Unfettered and Alive

by Anne Summers

  Gloria arranged for me to spend time with Betsy Carter, an experienced magazine editor who was currently running a new title called New York Woman. She also introduced me to the legendary Clay Felker, the founding editor of New York magazine, who had launched the first issue of Ms. as a supplement in the magazine in 1971. Felker was a genius of an editor who had changed the way New York was written about. New York under Felker was ‘all about how the power game is played and who are the winners’5 in the seven glamour industries that make New York such an alluring place. (Those industries were news media, fashion, finance, theatre, high art, advertising and book publishing.) He had been forced out of New York when Rupert Murdoch bought it in 1976 and was now editor of an interesting business magazine called Manhattan Inc.

  I sat in with Felker while he commissioned a fashion business story, and was relieved to see there were still some hands-on editors left. He liked some of my ideas for Ms., especially my ‘Joy of Growing’ column, but he disagreed with my plan to run news. ‘People don’t want news from magazines,’ he said. I chose to ignore this and was glad when the popularity of the Ms. Reporter vindicated my decision. His suggestions for attracting attention were basically to combine big names with big ideas. I had been thinking along these lines and was pleased to get this reinforcement. I had no shortage of ideas, for stories and for writers, and soon I was hitting the phones to commission people I hoped could deliver a feminist spin on these big ideas. I had begun preparing for my first issue—which would be February 1988 and which would hit the newsstands in late January—in mid-October, even before I had moved into the Ms. offices. I was heartened by the warm and positive response I received from virtually everyone I contacted. I was worried there might be suspicion, or condescension—would the ‘Crocodile Dundee’ headline have stuck?—and I would not have been at all surprised if writers were wary. Instead, my calls were picked up, or quickly returned, and my proposals met with enthusiasm. Soon, writers were calling me, including many who had written in the past for Ms. but who told me they had become disenchanted with the direction of the magazine. I was surprised by the deference so many showed towards me. I was learning fast just how much power New York editors have, even on a magazine as egalitarian as Ms. supposedly was. Ships’ captains and magazine editors, someone had said to me, the two remaining positions of absolute and unqualified power. I was going to need all the power I could muster, I quickly realised, as I was discovering the dismal reputation of the magazine in the industry and with readers. Things were far worse than Sandra or I had understood.

  For most of its history, Ms. had managed to maintain a circulation of around 500,000. This was barely sustainable in a country where successful women’s magazines sold at least 3 or 4 million copies a month but when we took over, the circulation had fallen to a fifteen-year low of 450,000 and advertising revenue was sliding precipitously. If Fairfax had not come along, it is doubtful Ms. would have survived the year. The printer was owed hundreds of thousands of dollars and was unlikely to print another issue without receiving a payment. In 1987, the magazine had carried 503 pages of advertising. This was respectable, very respectable in fact when compared with the just 343 pages for the whole of 1986—until you took into account the special fifteen-year anniversary issue of July/August that year, with a nice fat 232-page book-size that was crammed full of ads. It was this issue which had helped Sandra and I persuade the Fairfax Board to buy Ms. It proved, we argued, that the advertising support was there. All it needed was the professional approach to selling ads that Sandra’s extensive sales experience would bring, supported by a marketing campaign which Fairfax could finance—something Ms. had never been able to afford in the past. We only found out later that the do-or-die effort to make this anniversary issue a success had involved advertisers being offered deals that did not require them to pay any actual money. We discovered, to our consternation, that many of the contracts had no revenue attached to them. We also found that advertiser resistance to Ms. was entrenched and seemingly intractable. In late January 1988 we put on a very expensive dinner at the ritzy Pierre Hotel to signal that things were going to be different from now on. We invited 200 advertisers, but got very few acceptances. Instead our friends and staff members got to enjoy a lavish dinner because, we discovered, it was too late to cancel the event.

  Our advertising agency, Della Femina McNamee, had done a couple of quick focus groups on Ms. editorial using their own female staff. The response had been overwhelmingly negative. Not one of them read Ms. and none of them liked any of the issues they were shown. You would not expect hip women from Madison Avenue to like an issues-based magazine like Ms., I told myself. Except it wasn’t just these women. Ms.’s own research, done in 1983 and made available to us as part of the sale, showed the magazine had a massive problem in trying to reconcile the needs of the long-term readers—dubbed the ‘true faith’ readers by the research company—and those they needed to recruit if the magazine was to survive, let alone thrive. The research identified women who, having tried the magazine, did not renew their subscriptions because they found Ms. ‘too depressing’ or because it made them feel guilty. This research revealed what would be an intractable problem for me in trying to achieve the right editorial balance for Ms. It was impossible to please, let alone satisfy, both groups. The true faith readers, those who had been loyal to Ms. since 1972, wanted to have their fiercely held feminist convictions reinforced and reaffirmed, with a diet of articles that hammered home the basic injustices the world continued to inflict on women. Yet this group was small, around 15,000 of more than 400,000 total subscriptions, and ageing. Younger women said they wanted hope and affirmation that their lives were not all terrible, and they hated being depicted as victims. They did, however, want help with their lives and they wanted to read about women like themselves, ordinary people struggling to fulfil their goals, rather than the corporate high-flyers or celebrities who featured so prominently on the covers of most other women’s magazines.

