Memoir installment #15

That time I got fired

In the old world order of Conde Nast, there were two times a year—the first days in the office after Labor Day and New Year's—when editors and publishers whose titles weren’t performing had to worry most acutely about their jobs. So it was not entirely surprising—given Lucky’s downward trajectory on pretty much every measurable front—that on the last weekend of the summer of 2010, I found myself seized by the very real suspicion that my number was up.  

I was taking a walk near my family’s home in Sag Harbor during that wonderfully still hour before sunset when everything seems perfect out on the eastern tip of Long Island, and my mind, as usual, was back at 4 Times Square. I was obsessing, not for the first time that day, over my most recent newsstand figures (weekly sales memos were issued on Fridays, just in time to either make or destroy your weekend). The numbers for our most recent issues had been updated to indicate we were even more down than the previous week’s. Which hadn’t been good either. We were dropping under 200,000 copies a month. A new low. At the peak of our popularity—around 2004—we'd had a couple of  issues that almost hit 400,000 at the newsstand. But that was a long time ago.  

This alone wouldn’t be such an issue; 2010 was a perfectly hideous time for newsstand all around, and even company stalwarts like Vogue and Glamour were seeing dramatic fall-offs. W had suffered a 41% drop over the course of just that calendar year. 

The bosses would never not care about newsstand, but there was a nominal degree of protection in numbers: as long as enough other magazines were down too, we were relatively safe. And this wasn’t my biggest problem at the moment anyway. The September issue—the most important business bellwether of the year by far—was way more troubling. Its ad pages had been down, and unlike the newsstand figures, in this respect I stood alone: literally every other fashion title in the business had seen their first significant post-recession jump that month.  

The selling of ads is the publisher’s job, and ultimately her ass, and the company was generally more inclined to make a business side change than an editorial one (which was unlikely at Lucky, as our publisher was brand new; her predecessor had been promoted). But at a certain point the 11^th floor was going to take a look in editorial’s direction. How amazing, it suddenly occurred to me on that walk, not to assume they already had.