The changing role of the editor

In this, the first episode of a brand new reality show from Channel Four, you have the chance to spend a month as the editor of a famous glossy magazine. Having seen The Devil Wears Prada and Absolutely Fabulous, you will be under the impression that it's largely a question of being conveyed from your daily hairdresser's appointment to lunch with a famous celebrity, pausing only to look at some of those huge poster-sized proofs that your staff bring in to your office for your approval, all of which you reject with a wrinkled nose of disgust and an abrupt edict that the next issue is going to be all about Animals or the Planet or Beige; you then canter down the hall to the car which conveys you to dinner on an advertiser's yacht, pursued by beautiful assistants noting down and acting upon your merest wish.

Well, the first thing you will learn is that if it was ever like that in the past, it ain't like that anymore. As the newly installed editor, you will be expected of course to clean up the mess left by that clown who had the job before, motivate a demoralised team and produce brilliant issues immediately. But - and here's where you start to learn how problematic the editor's role has become just at the moment you arrived in the chair - your manifest brilliance will no longer be rewarded by automatic sales spikes and trebles all round in the executive suite.

The editor: RIP?

The bad news is you're vying to be a star magazine editor at the very moment when the species itself is under threat. Bonnie Fuller, the Canadian who has been noisily successful at the helm of American titles like Us Weekly and Marie Claire, stepped down recently as editorial director of the company which publishes Star Weekly and the National Enquirer. Folio magazine speculated that this would save the company two and a half million dollars a year (and that doesn't include the hair and make-up) and headlined their report "The Death of the Star Magazine Editor". I felt much the same when Mark Frith left Heat earlier this year, correctly deducing it was easier to write a book about being a successful magazine editor than it was to actually be a successful magazine editor.

What’s expected of the editor

But back to your challenge. Your next shock is that the chief executive of your company has been on a course and actually wants to change your job title from editor to "chief content officer". After quickly calculating how unimpressed your mother is bound to be when you tell her, you ask him why he wants to do this. He explains, quite reasonably, that it is not longer just about the printed magazine. That's got to be kept up to scratch, of course, (and by the way you must lose a couple of staff members) but newsstand growth is hard to come by and the increasing proliferation of choices available to advertisers mean that they no longer think a few spreads in a magazine is quite enough. Therefore it's all about making your material go further. Because, like most types who came up through advertising or marketing, your boss believes in something called "content".

His problem is that while he believes in content, he hasn't an earthly clue where to find said content or what to do with it. He suspects that it's kept somewhere under lock and key and is only got out after he goes home for the night. Regardless of his lack of experience with this magic substance, he has seen a new model for the future. In this new dispensation, you preside over the provision of this pliable, uncomplaining matter down various pipes - each labelled "magazine", "website", "podcast", "events" and some things he hasn't thought about yet.

So, you say, you want me to do all these other things on top of the basic magazine editing job and you've no guarantee that any of them are going to work and you're not going to pay me any more money, is that right? That's right, he says. At which point you have a breakdown and have to be removed from the series on psychiatric advice. No tearful interview with Davina, no nothing.

Plan A or Plan B?

If there are any editors reading this at the moment, I fancy they're nodding. It's not the increase in their workload that bothers them - most of them are so furiously ambitious they're always trying to colonise potential areas of new business - so much as the fact that they're required to pursue the old plan while trying out a new plan at the same time.

I was talking to the editor of one household name publication recently and she put it this way: it's not that we don't believe in so-called new media, it's just that although everyone's predicting the eclipse of paper and print, that's still where the majority of the money is coming from - and will do for the foreseeable future.

The current round of financial results from publishing companies describes the same pattern. Revenue from traditional sources has gone down by this much money. Revenue from new sources is going up by this many per cent. Nobody is comparing apples with apples, deliberately so. If they did that, it would be clear that many of them are swapping offline pounds for online pennies. But, because standing still is not an option, they have to keep doing it. The CEO who told me last year that he had stopped producing business plans that showed his company could make money from online is no longer a CEO.

The challenge

But while that's all going on in the captain's tower, down on the killing floor, the editor has to wrestle with the new practicalities. He knows that his efforts have to be redeployed, but precisely how? The comfy space that magazines used to operate in has got everybody else's tanks parked all over it. It hasn't affected everybody equally or proportionally. The women's weeklies seem to be doing fairly well, as are the upmarket glossies. The men's market, which made the mistake of getting into a sex and trivia competition with the internet, has unsurprisingly taken a kicking. But everything's under challenge. People looking for a new car are not immediately going to head for What Car as they might once have done. The role that a magazine plays is no longer self evident, if it ever was.

However, it's important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Lots of people enjoy reading magazines just as much as they ever did but they're not beating the newsagent’s door down to get at them. In the light of this, there's little point in spending insane amounts of time on shaping the package with the demands of the newsagent’s shelf uppermost in your mind. It's ironic that the men's monthlies have declined from their position of apparent pre-eminence to their current sorry state without losing their faith in all the cover formulae of old.

This is strangely significant. If you believe salvation is in casual purchase at the newsagents, you edit a magazine from the outside in. If you think it's about subscription, you do things from the inside out. One of the encouraging things about the growth of steady climbers like Psychologies is that it appears to belong to the latter group.

Obviously the revolution that has been triggered by the technological innovations of the last few years is not about to settle down into a neat new template. Nobody knows precisely what skill set is going to be most appropriate in the future, but it will probably include these five elements.

1. They will want editors who can stand up and talk. They need people who make plausible advocates for their titles, who as far as possible represent them, who are as comfortable standing up at a conference, taking part in a podcast, fronting on a website video as they are poring over the minutiae of a logo. I think we may have seen the end of the women's magazine edited by a man.

2. They want editors who are agnostic about so-called "new" media. They obviously don't want people who are going to go charging in the direction of distraction but neither do they want editors who regard all this as just a fad that will soon go away. They need people who see it as an opportunity and not a threat.

3. If editors are going to go the "chief content officer" route, they need to know what different media do best, to decide which material would work most powerfully on a website, which items are best chewed over in a podcast and which things they can rely on their readers to generate. This is not as easy as it seems.

4. They don't want editors with a high priest's view of their role, who believe that they are involved in a purely one-way communication with their readers. New generation editors need to spend less of their time polishing a "product" so that they can see their face in it and more time increasing their contacts with their readers and advertisers. That means listening as much as talking.

5. But they will still have to produce a brilliant magazine, something that embodies their brand for both readers and advertisers. This has always been the case and is no less so in the new age. However they may have to pull off that trick in a less flashy way, putting their faith less in the big, circulation-boosting stunt and more in the delivery of a really satisfying reading experience.

Remember that one?