As I quickly realized, though, I didn’t love the job enough to stay indefinitely for any amount. I was suddenly really sick of beauty—I wasn’t someone who got excited about new products or followed the lives of models, and it’s exhausting to only approach a topic as something to be dismantled. I was burned out, and the additional money didn’t make the difference I thought it would.
So when I got an email from Michelle Lee, the editor in chief of Nylon, saying she was building out her digital team, I almost instantly knew that I’d be taking the job if she offered it. I still remember what her email looked like on the screen, short and to the point. We met at a sun-drenched restaurant in Soho, and over sashimi and lattes she told me about her vision for Nylon. I wore a black-and-white-striped top with black pleather pants. She had a leather jacket draped chicly over her shoulders, her elbows on the table as she excitedly told me about working at this small indie magazine that I’d loved since I was a teenager. I found her totally charming and I was interested in her ideas; she knew in order to survive, the magazine needed a strong digital presence, so she was going after digitally native editors with proven track records. Plus she, like me, was interested in trying to fix media’s diversity problem, and she listened intently while I blabbered on about queer representation in the beauty space. My age didn’t come up once in the conversation. Within a few weeks I completed an edit test and she offered me the job over email. It all happened so quickly and easily it felt dreamlike. It was a senior editor position for $68K, and I knew Refinery wouldn’t try to match it—they’d matched the Us Weekly offer only months before.
In fighting to get more money, I had become a total pain in the ass. But I don’t think there would have been any other way to do it. My editors were shocked when I quit, especially since I had just gotten not one but two raises. (Years later, one of my star employees quit shortly after I fought to get her a big raise, and I was painfully reminded of my own behavior. That said, I wouldn’t change a thing.)
Eventually, though, the women who’d been my biggest cheerleaders were thrilled for me, especially when I explained that the role would be overseeing all the digital verticals, not just beauty, and that I’d get four pages in the magazine to call my own. It was October 2014. I was twenty-five and a half.
Admittedly, Nylon was an option I had never considered before. I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Historically, like many other magazines, it had a huge diversity problem. Founded in 1999, all the cover stars were white until 2003’s Lil’ Kim cover; they continued to be white until 2007’s Nicole Richie cover, and then stayed white until Zoe Saldana’s cover in 2010. That’s three women of color in eleven years. The pattern continued of having one woman of color every few years, with all of the other cover stars being white and thin. By 2013, the last year Nylon was still being run by its original founders, not much had changed; the cover stars were all white except for Selena Gomez, who is half-Mexican. Then, the magazine was sold and new leadership came in, following a massive round of layoffs. Racial diversity improved over the next couple of years under Michelle’s leadership, and I trusted that her interest in me meant I could help with that shift.
About a month before I started, Leila Brillson had been hired to be Nylon’s digital director. She too had come from Refinery29, from the entertainment department. Leila was an unconventional-looking boss—with tattoos and ripped fishnets, she rejected any sort of normative idea about what a professional woman should look like, and I really looked up to her. She was a self-proclaimed weird girl who quickly became one of my closest friends, despite also being my direct manager.
Following the layoffs, there were two remaining junior digital editors, and they were less than thrilled to suddenly have new bosses. On my first day, when Leila introduced me to them, they wouldn’t even look up from their computers to say hi. It was like being in middle school all over again. They made me feel so worthless that I called my mom that night crying, wondering if I’d made a huge mistake.
Rather than wallow, though, I spent the next few months making a point to take my new coworkers out to lunch, willing them to like me. Leila was in her thirties with a lot more professional experience than me, and I realized immediately that if I was ever going to be seen as something other than her little pal, I needed to keep my age a secret from the editors. It worked; I was told my colleagues assumed I was over thirty, too. Eventually I found myself being a trusted confidante for many of them, a kind of pseudo-HR in place of an actual human resources department, a go-to adult. I was also assigning, editing, and writing stories, maintaining the editorial calendar, helping with social media, and working closely with the video department. In many ways, the person who is second in command always does the actual job of a director; while Leila was in big-picture meetings with other executives, I was in the trenches, and most of the time it felt like I was holding up the department with my bare hands.
I was largely making things up as I went, but it was working; my instincts for what made good content was resonating with our readers, and I seemed to be pretty good at managing people—processes were becoming streamlined under me and I loved watching younger writers and editors come into their own with my guidance. After a year, Leila promoted me to deputy editor and gave me a nice raise. It was the first time in my life I’d gotten a raise without fighting for one.
A few months later, quite suddenly, half the print team was let go.
Within a few months of that round of layoffs, in 2015, Michelle left for Allure, and in what became a year of rapid structural change, eventually we got a new CEO, and then Leila abruptly left, too, which meant the digital department was left without an official leader.
My new boss called me into his office and said, “Can you do her job, or do I need to hire someone else?” I looked him straight in the eyes and said, “I’m already doing it.” He changed my title to digital director and gave me a small raise, promising to revisit it in six months depending on how successful I was. I was about to turn twenty-seven.
