
Sarah Ball: I think fashion, to your point, I knew when I came here this was a fashion-oriented publication in terms of like its commercial and also addresses luxury lifestyle as its audience. And I knew the digital side should also reflect that. It’s still very much positioned as a luxury lifestyle magazine with fashion. I think the thing we’ve mostly done is taken some of the proportion of lifestyle out of the bigger stories and started to cycle in more culture and more enterprise, frankly.
And then the fact that we’re daily with the paper really leavens that. I would say we still have the same number of huge high-production fashion shoots all over the world, which is like a blessing to still have location fashion shoots. In the world of fashion magazines it’s rarer and rarer that we’re able to send—we sent a photographer in the last six months to the side of an active volcano to shoot beautiful gowns as lava is running in the background. Stuff like that still exists here and I pinch myself that it does. But we have just mixed in the proportion of other things and it definitely was an adjustment for me.
I think traveling for Fashion Weeks is the biggest change in my life. I think participating in the brainstorming and the visual language of how to put a fashion shoot together, I did see a lot of that at GQ. And at VF in a different way with the way we would do the Hollywood shoots and those kinds of things. So the production of the fashion wasn’t that foreign to me. But certainly being on the road is a totally different life than I’d experienced before.
Maggie Bullock: Yeah. And also a mixed bag with that whole motherhood goal you had.
Sarah Ball: Hundred percent. You can’t take three children—
Maggie Bullock: —you can’t stay at the Crillon with your nanny…
Sarah Ball: Exactly. With my five-bedroom suite that comes with this job, so they each have their own room. And the day and night nannies have their own room, too. So, honestly, it really works out. It’s great.
Maggie Bullock: It would be so unfair for them to have to share. But actually, I just want to point out something that keeps coming through to me as you’re talking. I bet you’re picking up on the same thing, Rachel, which is that you’re just a much more strategic person than I have ever been. It’s really striking because you are like, I think I was very comfortable at VF, but I felt like I could learn this better editing skill at GQ. I was very comfortable at GQ, but like I was ready to be a mom and I felt like I needed to see how that works with other working mothers. I don’t know if this is how you think of yourself, but it’s coming through to me loud and clear that you seem to be seeing life from, like, a 30,000-foot perspective and able to jump on the board at the right times, which I don’t know how to do and I think is a rare skill.
Sarah Ball: I don’t know—in the moment of it, when I’m retelling it sounds very smooth and, ugh, I just knew it was time. I just felt it in my bones. Someone gave me the advice early on that you can’t—we all fall into this trap, right?—you can’t dream a scenario in your career and be like, “I’m going to work at these three places because they’re all going to be hiring and they’re all going to have great salaries and they’re all going to have great benefits and great jobs.”
For me, you have to make your decision by what’s out in the marketplace at the time that you think that you need to change. I had no idea I would go to VF from Newsweek. And I had no idea that I would go to GQ from VF. I think that I did hit points at Newsweek, at VF, at GQ, where I thought, Oh, I want to develop in one specific way and I feel like I don’t have that skill.
I am super curious. I think that is something that’s true of me is that I am curious to try new things and to be challenged. I haven’t yet learned—which is a weakness—to just put my feet up and relax and chill out. I always want to try something different and new. I am insatiably curious about magazines and then I also think I don’t have one type of magazine that I want to stay with. I think those three are pretty different.
At the same time, they might all be general interest. Maybe you could categorize that as a connective thread and that really makes a lot of decisions for you because sometimes, if you want to stay able to write about men’s and women’s style, or crime and culture, there are not that many places to hop around to, but I do think if I did have any like 10,000-foot vision, it was two things: I didn’t want to be stale. I wanted to learn how to stay current with editing skills and challenge myself.
And then the second thing is that I think being on the digital side of history, but respectful and reverential for what print takes—and took—to make, and not being like the other way of, I’m going to go work for Chat GPT. Do you know what I mean?
I do have respect for both, but I think being on the digital side of ‘history’—I think just opened more opportunities for me through my career than if I had been like, “I don’t want anything to do with the internet.” Instead I was very arrogantly, “Internet it is, but I’ll just make it like print.” Do you know what I mean? I think that might be the mind-trickery that I had.
Maggie Bullock: I think it also sounds like you are not that risk-averse because lots of people stay in their jobs for a long time because they’re just afraid that the next thing could be worse. If you have a job and you like it, you’re afraid that the next thing could be worse. But maybe I’m only just talking about myself and we’re veering into therapy here.
Sarah Ball: I’m here for that, Maggie. I’m here for it. Let’s work it out.
