Photo: Roy Rochlin/Getty Images
Shortly after noon on Thursday, the staff at Vanity Fair received an email from Condé Nast’s Anna Wintour inviting them to a meeting with editor-in-chief Radhika Jones. To the surprise of almost everyone, including most of the magazine’s senior-most editors, a visibly emotional Wintour announced that Jones would be stepping down after seven years at the post. As Wintour spoke for a few minutes about Jones’s accomplishments, she was seemingly on the verge of tears, according to two sources present. Jones followed up the meeting with a memo in which she said she had accomplished “virtually all” of the goals she had set out to achieve when she started the job in 2017, adding, “I have always had a horror of staying too long at the party.”
In truth, the party has been over for quite a while. Jones is purportedly leaving of her own accord. She has been privately discussing doing as much since last fall, according to a person familiar with the situation. But, inevitably, rumors are swirling inside One World Trade about whether there’s more to the story, given the long slow slide Vanity Fair (where I used to work) has undergone since its heyday at the top of the magazine industry. “I have to imagine that there were more than enough financial reasons to warrant her leaving,” one Condé staffer said. “We never get good news on the traffic front. It just seems like a constant precipitous decline. We never meet our benchmarks, and there’s just no stated mission or mandate for what we should be doing.”
Jones, who prior to leading Vanity Fair was an editorial director of the New York Times’ books department and, before that, a top editor at Time, will stay on until June. Wintour will now have to appoint her successor. If Condé chooses someone within Vanity Fair, executive digital director Mike Hogan will likely be in the mix, as he was last time Vanity Fair was looking for a new top editor after Graydon Carter stepped down. Wintour could also tap a protégé to lead it, like Mark Guiducci, who before joining Vogue ran Vice’s Garage magazine, or Will Welch, a Wintour favorite, who runs GQ.
In her memo, Jones spoke proudly of her major achievements, such as running the magazine’s “epic party machine,” which includes its vaunted Oscars party, and commissioning Amy Sherald’s painting of Breonna Taylor for the cover. But the mood at Vanity Fair, as at many other Condé publications, has for months been one of general malaise. The weekly features meetings, which Jones used to run but handed over to two of her top editors last year, have been particularly brutal of late — “an astounding dearth of ideas,” as one staffer put it. Condé’s unofficial internal slogan for the past few years has basically been “Do more, but with less!” Now, for the time being anyway, they’ll have to do more with one less editor.
