Interview: Jane Johnson, Closer editor (Evening Standard)
By David Rowan
IT is Emap's most successful magazine launch, claiming sales approaching 500,000 after barely 20 months. Closer, the celebrity women's weekly from the team behind Heat, seems to have found the magic circulation formula that has eluded more traditional women's titles. Tonight its editor, Jane Johnson, is tipped to be voted editor of the year at the Periodical Publishers Association awards. But is her secret, as some rivals are sniffily suggesting, simply to have let tabloid newspaper hacks loose in the more respectful world of magazines?
Johnson, a former Sunday Mirror executive editor, certainly wants Closer to "beat the newspapers at their own game" with celebrity exclusives and hard-nosed "real life" features. She raided the News of the World for her deputy, The Sun for her news editor, and the Star for a news reporter - because, as she puts it, "newspaper people have that great drive to find stories".
At first, the doubters told her a magazine could never compete with papers on breaking news. "But since we've proved that we can, people have started to notice us. So now we're attracting more high-profile people who would previously have gone to the papers."
Her list of "scoops" is certainly more red-top than broadsheet. "We had an exclusive on Russell Crowe and Danielle Spencer having a baby, the first big piece with Amy Crowhurst, the controversial 13-year-old mum, and we led the way with the Sadie Frost and Jude Law divorce story," she says, at times even lapsing into tabloidese herself. "We like to think we've busted the myth that magazines can't get those kind of stories."
But the magazine has also taken on some less welcome red-top characteristics: Johnson's "biggest" story so far, Louise Woodward's first interview for six years, led to a Press Complaints Commission wrist-slap after Closer paid Woodward's boyfriend for a photograph (the PCC code prohibits payments linked to convicted criminals). "We did apologise, and explained the situation openly," she explains.
Closer is something of a hybrid, with conventional women's magazine features, such as puzzles and advice columns, 20 pages of television listings, and a combination of celebrity news and "triumph over tragedy" stories. "The most obvious difference with other magazines is the way we mix real life and celebrity, very much as a newspaper does," Johnson says. "Papers have done it for years, but we feel we're the first magazine that does it convincingly." Hence the Heat-style features such as "Cringe! - The pictures celebs would prefer to forget!", alongside headlines such as "I was married to a long-distance bigamist" and a wife's account of her over-tattooed husband "turning himself into a lizard".
"We do need the Madonna-type celebrity story," Johnson explains, "but ordinary people can also be quite extraordinary too. We're bringing those two worlds together, something that has been crystallised by the reality TV phenomenon."
Readers seem to be taking note. In a crowded market, boosted since its launch by New! and Star, Closer's circulation - audited last year at 385,000 - is now said to be storming towards that of Now, at 592,000 the market leader. Many of its sales are at the expense of traditional titles such as IPC's Woman, Woman's Own and Woman's Weekly, between them down by more than 150,000 over 18 months. Johnson, 35, claims to be "reinventing" a moribund market - although IPC provides alternative figures to suggest that the market as a whole is stable, and fully in touch "with what today's woman wants".
Yet the magazine's tone is certainly more hostile than traditional titles to the newsmakers it seeks to bring readers "closer" to. Like Heat, it delights in revealing their flaws - from the paparazzi snaps of Cher wearing a face-pack, to the unflattering pictures of the "morbidly "It's a question of showing the reality, not just the sanitised version of celebrities' lives," Johnson responds. "If people are trading on their perfect image and the reality's different, they need to be taken to task. We act very much like the readers' mates."
Besides, she says, celebrities themselves tell the magazine how much they "love" it. "We ran some paparazzi pictures of Susannah Constantine eating, alongside the headline: 'How not to eat'," she says. "She phoned in to say it was the most hilarious thing she'd ever read. We're not against celebrities - but we definitely don't give them an easy ride."
But what about the "ordinary" women who are mocked by the magazine's sometimes insensitive tone, particularly over diet-related issues? This week's knowing interview, for instance, with Callie Rogers, the 17-year-old Lottery winner - whose "dramatic weight loss" had resulted in "gazelle-like limbs" thanks to a "mystery illness", clearly implied as anorexia.
Johnson denies that such coverage is "nasty" or exploitative. "She wanted to do that interview as there had been a lot of negative 'anorexia' pieces in the papers that she was quite hurt by," she says. "And she chose Closer. I think she'll be pleased with the result."
DIET is one of the magazine's more consistent topics, from features about a threestone woman who became a glamour model, to extracts from Carol Vorderman's latest recipe book. Isn't this obsessive coverage merely adding to women's anxieties?