  It was obvious we needed to do our own research, to test the magazine afresh and to get some feedback on my editorial ideas. Sandra asked Barbara Riley, an expert market researcher, to come over from Sydney and in late October we went on the road, to Washington DC, St Louis, Chicago and Los Angeles. Sandra had told me that Barbara’s expertise was in conducting focus groups, small gatherings of people from a target audience who did not know each other and who would sit around a table and, under Barbara’s guidance, talk about the subject under discussion. The client, in this case Sandra and I, observed the proceedings from an adjacent room through a two-way mirror. The groups provided me with valuable insights into the way average American women were feeling about their lives, how they resented what they saw as the burden to ‘have it all’, for instance. None of them wanted to turn back the clock; if pressed to choose between home and work, they would prefer to work and they definitely wanted their daughters to be able to work and support themselves, but they were affronted at how hard it was to juggle the various components of their lives. Every single woman had heard of Ms. and although the groups included a few former subscribers, not a single one of them had a positive view of the magazine. It was disconcerting to hear what a negative view most of them had of feminism and downright alarming to hear their extraordinarily vehement anti-lesbian views. Invariably a member of each group spotted in our classified ads page the very small number of lesbian book ads. In early November, Barbara presented Sandra and me with her verbal report: ‘If you want Ms. to have any chance of success,’ she told us, ‘there are three words that should never appear in its pages: feminism, lesbianism and Gloria Steinem.’

  I was dreadfully upset by Barbara’s report. We had drawn the women in the focus groups from populations we assumed were potential Ms. readers but what Barbara was telling us was that even within this group, there was scarcely any tolerance for feminism; no admiration or respect for Gloria Steinem; and a down-right loathing of lesbians. I was under no illusion that Ms. cou
ld ever become a mass circulation women’s magazine, but I had hoped we could get to a circulation of one million. Surely in a country of 230 million people, we could appeal to less than a quarter of one per cent of the population? And surely that group was more tolerant than the population at large? If that was not the case, this presented us with a terrible dilemma. We could not, and would not, ditch the feminist premise of the magazine and nor would we disenfranchise the lesbian women who had stuck loyally with Ms. since the beginning, but how were we going to be able to attract new readers? The question of Gloria Steinem was trickier. It seemed to me essential that we start to wean the long-term readers from their reliance on her. For almost fifteen years Ms. had become almost neurotically dependent on Steinem, not just to sell ads, but to boost newsstand sales with a quickly turned-out cover story that more often than not was illustrated with her image on the cover but this dependency, we were learning, was self-defeating if the magazine was to grow.

  We had to position Ms. to advertisers as ‘evolving’. We tried to signal this with an ad campaign we ran in the trade press that showed Ms. as a woman transitioning, through four separate headshots, from a hippie-looking, headband-wearing 1970s type to a more glamorous 1980s look. It was titled ‘We’re not the Ms. we used to be.’ The Ms. people were outraged by this ad. Suzanne Braun Levine wrote an angry letter to Sandra and we had numerous complaints from the editors. They saw it as a repudiation of Steinem. We were mystified by this response: Steinem could never be accused of having been a hippie and she was already one of the most glamorous people in the women’s movement so it was a stretch to claim that the images were meant to represent her. And they looked nothing like her. But it seemed it was going to be tough to get people to think about Ms. as no longer being associated with Gloria Steinem if even this mild effort evoked such a reaction. I did not want to confront the possibility that maybe Ms. was so integrally associated with Steinem that without her, the magazine simply did not exist. Our task was not helped by the fact that she remained on our masthead as a consultant, and that I met with her frequently, usually over breakfast, to seek her counsel on various matters. Maybe we should have just cut all ties, but we decided it was better to have Steinem and Carbine in the tent, able to be called-upon when needed and, we required, to refrain from public comments if they did not agree with what we were doing. And Steinem had a contract to write a book. Maybe she would be so relieved to find her freedom that she would be happy to start to disentangle herself.

