HARSH CLIMATE FOR WINTOUR
After 5 turbulent years atop Condé Nast, Anna faces digital headwinds with bold new hire
ANNA
Wintour can certainly use a win. The legendary Vogue editor-in-chief, who is celebrating her fifth anniversary as Condé Nast’s artistic director, is under pressure as the company enters an important chapter in its 109-year history.
One of the most influential magazine editors of her generation, Wintour, 68, has been a force in the fashion industry since she took the helm at Vogue 30 years ago — often dictating international fashion trends and making or breaking designers.
But as the magazine business has evolved to encompass digital, video and live events — and rely less on print — Wintour has found herself in unfamiliar territory.
Her beloved Vogue, some believe, wields much less power than it once did. And while serving as artistic director at Condé Nast, Wintour has overseen some high-profile misfires, including:
Closing the print editions of Teen Vogue, Self and Details (which also shut down online and was subsumed in the GQ site), as well as the digital site Style.com.
Dealing with a musicalchairs-like changing of editors-in-chief, a number that stands at 11.
Despite bringing in leaders with a new vision, the company is still about $100 million a year in red ink, sources said.
“Anna’s got a gun to her head,” said a Condé insider, who noted the string of Wintour misses.
That pressure will no doubt mount in the wake of her latest hire — Samantha Barry, the vivacious, 36-year-old social media guru plucked from CNN to revive Glamour — once Conde’s cash cow and one of its most profitable titles.
Barry, with no experience leading a magazine, will have her hands full. Glamour’s financial state has slipped significantly over the last five years, which happen to coincide with Wintour’s reign as artistic director F OR the
last three decades, Wintour has been fashion’s ultimate power broker. Known for sporting a pair of oversized Chanel sunglasses and her precision-cut bob, Wintour has been able to strike fear in the heart of a designer, photographer or model with a mere un- shielded glare — a supposedly bitchy persona captured in the 2006 movie “The Devil Wears Prada.”
Wintour brilliantly brought Vogue acclaim by using its covers to reflect pop culture: mixing high and low fashions, tapping lightning-rod celebrities such.as Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, and highlighting a class of up-andcoming social-media-friendly models.
While life inside Condé has been tough and is testing Wintour, her brand outside of the magazine is still rocksolid.
Wintour is still a premium A-lister, hobnobbing with Hollywood elites, Washington power brokers and even British royalty. Witness the cool calmness in the photo of her and Queen Elizabeth at a recent London fashion show (pictured).
Of course, as chair of the Met Gala she took a onetimesleepy event and masterfully turned it into the most coveted ticket of the Big Apple’s spring social season.
Despite her successes outside Condé — she was even whispered to be on the short list of possible ambassadors to the UK — critics worry that Wintour’s knack for decision-making isn’t what it used to be, and that she “has too much power” at the company.
Missteps during Wintour’s artistic director reign include the appointment of Eva Chen to run Lucky magazine, which shuttered in 2015 after an unsuccessful stab at e-commerce, as well as the hire of Joyce Chang to run Self.
Condé folded Self ’s print edition in 2016.
With Wintour looking over their shoulders, both editors were blamed for making their magazines look too much like Vogue.
Another flub that took place on Wintour’s watch was the death of Style.com. Condé execs gave Wintour control of the fashion site’s content, folding its traffic into Vogue Runway, a Vogue offshoot, so that the international division could turn the site into an ecommerce play.
That venture cost Condé Nast about $100 million before it decided to throw in the towel, closing Style.com last summer.
Wintour fans inside Condé — and there are plenty — insist the recent difficulties at the company do not reflect her shortcomings but rather the revolutionary whipsaw of the magazine industry.
Wintour wields tremendous power at Condé, and yet no ventures have emerged under her watch to light a fire
Anna Wintour’s fifth anniversary as Condé Nast artistic director comes at a time when her employer’s crown jewels of print continue to take a beating from digital rivals. She has fought back via such measures as naming digital whiz Samantha Barry (left) to lead Glamour. But Wintour will need to pull more tricks out of her bag to stanch the red ink.
under Condé’s bottom line.
Wintour, through a spokesperson, declined to comment for this story.
