uberlife Real Champions series: Hanging out w/ Jo Elvin
uberlife’s Real World Champions series continues this week with a chat to Jo Elvin, the intelligent and inspiring editor of the UK’s leading magazine, Glamour.
(uberlife) Sanchita: What was it that inspired and motivated you to start out on the journey in writing that lead to you being editor?
Jo: I think I was about thirteen or fourteen when I knew that out of all my subjects at school I enjoyed English writing and creative writing, I grew up in Australia, and I was obsessed particularly with English magazines.
I loved things like Smash Hits and Number one. Interestingly not so much fashion, but fueling that hormonal teenage girlie thing of crushes on pop stars and stuff like that. It was another friend of mine to put the light bulb in my head that I could combine the two. I suppose nobody really thinks like that, at that age, that I can use writing to do what I want so once I put those two things together it was all I wanted to do.
I focused on becoming a journalist and I wasn’t really sure at that age what type, I think obviously magazines were an ideal, but I didn’t think that I could just step into magazines. I knew I would probably have to go work in newspapers and all that with the goal being magazines.
Sanchita: That was very astute of you..
Jo: Well, in the olden days before the Internet, you had to do a lot of research and asking around, I was lucky in that I went to a co-ed state school, which was a good school, but it was no frills. However we did have a good careers advisor so she really helped get people work experience in the right place and things like that. I ended up in a local newspaper where they were brilliant and they answered lots of questions, I ended up meeting a woman there who was a cadet journalist, as they’re called, who took me out on loads of assignments - garbage strikes, 50th anniversaries, you know, all that sort of thing, but it was really interesting.
Years later when I was eighteen or nineteen and I’d left school; I was at university studying a communications degree, which is basically a media course. You have really long holidays in university, I was really bored and I started cold calling magazines. I called Dolly Magazine which is the biggest teenage magazine in Australia and I read it through all my informative years and I figured I’m young maybe I’ll get the chance to do more there because it’s a young magazine.
As luck would have it the woman on the phone just sort of went; ‘Yes we’re pretty booked up for work experiences (as we all say)’ then ‘Oh, I don’t see why not, so do you want to come in next week?’ so I did.
Then I was just so keen so it must of been obvious, everything from opening the post to getting the tea and coffee was a thrill for me because I couldn’t believe I was at this magazine I had read all the time. One week led to them saying ‘Do you want to come in next week?’ then ‘Do you want to come in next week?’ and then the time came when the story that changed everything for me;
The editor at the time wanted a story to find a young girl who lived in the Aussie outback, and worked on a cattle station and she had to be a certain age, reasonably attractive and be living well away from home. As I say, as it was pre-internet, so it meant I was given the task because the two feature writers were grumpy about the amount of work. It was a week’s work to sit and got through the all the yellow pages. I mean this is Australia-every huge state has its own yellow pages, so it’s like phoning cattle ranch upon cattle ranch. It took days and days and days and finally I found someone. I think we gave them the choice of one or two girls and I think the editor was really impressed I had stuck at it and got it.
So then when I had to go back to university I was going in there a couple a days that I didn’t have classes, volunteering and doing all that sort of research and vox pops in the street and that sort of thing. That’s where it started and then I’d been doing that for four or five months and I walked in one day to find the two features writers furiously packing their desks with the editor standing over them. I think they’d gone to the managing director of the company and said we think she is doing a bad job of the magazine and you should fire her and that went as well as you’d expect it to, so they ended up getting fired. Then out of desperation, I was given more work to do, then that editor left because she didn’t enjoy it, it wasn’t the right fit, and the girl I’d been on work experience with at the local paper became the editor and gave me a job.
Sanchita: You mentioned luck earlier and I think that’s very modest of you. What advice would you give to people starting out other than having luck on their side?
Jo: Yes it was lucky, I didn’t know when she said come in for work experience that it would lead to A, B and C. But also I had spent so much time undeterred, with people going ‘No, No, write a letter No, we haven’t got anything’. I probably spent about 3 days just thinking there must be somebody else I can call.