  As I threw myself into producing my first issue, I had to get used to a very different way of working. Starting with the time-lines. With newspapers you could have a good idea one day, and see it on the front page the next. Now I needed to plan two or three months in advance for my next issue, and to learn to be mapping out the next one and the one after that. You needed a long view. And I was amazed at how the editors, as they were called, and who reported to the editor-in-chief (me!), were responsible for shaping stories in ways that Australian journalists and writers would have found shockingly intrusive. It was the same with fact-checkers. I could not believe the potential power they had to rewrite stories that had already been altered, often beyond recognition, by the editors. I knew about the legendary fact-checking department of the New Yorker, but had not realised how integral fact-checking was to all American magazines. It was not just ‘facts’—such as dates and spellings—that were confirmed. Quotes were read back to people, who of course could deny having ever made the comment. It seemed to me that editing and fact-checking lessened the responsibility of the writer to deliver a well-crafted and complete story. Knowing that facts would be checked anyway encouraged writers to simply leave blanks or, more often, use the ubiquitous TK (which, bizarrely, meant ‘to come’), indicating the fact-checker should insert the relevant information. I was astonished to see stories come in that were peppered with TKs, meaning the writer had not bothered to insert the most basic information. This system certainly encouraged laziness on the part of the writer, I thought, but even worse in some ways was the safety net provided by the editors. If a story was badly constructed, poorly written, or otherwise in trouble, it was the job of the editor—not the writer—to fix it. It was not hard to see that writers could succumb to the temptation to allow the editor to do all the hard work. And who got the credit? The writer’s name was on the story, not the editor’s. What an unfair system, I thought.

  Late in 1987 we had moved Ms. out of its squalid offices in the garment district to join Sassy on the two floors we’d leased in the famous triangular building called One Times Square; it had once been the home of the New York Times, and the reason the area once known as Longacre Square had been renamed Times Square in 1904. Now the building was famous for its non-stop news ticker and for the ball which dropped every New Year’s Eve. Ms. and Sassy each had a floor of the building that admittedly had a very small footprint. Everything was new and nice, a far cry from the squalor of the old Ms. offices. I think the staff appreciated their new surroundings, despite a few mutterings about it being ‘too corporate’, and that everyone had cubicles rather than open desks. We were starting to see something of a team spirit, I thought. In the end I had fired only three of the Ms. staffers, all of them very junior. I knew I should have been tougher, perhaps cleared out the whole place, but I’d feared I would not be able to produce the first issue without the senior team. I found myself becoming very impressed by several of them, at how hard they worked and how committed they were. Early on, I decided that Marcia Ann Gillespie brought editorial insights and experience that complemented my own and within five months I had appointed her executive editor, effectively my deputy; she became the first African-American woman to hold a senior position at Ms.. Marcia had been editor-in-chief of Essence, the mass circulation magazine for African-American women and had been hired by Ms. as a consultant in the final desperate pre-sale days when the magazine was trying to save itself from oblivion by launching its ill-conceived makeover. Marcia was savvy and smart and a lot of fun, and there was nothing she did not know about women’s magazines. She gave me advice on how to achieve what I wanted. I was used to controlling words, editing pieces and ensuring they said what I wanted them to say, but I had never before worked with an Art Director and quickly found I did not have the language to communicate what I wanted. Nor could I always get my ideas across to the editorial team. Sometimes it was cultural, the weird misunderstandings that occur when people think they are speaking the same language, but there were also disagreements and pushback. I was okay with that. I did not want compliant ciphers but I wondered if we would ever achieve a state of mutual trust. I would promise readers in my first Editor’s Essay that there would be continuity and change. I wanted to retain the best of the old Ms. at the same time as I reshaped the editorial so I asked Letty Cottin Pogrebin if she would write a regular column that had a personal focus. Letty was a bubbly and enthusiastic person, a writer, lecturer and activist around feminist and Jewish issues, who had been a founding editor of Ms. She had been present the day Sandra and Pat had signed the papers but I gathered from the couple of meetings we’d had that she understood Ms. had to change. I was glad she was willing to sign on with us, and hoped she might be something of a bridge between the past and the future.

  ‘Follow your instincts’, Betsy Carter had said to me. It was the same advice I had received from Gill Chalmers at Woman’s Day. I was not always confident that my instincts were right since I was now working in such a different medium, one that was avowedly emotional and thus very different from the straightforward, factual approach of newspapers. But I was game, and I had no qualms about jumping right in. I intended my first cover story to be a good, tough piece by a big-name writer on why Pat Schroeder had pulled out of the race for US President. Schroeder was a member of Congress from Colorado with strong feminist credentials, who in early 1987 had announced she would run for the Democratic Party nomination for President of the US. There was widespread disappointment among women, parti
cularly feminists, when a few months later she said she was not going to go forward with her campaign. Worse, she burst into tears as she made the announcement. Oh, no, we had all thought, that’s going to play badly with the anti-woman conservative media and political world. I had been pleased when Clay Felker had suggested that ‘a fierce probe’ into Schroeder’s actions could put ‘my’ Ms. on the map. It was exactly the reinforcement I needed that I was on the right track in my thinking about how to reposition the magazine. The story I would commission would be an example of good, strong journalism that brought a tough approach and feminist assumptions to Schroeder’s story. No one else was doing this. I thought that if our articles were well-written and provocative, they would appeal to a wider audience than Ms. had attracted in the recent past. This was, after all, the age of magazines, of big, thoughtful and argumentative pieces. Magazines were the media stars of the 1980s, more confident than newspapers which were now trying to stay relevant and competitive by copying magazines, bringing in colour printing and longer pieces. I was bold enough to imagine that I could do with women’s stories at Ms. what Felker was doing with business stories at Manhattan Inc.—change the conversation, get people talking about us, looking at us differently.