Reinventing the Form with Stella Bugbee
BREAKING: 🔊🔊 The Helen Gurley Brown and Tina Brown of newsletters—modest, eh?—just “grilled” the editor of New York Times’ Styles 🔊🔊
What would make the perfect women’s magazine? Juicy yarns, hot goss, big ideas, deeply personal examinations of women’s lives—and none of the advertiser obligations. Welcome to the Spread, where every week two editors read, listen, and watch it all, and deliver only the best to your inbox. (And, this week, to your ears!)
Sugarplum Spreadies,
In July, we blew the roof off of the media-insider podcast Print Is Dead. (Long Live Print!) when we interviewed her Majesty, Joanna Coles (now the show’s most-listened-to ep ever, thankyouverymuch). For our second go on the mic, we aimed for the moon yet again and landed Stella Bugbee, the originator of the Cut and now editor of the New York Times Styles.
Bugbee is a media unicorn who spent the first chunk of her career as a graphic designer and then pivoted to the edit side, where under New York’s legendary Adam Moss she rose straight to the top of the masthead, reinventing the women’s magazine as we knew it: The Cut we know and love (and endlessly link to) today still operates more or less on the blueprint Stella originally designed. Now you can see her hand in the tone of Styles’ zinger headlines and finger-on-the-pulse cultural takes. “Girl Dinner,” anyone? We know you’re still thinking about (thinking about) the Roman Empire…
**Listen now via the link above, or on Apple, Spotify, or wherever the heck else you get your podcasts!**
And stay tuned: We have big plans for more Print Is Dead/Spread coproductions in 2024. Now taking votes for which media superstar you want to hear from next: Should we aim our lasso for Grace Coddington? Dame Glenda Bailey? Hanya Yanagihara? Miranda Priestly? (We hear she lost her 24-hour car service when Runway went digital-only, recorded a MasterClass in anger management, and now spends her days mixing up bouillabaisse with Ruth Reichl.)
Love to love ya babies,
Rachel & Maggie
P.S. We are children at heart who respond well to positive parenting: Click that ❤️ button, why doncha?
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Oh can't wait to hear! As a former HB editorial staffer under the great Liz Tilberis, I highly recommend we hear from the delightful Glenda Bailey. A true delight!
Loved that podcast! So much fun. Just finished listening to Tina Brown's Vanity Fair Diaries. If you can't get her for the podcast, I'd listen to you two reading it! xo