Rachel Baker: You had just mentioned going to work for Kristina Neil, who was an extremely beloved EIC at WSJ, and then she left in 2023, and then you got her job. That seems like that could be awkward, like how did you manage all that?
Sarah Ball: I think the biggest transition at the time was also that I was in London. So I had been in London and this is a plot twist. Also I was overseas. So another thing to Maggie’s point about risk-aversion is that during COVID—my husband is also an editor—he works at Bloomberg News, and the editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News is very keen on rotating you around bureaus around the world. And so he was rotated, or asked to rotate, to the London bureau in 2021.
So me, two little children, and my husband moved to London during deep COVID on an empty plane. And we set up life there. And the minimum Bloomberg rotation is two years. So we were there. I was working at the Journal first from home, and then in the Journal’s offices there, which are amazing because it is the British headquarters of this company.
So it’s the Sun and the Times of London and the Times Literary Supplement and it’s a real exposure to that part of this company. It was a surprise when Matt left the paper and Emma was appointed. And Emma was actually at the Sunday Times in the same company over there. And then we didn’t cross paths until later. But she came back to New York in February, and Kristina left a little bit after that.
And I had been her deputy, running digital but also running the Style section that we had started together a couple years before. So we had put in for company investment and started this additional section of like a cross between paper and magazine that fed into the site and the app. And it’s a wild ride. And I was lucky that Emma wanted me to apply and when you’re staring down the prospect of those memos, I’m sure you’ve talked to a lot of people on this podcast actually about the creation of the memo. But when you’re invited to apply, but told the job is not yours, you have to earn it through your memo, that is very daunting.
But I don’t know. I didn’t find it as awkward as much as exciting to get this job with a team that I knew and had worked with for five years. I think it’s hard if you’re coming in completely fresh from the outside and you don’t know the team, and if you’re leading that team to create something new, you are earning their trust.
Of course, that’s always part of the process with any job you take, but I knew the team. I knew a lot of the capabilities that they had. I think the hardest part was I wasn’t here for a lot of this transition. I was over in London and everyone was here in New York, and then I was flying in months later when I did turn in that memo, and thankfully did the interview process and was lucky enough to get it.
So I think that part of moving my family back in, and then one month later became pregnant again. And so that part, to me it’s, it sounds like a shortcut or not answering it, but it was more awkward and tough in my life, I would say than here where I’d known the team for so long and had worked with them and was excited about the opportunity and also excited to see what Emma was going to do with the rest of the paper.
Rachel Baker: As you’re talking, I’m thinking about, like, your sensibility is a little bit British, like you could see how this all fits together. You’re Southern, you’re British, you’re from Washington, DC.
Sarah Ball: I have had two-and-a-half tours of duty in the UK. In college I was an intern with the Associated Press and I went to the London Bureau and I covered British news all day, every day. And at the time, British news that an intern would get was like, “Kate Moss is in court today. You need to go.” That’s what I did. I followed her and Pete Dougherty around London.
I wrote lots of things like cops and courts, British stories. So I did this, I did a literal Fleet Street stint of three months one summer in college. I then went back in 2016 for a year. So I left for, again, my husband’s job with Bloomberg.
We were in London once before. We went for a year. I worked for a little while with Tatler and with Condé Nast UK. I got to see how that side of the company ran, and then I just—we just went again for our last-and-final stint of just under three years. So I have had a four-year schooling in British journalism.
Rachel Baker: I’m sure you read all the Tina Brown books and listened to them on audio.
Sarah Ball: Of course. I’m close to a full Tina. I have Tatler, Newsweek, Vanity Fair. Obviously I don’t have The New Yorker, so I need to submit—
Rachel Baker: I was about to say, now we know what’s next. Now we know.
Sarah Ball: I need to win the cartoon caption contest and then I will have it. And I’ve never met her either. I think I have to wait until I have some—I do, I’ll do a “Shouts and Murmurs.” That’s what I’ll do. I’ll get some New Yorker byline and then I will be like, I have Tina.
Rachel Baker: Perfect.
Maggie Bullock: So we’re on the record at the Spread saying that you were our pick for the Vanity Fair job. And now everyone’s aflutter about the Anna Wintour job. Between us, do you think these exalted legacy jobs still matter? We have found it ironic because we run this newsletter that covers women’s media like it matters all the time. In the sort of old, traditional sense of women’s magazines. Now everybody’s talking about these things. I just wonder what’s your perspective on the importance of those roles that were the old roles. So much has changed. What do you think about that?
