New name and mission at Vanity Fair
The ‘formerly shy’ Radhika Jones chosen to lead the iconic magazine of fashion and popular culture
Radhika Jones grew up around music. Her father, Robert L Jones, a singer and guitarist, was a prominent figure on the Cambridge, Massachusetts, folk scene of the late 1950s and early 1960s. When he decided he wanted to travel less, she sold T-shirts and worked the box office at the many events, including the Newport Jazz and Folk festivals, he helped produce.
“One thing I really learned from my father,” Jones said, “was the kind of excitement and rush of discovering new talent and keeping an open mind to new voices and bringing artists together”.
That love of discovery will come into play for Jones, editorial director of the books department at The New York Times and a former top editor at Time magazine, now that she has accepted one of the most high-profile jobs in media: editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair.
Condé Nast, the company that owns Vanity Fair, made the formal announcement earlier this month. Jones, 44, will become the magazine’s sixth editor since its founding in 1913 and the fifth since it was revived in the early 1980s. She will succeed Graydon Carter, 68, who said in September that he would step down after a 25-year run at the helm. Her appointment takes effect Dec 11.
It is a remarkable transfer of power at a magazine long defined by Carter’s sensibility — a stew of Anglophilia, liberal politics, old-style Hollywood glamour and a sense of mischief. Unlike Carter, a co-founder of the satirical Spy magazine who went on to become an establishment fixture and gatekeeper, Jones is hardly the gallivanting celebrity editor many media observers assumed would end up as his successor.
Whip-smart and unassuming, with meticulous handwriting and an erstwhile fondness for Tetris, Jones seems suited to a new era — of transformation but also of restraint — at Vanity Fair and Condé Nast.
“In Radhika, we are so proud to have a fearless and brilliant editor whose intelligence and curiosity will define the future of
Vanity Fair in the years to come,” Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of Vogue and Condé Nast’s artistic director, said.
A compendium of culture high and low, politics and distinctive visuals, Vanity Fair was resuscitated in 1983, after a 47-year absence, to add some swank and intelligence to the Condé Nast stable in the days before the company had purchased
The New Yorker. Its pages have featured the combative essays of Christopher Hitchens, the dishy features of Dominick Dunne and the high-production portraits of Annie Leibovitz — but the magazine has also remained a holdout as its publisher looks to become leaner and less tied to its print titles.
Carter has said he mulled leaving the magazine earlier this year but for the election of a longtime foil, Donald Trump. (The magazine saw a spike in subscriptions after Trump tweeted last year that the magazine was “Way down, big trouble, dead!”) He had balked at Condé Nast’s belt-tightening and resisted efforts inside the company to consolidate its design, research, photo and copy teams.
It was not a good time at Condé Nast, or anywhere else in the cash-strapped magazine industry, to scoff at cost-cutting. The company expects to bring in US$100 million (3.2 billion baht) less in revenue this year than it did in 2016, and it is in the middle of laying off 80 employees. This month, it said it was reducing the print frequency of titles like GQ, Glamour and
Architectural Digest and shuttering the print edition of Teen Vogue.
To follow Carter’s long run, executives sought an editor who could carry on
Vanity Fair’s journalistic traditions and travel seamlessly between the spheres of Hollywood, Washington and New York. At the same time, the new editor would be charged with taking the title beyond its printed form — and with fewer resources — according to an executive briefed on the selection process.
Guessing Carter’s replacement became a parlour game at media industry parties. Among the names that surfaced were Adam Moss, editor of New York magazine; Janice Min, who revitalised Us Weekly and The Hollywood Reporter; and Andrew Ross Sorkin, a columnist at The New York Times and a host of CNBC’s Squawk Box.
The decision was ultimately up to Robert Sauerberg, chief executive of Condé Nast, who oversaw the search along with Wintour. David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, was also heavily involved.
It was Remnick who brought in and championed Jones, the executive said, and she eventually won over the others.
“We didn’t need a name for the sake of a name or a celebrity,” Steven O Newhouse, a nephew of the late Samuel I Newhouse and a top executive at Condé Nast’s parent company, Advance Publications, said. “We really wanted someone who could do the job and be a worthy successor to Graydon, and I think we found someone.”
“She has vision and energy and a very active mind,” Newhouse added, “and I think that’s what Vanity Fair needs”.
Jones was the only candidate Newhouse met.
A product of Ridgefield, Connecticut, by way of New York and Cincinnati, Jones graduated from Harvard College and received a doctoral degree in English and comparative literature from Columbia University. She has lived in Taipei and Moscow, where she got her start in journalism as arts editor at The Moscow Times, an English-language newspaper. (Her Russian, she said, is rusty.)
Those who know Jones believe she will thrive, citing her academic background as well as the breadth of her interests. Before she joined The Times, she was a deputy managing editor at Time magazine, where she transformed the Time 100 franchise into an eclectic mix of celebrities and unheralded visionaries.
After the issue’s corresponding annual gala, she would host an all-night karaoke party at a Midtown dive. At The Paris Review, the literary quarterly able to make a young writer’s career, she served as managing editor.
“She once referred to herself as a ‘formerly shy person’, as someone who had to learn how to speak out,” said Nancy Gibbs, who recently stepped down as the top editor at Time. “She doesn’t come on incredibly strong. She doesn’t overpower you with her ideas — she’s a different kind of presence.”
We are so proud to have a fearless and brilliant editor whose intelligence and curiosity will define the future