In whatever you do, whether it’s in magazines, online or newspapers, you need to be resourceful. You need to have that ‘I’m not going to give up’ attitude. What still helps all of us here, particularly when dealing with the celebrities and trying to get covers and trying to get ideas, is that when one door shuts and something’s a no or not possible, that you’re like ‘There’s got to be another way to make this happen’. It’s that kind of resourcefulness, tenacity and thick skin that you need.
There is a fine line between tenacious and annoying and I think you’ve got to know when to draw the line. I certainly, even now, have times when publicists say ‘You know what, you’re really pissing me off now, I said no.’ So you have to kind of gage that. Rejection is a fact of anybody’s life, no matter what you choose to do for a living and, I genuinely think and I know it sounds like a cliché but I was very, very lucky to find a passion for something very early on and I think it’s so important to try and find something that you want to do.
I see a lot of people come in at various levels on the magazine and they are really frustrated because they are not yet the editor, but I didn’t start with ‘One day I’m going to be the editor of a magazine.’ I started with ‘Oh my god I’m working on a magazine! Yes, throw a bucket of shit over me and I’ll do it! Yes, thank you’.
I don’t see that in a lot of people now and I definitely think that real enthusiasm and wanting to know about everything on the magazine gives you the experience and to be able to do it. It’s also is the kind of thing that makes people want to give you more and more responsibility.
I do get work experience people who come in and say ‘Jo, I’m loving it here, but I really think you’re wasting my talents, I’ve got a degree’ and I’m like ‘But everything I been asking you to do is something that if you weren’t here we would be doing - everything that we do plays a huge role on the magazine.’
It’s not all about meeting pop stars and going to the fashion shows. It’s about budget meetings, Monday evenings here, when at six o’clock someone comes in with a pile ‘this big’ of pages I’ve got to read before I go, but I love it, and you to have to love every bit of it.
Sanchita: So through your journey, is there one person or people that you have hung out with that have really inspired you?
Jo: Yes I mean tons! Marina Go who is still a big player in Australian media was the local papergirl who became the editor of Dolly magazine. She was just such a champion and so encouraging and nurturing, she gave me a really big break and started the whole thing, so she was really inspirational to me and taught me a lot. She was good at commerciality and how to appeal and speak to a huge audience.
Similarly in England Kath Brown, who until recently was executive editor of Marie Claire, launched Sugar magazine in this country and gave me the job as editor under her. She was also the deputy editor of Elle, launched Red magazine and I think she taught me how to be tough. I don’t think anybody had taught me how to be the one who has to make those unpopular decisions and go by your gut, because at the end of the day you’ve got to be happy with the decisions that you’ve made when facing your employers. She was brilliant at that and then there are lots more people who I have met.
I don’t really know Anna Wintour but I think she is just inspiring for the longevity of her career and the freshness that she still brings to that magazine and the resilience and the strength of that brand.
My US counterpart, the editor of US Glamour Cindi Leive who’s I think a little creative fireball and so lovely, and very community minded in helping and working with other Glamours when necessary. So there are tons of people.
Sanchita: Through your career or in the past 12 months there must have been highs and lows. Can you give us one pinnacle moment in your career, either in the journey or at Glamour and also a low point and how you picked yourself up, and motivated yourself to get over that.
Jo: Well let’s start with the low point, because that leads to the really high point. It was when I launched B magazine in 1997. Without dwelling on the details, less than 18 months late I got fired. It was selling pretty well but it was only selling about half of what Sugar – my previous magazine – had sold.
However Sugar was a phenomenon you know, not many people get a Sugar in their careers. It really wasn’t working between the management and me. At the time that was very devastating and for a long time I didn’t even admit that was what had happened. I’ve realised as I get older that it’s a real rite of passage and it’s actually amazing if you can learn from those lows and those failures. I remember really panicking and thinking ‘Oh god, am I actually ever going to get a job again?’ but actually I did pretty quickly, I ended up freelancing for another company EMAP who brought me in to do a bit of feature editing on that magazine and a bit of acting deputy on another magazine.’
