Episode 21: Joanna Coles (Editor: Cosmo, Marie Claire, more)

Maggie Bullock: It’s 2016. Rachel and I are sitting at our desks on the 24th floor of the Hearst Tower working at Elle magazine when the glass double doors blow open—or at least that’s how I remember it—and a vision of white-blonde hair, metallic pants, and checkerboard platforms, breezes into the office speaking in a commanding British accent to two or three minions in her wake.

There are no cameras in sight, but it’s as if we’re watching a grand entrance and a reality TV show. You can almost feel the wind machines in the air, which is what it’s like pretty much any time you witness a Joanna Coles appearance in the corridors of Hearst. There’s just something cinematic about her.

Rachel Baker: Joanna started her career as a reporter in London, moving to New York in the late 1990s to be The Guardian’s New York bureau chief. Next, she shifted into editing. First, as an articles editor at New York magazine, then over to More magazine.

By 2006, she grabbed hold of the editor-in-chiefship at Marie Claire, part of Hearst, and in 2012 became the editor-in-chief of the company’s largest title, Cosmopolitan.

Maggie Bullock: By the time she strode into the Elle offices in 2016, she was much more than an editor. She was also a reality TV star, a television producer, an author, a public speaker, a driving force of the “girl boss” movement, besties with Sheryl Sandberg, and a celebrity in her own right, who famously ran meetings from the helm of a treadmill walking desk.

Rachel Baker: The Jo-Co who walked into our office in 2016 had been newly-crowned as Chief Content Officer of Hearst Magazines—the first to hold the title—and tasked with consolidating the creative side of the 100-year-old publishing giant in the new digital-first era.

Maggie and I are a longtime print editors, so you can imagine how that sounded to us. But even through our fear goggles, we could also see that Joanna was ready to do the necessary surgery that other print editors didn’t have the stomach for, so that legacy magazines might live to see another day.

Maggie Bullock: Joanna was certainly the most famous women’s magazine editor at Hearst at that time. But what wasn’t clear back then, and is undeniable now, is that she was the last of her breed. There was a rich history of iconic women’s magazine editors that came before Joanna, but can you think of an iconic, larger-than-life one that came after her?

Rachel Baker: Joanna left Hearst in 2018, roughly around the same time that both Maggie and I did, and today she’s a board member for major tech companies like Sonos and Snapchat and an executive producer for major Hollywood projects, including an upcoming Amazon series starring Priyanka Chopra.

And she is, as ever, a baller.

Setting up our interview, with what lesser individuals might call a “personal assistant,” but Joanna has anointed Chief Get-It-Done Officer, when we met JC via Zoom, she was without pretense or treadmill desk. She was disarmingly down to earth.

Maggie Bullock: And yet somehow she still emanated that chutzpah or moxie—or maybe we should bring back the word “pizazz” to describe it. The X-factor that, in a 44-floor media empire brimming with big egos and considerable talent, made her one of media’s biggest stars.