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to Bailey's Bazaar
Top editor yanking back title from its long slide
By Jeff Bercovici
One might think, reading the New York press, that Glenda Bailey is about to be fired as editor of Harper's Bazaar, the fashion title she was sent in to resuscitate after the brief but disastrous reign of Kate Betts.
Bailey could very well be in trouble, and who's to say not, appreciating as we all do the sometimes weird machinations in the realm of women's magazines.
But a quick look at the numbers suggests that Bailey has the top job at Harper's Bazaar as long as she wants it.
Turnarounds and makeovers are the hardest things to pull off, but Bailey appears to doing a good job of it at a magazine that seemed to lose its direction several years back.
Bailey, former editor of both the U.S. and U.K. versions of Marie Claire, has revved up Bazaar’s long-flaccid newsstand sales over the past year. She has also gone a low way toward restoring the magazine’s much-abused sense of identity.
In its semi-annual report to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, Hearst is claiming a 13.4 percent increase in Bazaar's single-copy sales, for an average of 186,700 in the second half of 2002.
That follows a single-copy increase of 11.2 percent for the first half of 2002. Taken together, it represents the first time in over a decade that the magazine has posted double-digit newsstand increases for the full year, according Hearst, which publishes the title.
Bailey's Bazaar has been less successful in gaining advertising, but it's in good company there. Ad pages in Bazaar were down 12.6 percent to 1,436.2 last year, while ad revenue fell 5.4 percent to $99.8 million, according to the Publishers Information Bureau.
Advertising in Elle and W was off by an equal or greater margin, however, and even category leader Vogue was down in both pages and dollars.
Similarly, Bazaar began showing substantial improvement in the second half of the year after being down 25 percent in pages at mid-year, along with its competitors.
Assuming the advertising climate does not deteriorate further, Bazaar should be able to turn its newsstand growth into page gains. Although the title was flat in total paid circulation last year, advertisers typically look at newsstand sales as the most important indicator of circulation vitality and "heat."
Felicia Ferber, vice president and group media director at MediaCom, says she has been impressed with the way Bailey has returned Bazaar to form following the unsuccessful revamp of her predecessor.
“I think she’s going back to the roots of the magazine in terms of clean, sophisticated editorial,” says Ferber.
“She had a big job ahead of her, and I can see her pages are still in the middle of evolving, but I think it’s looking back on track to where it should always have been. It’s looking very sharp.”
It certainly had a distance to go.
Betts, a former protégé of Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour, completely overhauled Bazaar upon taking over in 1999. Her take on the magazine combined visual austerity with a stab at increased pop culture relevancy, both of which earned it harsh reviews from critics.
One low point was the April 2000 "Silicon Valley" issue, which featured models pretending to be dot.com geeks sporting the latest in haute couture.
During her nearly two-year tenure, Betts threw Bazaar into a newsstand nosedive. In the first half of 2001, Betts’ last semester at Bazaar, average single-copy sales plunged 17 percent, to 140,541.
Much of Bailey's revamp has amounted to undoing Betts' misbegotten innovations, returning the magazine to its roots as a haven for the fashion elite.
Those who attempt to describe the magazine use words such as elegant, sophisticated and neoclassical. The most obvious change she made was restoring the old Harper's Bazaar logo, which Betts had replaced with a blocky modernist design.
The direction she has taken has surprised those who expected something more along the lines of the ultra-accessible Marie Claire.
Meanwhile, Harper’s Bazaar isn’t the only fashion magazine that did well for itself in the second half of 2002. Vogue is expected to report that its newsstand sales were up 13 percent.
February 12, 2003© 2003 Media Life
-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life
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