The new memoir of former Good Housekeeping editor Lindsay Nicholson starts with a car crash and chronicles a life which scaled the peaks of media success and plumbed the very depths of human despair.
In Perfect Bound she notes that more magazines were sold in the UK between 2000 and 2008 than ever before – or ever will be again. And as editor-in-chief of Good Housekeeping from 1995 and editorial director of Hearst UK’s lifestyle brands between 1999 and 2017 she had a hand in creating many millions of them.
Triumph over disaster was a key part of the editorial formula Nicholson deployed at Good Housekeeping to help it sell more than 400,000 copies per month.
And it is the key narrative driver of her gripping memoir which is an inspiring read for anyone who has ever balanced personal troubles with a demanding job.
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Nicholson recounts how she threw herself into her career after the death of first husband in 1992 and then eldest child in 1998.
Then, in 2017, she faced a serious car crash, the breakdown of her second marriage, 16 hours in a police cell after an altercation with her then-husband and redundancy from her beloved job all leading to a breakdown, alcoholism and thoughts of suicide. Old traumas resurfaced to join new ones leading to an extremely challenging period, albeit one that makes for an unputdownable read.
Today Nicholson balances a portfolio of high-profile part-time roles with work as an equestrian coach for the disabled and freelance writing. Her memoir, which reads like a pacy novel, has received rave reviews and looks likely to be optioned for film or TV.
She lost her job at a time when Good Housekeeping was the biggest selling glossy magazine in Britain and Hearst UK’s most profitable title. But she is not bitter.
“I’d been at the top of business decisions in magazines for over a decade by that point, and I understood the complexity of business decisions. So although it was personally upsetting, I couldn’t say I’ve not seen anything like it before, nor that I hadn’t taken part in decisions like that before – it was just business.”
Mental health and the media: ‘You need to help yourself’
Redundancy hit Nicholson hard coming on top of so many other calamities.
“I worked ten, 12 hours a day and the joy of journalism was that you never stopped thinking about it. I would turn on the radio in the morning, and the cogs would start to work. And then when there was no reason to think about it, all the other thoughts that I pushed away, came in.”
Press Gazette nowadays frequently writes about the importance for journalists of looking after their mental health, a topic which has come more into vogue since the coronavirus pandemic. Does Nicholson think that with hindsight she should have balanced her work and life a little better?
“The thing that’s not really understood about mental health is that the first person who’s got to recognise that you need help is yourself. Because if you’re someone like me, very good at putting on a front, who buries themselves in work – workaholism is very difficult to deal with, because you’re very successful.
“I won loads of awards. I made a lot of money for my employers. It’s very hard for someone outside to say ‘maybe that’s not a good idea’…
“You have to take responsibility for your own mental health. And I probably didn’t do that because I didn’t want to think about it.”
Facebook and the decline of magazines
The magazine industry initially proved more resilient to technology than newspapers but is today seeing a similar level of print decline (as evidenced by Press Gazette’s coverage of the ABC figures).
Nicholson blames the decline of magazines on the emergence of Facebook and Instagram in the late 2000s and a lack of investment which has seen glossies lose their USP of high production values.
She cites an award-winning photo shoot about autumn carpets for Good Housekeeping which involved hiring two models who were body painted to blend in with the designs as an example of the “stunning” work she was able to invest in.
Risk-taking was a hallmark of her editorship. In 2014 she made headlines when Good Housekeeping deployed its product testing skills honed on toasters and washing machines in the world of sex toys.
Ideas are the currency of a good editor. How did Nicholson get hers?
“I never ever stopped. On the train, in the shower, and I would read lots and lots of international magazines and most newspapers… and I loved working in a team.”
It sounds like she was constantly feeding information into her mental computer?
“If we follow that metaphor, it was like a computer linked to all the other computers in the office, as well as the freelances and photographers, were all bouncing off each other.”
Leadership tips: Embrace your inner sheepdog
What are her tips for leading a successful media team?
“I think you have to have a really clear vision. You articulate the vision and then you’re basically like a sheepdog running around, kind of barking at people’s heels to make sure that they stay on the vision because you’ve got all these creative people and their interpretation is going to be different.
“As a leader I was kind of a sheepdog. And also I would never ask anyone to do anything I wasn’t prepared to do myself.
“We used to have big events, like parties at the V&A, and I’d be on my knees in the corridor, stuffing the gifts in the goodie bag beforehand and so on. And no one went home after me.
“I think you have to be able to say when you’re wrong. I did this thing when I first went to Good Housekeeping where I put all of the Good Housekeeping Institute content in a special section on different paper…
“The ratings plummeted for that section, they plummeted so far that they went off the chart. And I realised that if you’ve got a USP, you don’t put your USP in 16 pages in the middle, you spread your USP throughout the magazine.
“I printed off the chart, and I pinned it on my office door. Because, you know, we can all have what looks like a great idea that the moment it encounters reality is not such a great idea.”
Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre once said journalists need: “An instinct to know when to be bold and when to be careful. Any fool can be either.”
How did Nicholson know where to draw the line?
“I was always a big believer in beg forgiveness, don’t ask for permission, which is certainly true with the vibrators story. And it was true as well when I had Cherie Blair guest edit Prima [in 1996 when her husband Tony Blair was leader of the opposition].”
“I had a very close team. I can hear them now. ‘Listen, boss, you’re making a mistake’. So you have to have the people who you’ve explained your vision enough to them that they know what you’re trying to do, but then you do kind of overdo it sometimes. And as much as I was the sheepdog running around after them, they would come in shut the door and say ‘boss, I think we’ve gone too far’.”