WINTOUR’S
big hire of Barry to lead Glamour comes after the company shook up its editorial ranks, with longtime editors Cindi Leive of Glamour and Graydon Carter at Vanity Fair exiting.
Heralded by Wintour as an editor who “comes from the future,” Barry — known by her peers by the nickname “Social Sam” — arrived at Condé with no traditional print journalism experience, an anomaly for an editor-in- chief. With the pressure on Wintour to produce a tangible success, the hiring of Barry is Wintour’s boldest move yet.
But Barry’s unusual résumé raised many a perfectly tweezed eyebrow among the staff.
“She comes from the future — I really can’t speak to that comment. I don’t even know what that means,” one source sniffed. “I think it means we’re taking a new approach.”
That approach includes a focus on digital growth. In the last year, Glamour’s Web site averaged about 7.3 million unique visitors per month, about one-quarter of the traffic of Refinery 29, Glamour’s biggest digital rival. Barry, who specializes in using trending news and audiencedriven data to inform coverage, seems well-positioned to grow Web traffic, even if the process of making a magazine is foreign to her.
Critics at Glamour have already noted Barry’s “complete lack of strategy” and knowledge regarding “how to put together a magazine.”
That kind of criticism is par for the course at Condé, which is known for its “Mean Girls”-style hazing culture.
Barry defended her credentials without giving insight to her strategy, offering: “I’ve had the privilege to hone my skills as an editor and a storyteller across radio, TV, digital and now I get the opportunity to take that to Glamour and work as the editor-in-chief across the magazine, digital and events.”
Captivating with her red hair and lipstick and big blue eyes, Barry said she knows “how to listen in real time to audiences and serve them up daily, weekly and monthly quality journalism and storytelling.”
Barry has already been adding such nuances to Glamour — nabbing an exclusive interview with Cynthia Nixon on her bid to run for governor.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo scoffed at Glamour, telling cable station NY1 that he “didn’t usually read” the glossy.
Barry tweeted a subscription link at Cuomo, informing him she signed him up. That kind of news-driven move is reflective of Barry’s career.
One insider at CNN who worked alongside Barry said the move to Condé “didn’t make sense” at first.
“Now it makes more sense,” the source said. “What the magazine industry is probably lacking is the ability to truly extend their brands beyond the pages of a magazine … at least the style magazines.”
At CNN, the insider said, Barry came in a bit green but was a quick learner who, it turned out, has many A-list pals.
There was that time in 2014, when Barry had just started at CNN, that she took some personal time off to “attend a wedding.” That wedding happened to be a little affair: the George Clooney-Amal Alamuddin nuptials.
Barry met Alamuddin while working at the BBC as a social news producer. Coincidentally, that wedding is where Barry would meet Wintour.
When Barry posted on her Instagram feed a shot of herself on a yacht in a flowing gown next to Bill Murray, her colleagues at CNN were buzzing jealously.
“It gave me personal pause to see that, and at first, she came in a little shaky,” the source said. “She became an incredible people manager. There was little tolerance for silly mistakes from her.”
BACK
at Condé, as a new crop of editors have come in to steer the ship away from its print roots and toward a digital future, every decision seems to be more vital than the last.
With the support of Wintour and Chief Revenue and Marketing Officer Pamela Drucker Mann, Condé has seen green shoots from the development of such new digital sites as Them, aimed at LGBTQ youth; The Hive, Vanity Fair’s media and business vertical; Architectural Digest’s Clever and AD Pro, and Bon Appétit’s Basically and Healthyish.
Those initiatives have helped Condé hit an audience high of 122 million unique visitors in February across all its sites, up 16 percent over last year, according to comScore.
Although the company would not provide financials, Condé in the first quarter will “exceed” its print goal and show an almost 30 percent rise in digital traffic and 95 percent increase in video over last year, sources said.
“The bigger question is, how receptive is Anna [and Condé] to Sam’s style of digital journalism? It sounds fun to say, I hired this digital whiz kid, but are they going to respond well?” a source noted. “If the organization is welcome to it and if Anna champions it and protects her … and if the world is ready for that type of Glamour, it might work. It was a big bet. I think you have to applaud Anna for that.”