I did that for about six months and then they offered me the editorship on New Woman magazine, that was a brilliant job as well and a really interesting magazine, in that it was really of its time and really trying to do the irreverent ladette thing and it was pretty successful at that. Had I not been kicked out the door on the younger magazine and then given the opportunities that led to a much older woman’s magazine, I wouldn’t have been on the radar to be offered Glamour. So I think that it’s really important to just try and be philosophical about those moments.
Sanchita: and roll with the punches…
Jo: Yes, It was really awful at the time and I think it’s really relevant advice in this climate. When it happened to me we weren’t looking down the barrel of the worst financial times any of us had ever known, but it’s important to remember that if you can keep strong and keep plugging away I think there is always a way to overcome those things.
The high has been wall to wall Glamour. Within I think days of it hitting the shelves we had to hurriedly print extra copies to keep up with demand. I must admit that I knew it would be successful, but I didn’t think it would be that successful and so that was a real pinch yourself moment, I mean unbelievable.
Sanchita: What do you think you nailed for that to happen?
Jo: Well, I think it was a few things, bitter competitors at the time pointed to the size…Obviously that was a real innovation, the handbag size gave us a real resting point of notice which I think was very important because it was a saturated market. But I do think that it was also it was just exactly the right time for the kind of launch we’d had.
The last big launch before Glamour was 12 years earlier in Marie Claire, and between Marie Claire and Glamour there hadn’t been a real powerhouse, glossy, commercial brand. There had been lots of women’s magazine launches like Nova, Frank, Bare, Eve, I think launched just before Glamour and they’re all really interesting and dynamic in their way but most of them were very much, sort of, anti woman’s magazine. They were trying to say ‘We want women to buy this but we’re embarrassed to be a women’s magazine so we are going to pretend. We’re going to have features about lipstick because we want the advertisers but we’re going to pretend we don’t care that much about lipsticks’ and actually I don’t think women approach woman’s magazines as their entire life view.
I think that women buy women’s magazine for a particular mood and a particular time and they want to love lipstick and shoes, so Glamour came along and we were shamelessly feminine, upbeat, happy, glossy and quite American in outlook in that way. It’s no coincidence that Sex In The City was the hugest show on the TV when we came out. I think that suddenly English women were embracing that spirit of real confidence and intelligence but with a pride in your appearance and unashamedly enjoying shoes as much as current affairs and I think we just tapped into that in a really glossy happy package.
Sanchita: Excellent and so, I don’t know if you have much time to relax but if you could be hanging out anywhere in the world, where would you be hanging out and what would you be doing?
Jo: I am pretty happy in a lot of places actually, you know the more I travel, I realise I left the best city in the world. Sydney is just so beautiful, and so easy to have that mix. You go to work in an office and then at 6 o’clock in the evening you can be down at the beach, it’s absolutely lovely. I love the food and the lifestyle and the people in Sydney. Similarly LA I think gets a divided press but I really love going to LA because I so appreciate great weather now. Where else do I love? Italy, Sicily is one of my favourite places to come on holiday and Mexico.
What I really like doing is just the really dull stuff to be honest, because I don’t get a lot of free time. It’s literally just dinners with friends and hanging around on the couch with my husband and my daughter and it’s just really simple things.
Sanchita: Final question, we spend so much of our time on online social networks where do you see the value in offline face to face networking over communicating and keeping in touch with your followers and peers by say Twitter for example?
Jo: I think that building relationships is so key to what I do. You know, email and Twitter can get you so far. The entertainment director and I are going to LA in about three weeks and we do that quite regularly because it’s really important, we feel it makes a difference to meet those publicists rather than just talk on email or the phone all the time because they have a lot of noise being bombarded at them all the time.
There is pretty much only a handful of famous people who we all want on our covers. It’s ferociously competitive. So to have that relationship where you have talked about your kids and found some commonality, which you don’t get to do unless you are having lunch or a face-to-face meeting, really does help, if they know you. It doesn’t mean you are going to get everything but if somebody knows you I find it can quite often make the difference between them giving something to you or a different magazine.
So for me, relationships are key to what I do. I chat to people all the time on email but I also make sure I have a drink with this person, or that person, or a lunch. It’s hard to quantify but it definitely makes a difference.
Sanchita: Thank you so much Jo for taking the time. It’s been really insightful