Sexism and ageism in the media
Nicholson campaigned as an editor on behalf of working women saying they should have the right to ask for flexible working. Today the gender pay gap in journalism continues and men still dominate the top jobs. At her old employer Hearst UK (formerly the National Magazine Company) men earn 18% more than women on average.
Does she think talented media women are today having the careers that they should have?
“When I was chair of Women in Journalism, I commissioned some research on the age cliff in magazines.
“In journalism generally you very rarely have women aged over 50. During their childbearing years, they’re kind of hanging on by their fingernails, juggling, and by the time they get to 50, or before 50, that juggling is just so hard.
“If you look at the year I went from editing, many of the men then employed as editors like Dylan Jones and Geordie Greig are still around and the women have gone off to do other things. I think sexism and ageism are endemic in the industry.”
She said the rise of technical roles like coders and programmers from around 2010 onwards also made it harder to close the gender pay gap, because of the male dominance in technology roles.
Do magazines have a future?
What is her advice to the current crop of magazine editors fighting against seemingly inevitable industry decline? Nicholson reckons that in the 2000s there were 3,500 newsstand magazines in the UK. Today many hundreds of titles have disappeared, and many of the surviving titles sell a small fraction of what they once did.
“It’s about creating a community and I would look at the magazines I read now or enjoy. I look at everything but the ones I enjoy now are ones that are really about a community. They are smaller than the magazines that I used to edit, like Simple Things, which an old colleague of mine Lisa Sykes has set up, and The Spectator which I think is brilliant.
“Country Life really knows its audience, and knows its community. There’s a reason for reading it. Private Eye I think is very clever.
“I’ve got high hopes of what Jane Bruton will do at Good Housekeeping in that space of the bigger general interest magazine, which I couldn’t even begin to guess what you do. Because if you’re going to sell a big number of magazines, you need a lot of really serious research behind you and I haven’t seen research for a long time.”
Does she think magazines still have a future?
“You can have a technology that disappears. But I think that if there’s sufficient creativity and sufficient thought, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t. They just have to change and evolve.”
Lindsay Nicholson shares her tips for editing excellence
Here Press Gazette extracts six pearls of media wisdom from Lindsay Nicholson’s memoir Perfect Bound, published by Harper Collins. The title Perfect Bound is a reference to the binding on upmarket glossy magazines which are glued into a spine (like a book).
1) Have an imaginary friend
“Every successful magazine editor has an imaginary reader, an archetype crafted from hundreds of hours of market research. For Prima, I created Kate, a nurse living in the Midlands with her electrician husband and two children.
“For Good Housekeeping, I invented Claire, a part-time GP living with her solicitor husband and their three children in a detached house outside a big provincial city – Bristol, Leeds or Edinburgh maybe?. Everything I put in Good Housekeeping was run by the fictional Claire for approval.”
2) Good Housekeeping’s winning formula
“My secret was a judicious mix of aspirational fashion, interiors and beauty pages mixed with real-life stories… Or what is known in the business as TOT, or Triumph Over Tragedy – inspirational first-person accounts by women who have overcome adversity. Not an easy combination to pull off in a luxury-ad-friendly environment – but something I knew how to do because I was living it.”
3) Don’t delegate the most important jobs
“No matter which magazine I was editing, whether it was located around my own interests like Good Housekeeping or Prima, or for women much younger than me at Cosmo, or even the men’s title Esquire, the one job I never delegated, no matter how busy I was, no matter if I was sick or travelling, was writing the coverlines. It was a job that always took at least a day and a half out of every month.”
4) How to make your coverlines sing
“My goal was always to attract new readers, serve the faithful audience, and send a frisson of surprise through the ones who might be feeling a little jaded. The formula I came up with, which I called the Golden Cover, was based on a mix of experience and long discussions with the circulation and marketing departments, held together with a dash of neuroscience.
“I started always in the top left-hand corner, prime magazine real estate, which I designated as the hotspot. This is the part of the cover that will be seen no matter how the magazine is displayed, whether letter-rack style in supermarkets, or peeking out from behind a cluster of other titles arranged in vertical rows on a newsagent’s shelves. The strongest, most welcoming line always goes there
“Across the middle of the cover ran my ‘banger’ line, maybe just one or two words setting the tone for the whole issue and, perhaps, linking several articles on the one theme. Confidence was the top-seller theme for GH – if I could have found 12 synonyms for self-esteem – one for each month of the year – I would never have put anything else on there.”
5) The ‘Crackerjack Factor’
“The Crackerjack Factor, which could be anything from a rallying call for more women in science to the lines that earned me reprimands from on high, such as when I persuaded male celebrities to strip off to raise awareness about cancer and, of course, the vibrators we so famously tried and tested. The Crackerjack is there to tell you that this seemingly familiar magazine with its century-old name still has a few surprises up its sleeve.”
6) Don’t make promises to the readers you can’t keep
“The real secret to successful coverlines is never to over-promise. Even now, when I pass the magazine racks in the supermarket I cringe at those overly optimistic lines: Drop a dress size in a week. Change your life in 30 days. Reset your finances forever.
“We all know that’s never going to happen. If it looks too good to be true, it probably is.
“Equally, I disdain the high-fashion formula of Vogue and others, which is basically always a variation on: New season looks. Or as I used to say, witheringly: Pink’s in! … So what?
“Trend news doesn’t mean anything unless you place it in context. What does a new shade of pink mean for me?
“The mantra I came up with and used on every magazine I edited was Small Achievable Promises, usually shortened to SAP. When writers pitched ideas, I insisted they give me the SAP.
“If they could sum it up in something that sounded like a coverline, then I would likely commission the feature. If not, forget it.”
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