FADE TO GRAYDON
Vanity Fair editor out after 25 glam years
GRAYDONCarter,
the iconic editor of Vanity Fair, is stepping down from the Condé Nast magazine title at the end of this year, ending a 25-year run.
The Canada-born journalist with unruly hair and Anglophile tastes was one of the last remaining celebrity editors and a throwback to a golden era of magazine publishing. He had started at Time magazine, was a co-founder of Spy magazine and worked briefly as editor of the New York Observer.
“I’ve loved every moment of my time here, and I’ve pretty much accomplished everything I wanted to do,” said 68-year-old Carter, who added that he’s looking for “a third act.”
In reality, Carter had a bumpy start when he first succeeded Tina
Brown at the helm in 1992. Advertisers fled, losses mounted, and Carter worried constantly that Brown — who had moved to another Condé title, the New Yorker, was quietly plotting behind the scenes to get him fired.
Then, in 1994, Carter hit on the idea of an annual ranking of what he called the “New Establishment,” chronicling titans of the tech, entertainment and media worlds who were coming to dominate the American business scene.
Carter ultimately turned the New Establishment issue into an ad-heavy franchise that spawned other issues such as “Young Hollywood” in 1995 and more recently a New Establishment Summit in San Francisco.
And the Vanity Fair post-Oscar party that Carter started became the must-have ticket in Hollywood. He specialized in the celebrity tellall, with a Jennifer Aniston cover in September 2005 selling nearly 739,000 copies on newsstands, the best-selling VF cover ever.
A 2015 cover story on Caitlyn Jenner set a Web traffic record for the publication, with 26 million unique visitors to its site and 46 million when social media and YouTube were added.
But, according to some observers, as he passed his 25th anniversary, Carter seemed uninterested in pursuing new ventures in the liveevents arena as corporate sought to offset sagging print revenue.
Insiders said Carter’s relations with Condé CEO Bob Sauerberg were never as cordial as they were with former chairman S.I. Newhouse Jr., or even Sauerberg’s predecessor, Charles Townsend. Indeed, insiders said Sauerberg only learned on Thursday that Carter had given a Wednesday farewell interview to the New York Times at his Greenwich Village townhouse.
Carter’s three-year contract, which expired in 2016, was extended until the end of 2017. But sources said it was clear that there would be no further extensions of the contract that paid him $2 million a year.
Carter long ago emerged as an unabashed critic of Donald Trump. The animosity goes back to his days as co-founder of Spy, when he labeled Trump a “short fingered vulgarian.”
When Trump ascended to the White House, Carter put many of his star writers on the beat, attempting to dig dirt and stir scandal via a newsy Web section of vanityfair.com called Hive.
Hive seems to have enjoyed a “Trump Bump,” which pushed Vanity Fair’s Web traffic to 19.9 mil- lion unique monthly visitors in November. But the site’s latest numbers for July were 33 percent lower, at 13.3 million. Corporate worried that a star editor’s fascination with politics was diminishing the celebrity coverage that was the publication’s bread and butter. When Bellinda Alvarez, recently hired on a major new corporate initiative as executive director of VF Hollywood, she reported not to Carter but to digital director Mike Hogan. Carter himself was absent from the offices for most of the summer, sources said. Despite concerns on the corporate level, a close friend said that the decision to step away was Carter’s and had been in the planning stage for some time.