When Martha Nelson takes the helm at People magazine Monday, she will complete a round of musical chairs that in recent weeks has landed new editors in top spots at three leading magazines geared toward women.
Nelson, like Charla Lawhon at InStyle and Bonnie Fuller at Us Weekly, has a tough job ahead: to increase revenue and readership in one of the worst advertising slumps in magazine history.
Though Nelson, 49, will have huge shoes to fill when she takes over from longtime People editor Carol Wallace–a well-regarded, Chicago-born journalist who has led the immensely profitable publication as managing editor since 1997–her task may well be easier than that of Fuller. As Us Weekly managing editor, Fuller has been given the directive to make the magazine, People’s rival, even more appealing to women.
Jann Wenner, chairman of Wenner Media, which publishes Us, told online magazine Mediaweek.com that Fuller is expected to make Us “more feminine in tone.” “Will it get a little sexier? I’m sure,” he said.
Lawhon, 45, is simply moving up the ladder at InStyle. She was named deputy editor in 1994, executive editor in 1998 and will become managing editor April 1.
It is likely, given that women tend to buy more magazines than men, that each of the new editors will try to court even more female readers.
“They probably are going to have to follow the lead of the more traditional women’s magazines,” says professor Carolyn Kitch, director of the magazine sequence at Temple University and a former editor at Good Housekeeping and McCalls. “Women’s magazines, which have a long track record of holding their own even in severe [economic] down times, tend to go for the empathetic celebrities. Good Housekeeping was one of the few magazines that actually had an increase in advertising revenue last year . . . and their approach to [covering] celebrities is very conservative and empathetic. “I’m sure everyone expects them to do just sex, sex, sex,” she said. “But that is probably not how you are going to get a broad-based audience of more women.”
Fuller, 45, who took her new position in February, has been a fixture on the American magazine scene since 1989, when she became editor of YM magazine. From there, she moved to Marie Claire, and in 1997 she became editor of Cosmopolitan. In 1998 she took over at Glamour, where she garnered criticism for injecting sex and celebrity into a publication that, under longtime editor Ruth Whitney, had what was regarded as a comfortable balance of fashion, beauty and issue-oriented articles. Fuller was fired from Glamour last May.
Says Kitch: “Bonnie Fuller has taken a lot of [heat] in the press because of what she has done on the covers of the magazines she has edited, her sexy cover lines. [During] her tenure at Glamour and YM and Cosmo, she got sort of damned for taking these wonderful old properties and trashing them, which I don’t think she did. She certainly knows how to edit for a female audience, because those magazines thrived under her until her last year [at] Glamour.”
Nelson comes to Time Inc.’s People from its sister publication InStyle, which she launched in 1994. Before joining InStyle, Nelson worked at another Time Inc. publication, Australia’s Who Weekly. Prior to that she was editor of Savvy and of Women’s Sports & Fitness and a staff editor at Ms. magazine.
Wallace, 52, stepped down at her own request, reportedly to travel and spend more time in Scotland, where she owns a day spa.