27 Secrets Magazine Staff Will Probably Never Tell You
"Is it like The Devil Wears Prada?" - Everyone to any magazine staffer, ever.
1. It's nowhere near as glamorous as people think.
2. We watch movies about magazines mainly to laugh at how inaccurate they are.
3. We can't "shop" from the fashion cupboard.
Pretty much everything gets sent back.
4. But the amount of freebies beauty editors get would put Kim Kardashian's makeup room to shame.
5. So everyone on staff ends up with more products than they could ever possibly use.
6. Certainly more than they could afford themselves.
Don't go into magazines expecting to get rich.
7. "Workies" (work experience students) really do have to do a lot of crap tasks, like get coffee for staff and go to the mailroom a thousand times a day.
8. A lot of editors are nothing like Miranda Priestly.
Many genuinely care about their staff as well as their magazine.
9. But some are.
She wasn't a complete work of fiction, after all.
10. Staff will flick through old issues and other magazines for inspiration, and use a bajillion sticky things to mark pages.
11. There’s a fierce rivalry between competitor magazines, and a lot of time is spent thinking about what the other does.
12. But when there are similar features or cover stars, it’s ~usually~ actually a coincidence.
It's less a product of corporate espionage, and more a result of creating something for the same market, based on the same trends and pop culture, within a very insular industry.
13. Monthly magazine staff usually work at least three months ahead of when the issue comes out.
14. And with monthly deadlines, everyone tends to take things slow for a week or two before going insane right before deadline.
15. There is a "book".
There's also a wall and a grid, all of which map out the issue being worked on.
16. Editors use them to get the flow of the pages in the magazine just right.
They’ll rearrange it multiple times right up until it goes to print.
17. Everything in the magazine is edited by multiple people, multiple times.
18. And everything is photoshopped, but it's typically much less nefarious than you think.
A lot of it is basic stuff like colour correction.
19. The covers are the most important part of the magazine, and a lot of time goes into making them perfect.
20. A cover star can make or break the magazine, so editors often play it safe.
Which is why there can be a lack of diversity. "Black doesn't sell" is actually something you might overhear in a magazine office, because unfortunately there's a widespread belief in the industry that covers featuring people of colour aren't as popular.
21. Advertisers can have a lot of influence over editorial.
22. The beauty pages in particular are often full of “added value” (mentions of the advertiser’s products within reviews and features that aren’t marked as sponsored content).
23. Everyone gets really excited when the new issue arrives in the office and you can see the final product for the first time.
24. It's pretty much impossible to get a foot in the door without working for free for a long time.
25. Because there's truth in the saying "it's not what you know, but who you know".
26. Writers, editors, and designers who work well together will often follow each other from magazine to magazine.
27. And many not only form strong working relationships, but lifelong friendships.
