Having edited British GQ for 22 years, when I left in 2021, as the operation became centralised in New York, my agent at Curtis Brown told me to write a memoir about my time there. Having zero interest in doing so, I said I would rather concentrate on other things (principally, an extremely long holiday with my family). But as he is a very good agent, he pestered me until I said yes, which turned out to be an extremely fortuitous decision.
Because my book — which was extremely flattering about the company which employed me for two decades — didn’t just act as a curtain call to my Condé Nast adventure, it seemed to coincide with a massive recalibration of the publishing industry. I wasn’t alone, as last year the exalted Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter published his own memoirs, adding lustre to the suggestion of a closing chapter.
Because magazine publishing has certainly changed in the past four or five years. Covid, remote working, digital empowerment, the disappearance of WH Smith from the British high street, the arrival of AI and a reinvigorated independent sector have all meant large publishing houses have had to re-evaluate their business models. Small magazines appear to be where the action is, appealing to strong, niche markets full of consumers who know what they want. The zeitgeist today is all about the personal and the targeted, and attempting to use your old magazine brands as printed versions of the internet appears to be a foolhardy strategy.
America first, sadly
Michael B Grynbaum seems to think so too, as he’s just written a history of Condé Nast that seems to imply that the old guard is changing. This has obviously been amplified by the news that Dame Anna Wintour is finally stepping down from her position as editor-in-chief of American Vogue.
It’s not a bad book by any means, and is quite gossipy in parts, although there are already two extremely comprehensive books about Si Newhouse, the genius who turned Condé Nast into a publishing juggernaut (Newhouse: All the Glitter, Power & Glory of America’s Richest Media Empire & the Secretive Man Behind It by Thomas Maier came out in 1997; Citizen Newhouse: Portrait of a Media Merchant by Carol Felsenthal was published in 1998) and a lot of the stories you may have heard before.
Of course, Grynbaum’s book details the rivalry between the likes of Carter, Wintour and the wonderful Tina Brown, but for some reason it only tells half the story. By focusing on the US (this is essentially a book for the American market) and ignoring the rest of the world, Grynbaum has inadvertently ignored one of the biggest publishing successes of the last 30 years.
While Brown and Carter battled it out in New York, a bigger story was unfolding in Europe, courtesy of Jonathan Newhouse, Si’s cousin, who served as chairman and chief executive of Condé Nast International for nearly three decades (and, even more importantly, my boss). In the publishing universe, it was CNI which was the real star, CNI which broke stories, broke records and conquered the world, time and time again.
Jonathan was the architect of the media company’s international expansion, adding nearly 100 publications and more than 20 geographic markets to its organisational footprint. He launched Vogues as though they were upmarket McDonald’s, turning it into the world’s biggest magazine brand. Saliently, he launched Vogue in China, which for a time not only became the Vogue everyone talked about, but also made a ton of money (allegedly, at one point it was rumoured to be making twice as much money as the American version).
The book also fails to acknowledge the vast influence that both British and Italian Vogue played in the fashion industry — Alexandra Shulman, Edward Enninful and Franca Sozzani were all magnificent editors.
I wish Condé Nast well, as I’m sure they have an interesting, if possibly challenging future ahead of them. If you want to find out what the company was like pre-Covid, then half the story is in this book.
Dylan Jones is editor-at-large of The London Standard
Empire of the Elite by Michael B. Grynbaum is out on July 15 (Hodder & Stoughton, £22)