Because of her entertainment background, Leila had been very good at driving clicks with news, and it made our traffic grow quickly. That was great for our bottom line, but I felt like we were getting away from what I loved the most about Nylon, which was quality feature stories on emerging culture and beautiful original photography that had a very recognizable aesthetic. I also personally just wasn’t interested in having to keep up with celebrity gossip. By the time she left I had a running mental list of everything I wanted to do differently, and so, given the keys to the kingdom, I poured myself into restrategizing. At weekly manager meetings, I’d come with pages and pages of typed notes documenting all of the changes I was making and what the results were; it made my boss happy but resulted in a lot of side-eye from the other department heads.
In those meetings, as the youngest person in the room, I felt that I had a lot to prove. I needed to convince them that I understood how the internet worked while having a thorough knowledge of what quality journalism looks like, plus a mastery of the brand and superior management skills. It was “fake it until you make it” on crack, because I technically had made it but still needed to fake it in a lot of ways. With Leila gone, there was no one to mentor me anymore—the new CEO wasn’t from an editorial background, so I was pretty much on my own.
As it turns out, though, I knew a lot more than I thought I did. I was positively thriving from being in charge of digital. I hired a bunch of really smart people, a few with more experience than me. I wanted our site to reflect my own political beliefs, because I knew that our new younger readers, like me, cared about issues of race, feminism, and queerness, while also being deeply invested in beauty, fashion, and music, so I put marginalized voices and their stories front and center.
Politics was new territory for the brand. It wasn’t something that was addressed directly in print; though they’d talk about feminism and girl power, there was little to no discussion of actual politics, nor even politicized intimacy. I tr
ied again and again to convince the print editors to cover sex and relationships, and it was a dead end. One editor in particular who always openly hated me for no discernible reason said, after I proposed adding sex content to their pages, “We’re never going to write ‘how to please your man’ stories,” and then scoffed in my face. I replied something along the lines of, “Do you really think that’s what I’m suggesting? Can you really not imagine sex content not centered around male pleasure?” But she won the argument; I had no control over the magazine. We did it online, though, and it was very successful.
I wanted to be as progressive as possible, which often resulted in tension with my boss. Certain advertisers didn’t want to be aligned with certain content, like one essay in particular that I wrote about trying out marijuana suppositories for my cramps. But there was no point to me working that hard, I told myself, if I wasn’t going to try to make the world a better place in the process, through stories that served and reflected a diverse readership.
And when it came time for that six-month review I was promised, it was stellar; my strategy had worked, and we were not only growing but gaining respect in the industry. My title was subsequently changed from digital director to digital editor in chief, and I was given another raise, which brought my salary to six figures. It sounded like the most money in the world.
But it quickly became clear that, even though the company strategy was tilting toward digital, the industry at large only recognized the value of an editor-in-chief title—the digital qualifier in mine meant that I came second to the person running the magazine. Print carried a level of prestige that digital simply didn’t. The editor in chief sat front row at Fashion Week while I sat behind her, watching the shows over her shoulder as I tried to take iPhone photos for Instagram. I was desperate for her approval, or at least some mentorship, since she was so much more experienced than me and very smart, but I was growing tired of the industry treating me like my work didn’t matter. It all felt very backward based on how the readers were actually finding us.
Eventually, our boss decided that he wanted me to be above her. He suggested the title chief content officer, but I didn’t want it because I worried about peaking too early; where would I, at twenty-seven, go from there? We tossed words around until we landed on global editor in chief, and I agreed to be the liaison between all of our international editions. It was a huge promotion. But while my digital team was delighted for me, the print team was pretty furious; my boss told me that one of their editors had even made a concerted effort to challenge my promotion, holding meetings in which she allegedly presented my age and my personal social media presence as reasons among many that I was unfit for the title. That weekend was gay pride in NYC, and in response to hearing she’d taken issue with my Instagram, I posted a photo of my butt on the beach. It was definitely petty, and maybe proved her point, but it was also cathartic and, in hindsight, hilarious.
There was one major problem with my new promotion, aside from the internal issues: I didn’t get a raise. As I’d come to find out, my salary was, in fact, less than that of one of my junior colleagues in a different department. My current salary was totally fucking amazing for what my experience level was, but ridiculous for a global title and my actual responsibilities, and completely unfair (bordering on illegal) compared to what my straight white male coworker was making to do a less senior job.
I wasn’t sure what to do. I had gotten a raise just a few months prior, but this was a real promotion, with a lot of added responsibilities, and I felt like I was being taken advantage of because I was a young woman. I began reaching out to friends in the industry for advice. Finally I spoke with someone who estimated that, as a global editor in chief of such an internationally respected brand, I should be making at least two hundred thousand dollars—basically twice my salary. But I had no idea how to go about asking for that kind of money, and it weighed on me heavily. One day I ran into a woman from accounting in the bathroom and I mentioned my new global title to her. She said she hadn’t been told about it. She asked me if I was going to ask for a raise, and I told her that I had, unsuccessfully. She asked me how much money I wanted. I said I didn’t know for sure, but I’d been told that someone with my title should be making at least twice what I was.