Sarah Ball: By the time this comes out we will know who is filling Anna’s role. I think they still have importance. I think it’s … relative to what? I think some pieces characterized Vanity Fair’s power in its absolute heyday as equivalent to all of HBO in terms of setting the culture.
I was listening to Graydon on Smartless and the Smartless guys saying, “By choosing the cover, you’re changing the culture, changing that person’s career.” Which did feel true. It really felt like when I was there, who you chose for Vanities—which was the inside, sort of young-Hollywood cover—who you chose for Vanities was likely going to be somebody who would one day be on a Hollywood cover.
And it felt like there was this real pipeline. That VF was participating in minting stars, making talent on the grand stage. I don’t know if that power to shape the culture exists with any publication anymore, but I do think it is a privilege to assign wild, imaginative work—I think that’s still a real thing.
It’s still a job that could have impact and power is what I’m saying. I think that Mark will—who I worked with when I was at Vanity Fair, we were there together—I think that he will use that platform and refuse to accept that it’s not influential and that it’s I think he will try to convene people together to make surprising work.
I actually think about it in a bit of the same way I think about the digital print separation, which is that, what if you don’t accept the logic that this is somehow a diminished and inferior position? And instead you use it in a full way to create magical work. But I think that I’m showing you my huge bias, which is toward the work-creation side of the job.
The stuff that I love is the jar of pencils sitting here and the jar of red pens, like, being in with legal and closing the story. I know it’s going to be big and when it hits the site, it’s going to have a million readers and it’s going to drive subscriptions. I like that part of the job. I don’t have the Graydon stories of, like, taking a helicopter into Ascot with Mike Bloomberg for a weekend.
Do you know what I mean? Those are amazing. Is that coming back to magazine editor-in-chief life? Probably not. For someone who has three small children and loves the syntactical flow of words and images, this is a great job. And I think for someone who really thrills to a boutique sized version of an editor-in-chief job, it’s a great time. I think if you want to put Zendaya on the map, I don’t know if this is that forum anymore. I don’t know, personally, if I’m more in that in the same way that maybe media reporters do.
Rachel Baker: Sarah, you’re still so young.
Sarah Ball: Rachel. Thank you so much!
Rachel Baker: You’re welcome.
Sarah Ball: A big birthday coming up.
Rachel Baker: Really? You’re younger than I am! We’re still so young.
Sarah Ball: We’re all so young. And don’t we look it? Sorry you can’t see listeners, but we do.
Rachel Baker: You’re not even at the midpoint of your career. Like, if you spend 10 years in this job, you still have so many years in front of you. What on earth could you do next? I have some ideas…
Sarah Ball: How on earth will the ecosystem change?
Rachel Baker: I think you’re ready for it. You’re, like, the one person who’s ready for it. However it changes.
Sarah Ball: I don’t think anyone’s ready for what a magazine looks like as spit out by Claude, but I am going to be curious about it and I’m going to try. I definitely love being in a newsroom where there are massive people in R&D who are tasked with figuring out what the future of journalism looks like. I think that was something at the end of my Condé time. I truly felt there was at times a kind of strategic rudderlessness but I think that’s what you do read about that company that is challenging is like how high the high was, to then not be more advantaged.
I think I feel protected about the future in terms of the ability to experiment because the Journal did a very wise thing in the nineties, which was to say, Must. Pay. For. Journalism. And that fortification has created a lot of safety and stability to then try to experiment. But who can be ready for that?
Ten years sounds like a very long time. And I hope that there’s still beautiful, exciting journalism and beautiful, exciting fashion photo shoots and all of it. And I don’t know what form it will exist in, but I am always more optimistic than not, I would say, with change.
And I think that the first two years of this role for me, even though I’ve been here for now, like over seven years, the first two years of being in this role have been a real kind of, like, pel mel of figuring out how to put it together and how to make it great and how to make it sing. And I do feel I’m entering that there.
People say this about the two-year mark that you start to enter: “Okay, I can catch my breath, I can try to refine what we’re doing and try not to make it feel like an accident that it all gets out the door, that all gets live to the site, that it feels a little bit more smooth.” I think if I got to spend 10 years refining that storytelling, I would be very happy.
Rachel Baker: Sarah, this has been so much fun. We write about you and your work in The Spread all the time, and we’ll keep doing it, but this has been such a treat just to hang out and talk magazines for an hour.
Sarah Ball: It’s completely my treat, you guys. I have revered this podcast. I’ve listened to every episode. I told people today as I was preparing for this that this, to me, feels like making it, to be on here as your guest. So, truly, the honor and privilege and pleasure is all mine.
Maggie Bullock: It was very fun. Thank you for joining us.
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