That night I got an email from my boss that said we needed to speak as soon as I got to the office. I was up all night worrying, so I went in super early and waited for him. As it turned out, the woman I’d spoken to in the bathroom had told him about our conversation, but had abbreviated it—she had told him that I was about to ask for my salary to be doubled, without any context. She was in his office when I went in, but we didn’t look at each other (in fact, we never spoke again). My boss’s face was red, and there was a vein I’d never seen before lit up across his forehead; his knees were bouncing aggressively under his desk, hands opening and closing rapidly. He told me that if I wanted that kind of money I should work elsewhere. I protested that I hadn’t actually been asking for that amount, that I was simply telling someone in a casual conversation about advice I had been given. He didn’t seem to hear me and yelled at me for nearly half an hour about how I was entitled and ungrateful; he’d given me a huge opportunity, he said, and I was just using my title as leverage, and what did I even need that kind of salary at my age for?
I said that I loved my job and I was happy to do it, but I didn’t know if I could continue pouring my whole self into it without being compensated fairly.
He said, “If that’s the case, this isn’t the job for you.”
I got up and left, shaking so much that I accidentally slammed his sliding door.
We didn’t speak for two weeks. A coworker who was close with him suggested to me that maybe he was hurt that I hadn’t come to him directly with the ask. Eventually I realized it was on me to make it right, so I knocked on his door and let myself in. Holding in my pride, I apologized. I said I hadn’t meant to disrespect him, and I was grateful for the opportunity. He said he was sorry for overreacting, and that he had just been worried I was about to quit on him, and we agreed to move forward. He said that since it was still the beginning of my career I shouldn’t be so concerned with salary because the title was all that mattered. I didn’t get any more money, nor did I ask him again.
One of the things my new title meant was that I was supposed to find a way for digital and print to work together, at which I was mostly unsuccessful: the digital team felt that the print team acted superior to them, and the print team felt like the digital team was diluting their brand. Both groups of people expressed to me that they felt left out by the other, but no one was willing to put in the work to be included. There were exactly two people who were willing to help, and those people became hybrid editors, but otherwise we were at a standstill. It was an impossible situation; there was no one enforcing my authority, so people who I didn’t manage were free to disregard me. My boss wanted me on camera hosting videos and at fancy events, so in that way my title was useful, but I wasn’t overseeing the magazine at all—I wanted to, but that department basically just ignored me. So truthfully I was still just a digital editor in chief who sometimes emailed with people in Korea and Germany about image sizes.
A year went by. And then, suddenly, everything changed.
We all knew something was coming because of the company-wide “strategy” meeting that was set to take place in three separate conference rooms. It was September 7, 2017. The email came around eleven a.m. Actually, some of us had realized for weeks that something weird was happening. Strange old white guys in suits had been coming in and out of the Nylon office, having closed-door meetings with executives. Our CEO had been gone for a suspicious amount of time. Various people closest to him had been spotted crying in the bathroom and they wouldn’t say why.
The print team was sequestered in the main conference room, while my teams, as well as the marketing and sales teams, were told to go to the building’s conference room downstairs, which was by the
lobby elevators. That was odd—it wasn’t part of our office. We waited for what felt like forever until the company’s owner and a woman from HR came in, looking exhausted and stressed. The HR person told us that the cost of our health insurance was increasing. We all looked around at each other, as if to say, Was that… all we came down here for? Obviously it wasn’t, and the owner proceeded to explain what a hard decision it was but that the October issue of Nylon magazine would be the last.
There was silence. Finally I said, “What about the print editors?”
He looked surprised by the question, and clarified that they’d all been laid off, effective immediately. I felt like an idiot for not realizing what that meant, but in truth he hadn’t actually said the words. Several people began to cry. Most of them just stared silently.
Eventually he left and we were told that we had to remain in the room until the print editors had cleared out their belongings and left the premises. Meanwhile, the press release announcing the closure had gone out the moment we were told it was happening, and all of our phones had begun blowing up with texts and emails. We sat there for just under two hours.
Later that day, after we’d been released, we got an email asking us to come in to work at eight a.m. on Monday. That was even stranger, perhaps, than the layoffs: we weren’t what you’d call a morning group. Plus, it was smack-dab in the middle of Fashion Week, a time when sleep is rare and precious. I tried to protest it to the owner, saying we had been through enough already, but he replied that the news he had to tell us was urgent, and he didn’t want us to have to wait any longer. I had truly no clue what the announcement would be. More layoffs? An acquisition? The weekend was a blur. I don’t even really remember it; my memory flashes from that conversation to stumbling into the office at 7:45 a.m., puffy and cranky. The news that he had for us was that our CEO had resigned, and once again, we’d be getting a new one.
Everybody (Else) Is Perfect Page 5