"I think we're enabling a lot of women to feel, if they aren't happy about their weight, that there's a way of dealing with it that's not scary or awful," Johnson answers. "Diet is a definite preoccupation women have. We're reflecting what the modern woman thinks about and talks about."
It may seem odd that the job of "shaking up" women's magazines, as she puts it, should have gone to an Oxford English graduate with a penchant for TS Eliot. But Johnson - who started with a graduate job on the Southport Star, and rose from jobs on Chat and Bella to be the Mirror's women's editor - refuses to accept that she has contributed to a "dumbing down" of the sector.
"What we're doing is modernising the women's market," she says. "We've just made it more exciting. It's all about raising your journalistic standards and finding your own stories. That's what we've learned pays off."
(Evening Standard, May 5 2004)
IT is Emap's most successful magazine launch, claiming sales approaching 500,000 after barely 20 months. Closer, the celebrity women's weekly from the team behind Heat, seems to have found the magic circulation formula that has eluded more traditional women's titles. Tonight its editor, Jane Johnson, is tipped to be voted editor of the year at the Periodical Publishers Association awards. But is her secret, as some rivals are sniffily suggesting, simply to have let tabloid newspaper hacks loose in the more respectful world of magazines?
Johnson, a former Sunday Mirror executive editor, certainly wants Closer to "beat the newspapers at their own game" with celebrity exclusives and hard-nosed "real life" features. She raided the News of the World for her deputy, The Sun for her news editor, and the Star for a news reporter - because, as she puts it, "newspaper people have that great drive to find stories".
At first, the doubters told her a magazine could never compete with papers on breaking news. "But since we've proved that we can, people have started to notice us. So now we're attracting more high-profile people who would previously have gone to the papers."
Her list of "scoops" is certainly more red-top than broadsheet. "We had an exclusive on Russell Crowe and Danielle Spencer having a baby, the first big piece with Amy Crowhurst, the controversial 13-year-old mum, and we led the way with the Sadie Frost and Jude Law divorce story," she says, at times even lapsing into tabloidese herself. "We like to think we've busted the myth that magazines can't get those kind of stories."
But the magazine has also taken on some less welcome red-top characteristics: Johnson's "biggest" story so far, Louise Woodward's first interview for six years, led to a Press Complaints Commission wrist-slap after Closer paid Woodward's boyfriend for a photograph (the PCC code prohibits payments linked to convicted criminals). "We did apologise, and explained the situation openly," she explains.
Closer is something of a hybrid, with conventional women's magazine features, such as puzzles and advice columns, 20 pages of television listings, and a combination of celebrity news and "triumph over tragedy" stories. "The most obvious difference with other magazines is the way we mix real life and celebrity, very much as a newspaper does," Johnson says. "Papers have done it for years, but we feel we're the first magazine that does it convincingly." Hence the Heat-style features such as "Cringe! - The pictures celebs would prefer to forget!", alongside headlines such as "I was married to a long-distance bigamist" and a wife's account of her over-tattooed husband "turning himself into a lizard".
"We do need the Madonna-type celebrity story," Johnson explains, "but ordinary people can also be quite extraordinary too. We're bringing those two worlds together, something that has been crystallised by the reality TV phenomenon."
Readers seem to be taking note. In a crowded market, boosted since its launch by New! and Star, Closer's circulation - audited last year at 385,000 - is now said to be storming towards that of Now, at 592,000 the market leader. Many of its sales are at the expense of traditional titles such as IPC's Woman, Woman's Own and Woman's Weekly, between them down by more than 150,000 over 18 months. Johnson, 35, claims to be "reinventing" a moribund market - although IPC provides alternative figures to suggest that the market as a whole is stable, and fully in touch "with what today's woman wants".
Yet the magazine's tone is certainly more hostile than traditional titles to the newsmakers it seeks to bring readers "closer" to. Like Heat, it delights in revealing their flaws - from the paparazzi snaps of Cher wearing a face-pack, to the unflattering pictures of the "morbidly "It's a question of showing the reality, not just the sanitised version of celebrities' lives," Johnson responds. "If people are trading on their perfect image and the reality's different, they need to be taken to task. We act very much like the readers' mates."
Besides, she says, celebrities themselves tell the magazine how much they "love" it. "We ran some paparazzi pictures of Susannah Constantine eating, alongside the headline: 'How not to eat'," she says. "She phoned in to say it was the most hilarious thing she'd ever read. We're not against celebrities - but we definitely don't give them an easy ride."
But what about the "ordinary" women who are mocked by the magazine's sometimes insensitive tone, particularly over diet-related issues? This week's knowing interview, for instance, with Callie Rogers, the 17-year-old Lottery winner - whose "dramatic weight loss" had resulted in "gazelle-like limbs" thanks to a "mystery illness", clearly implied as anorexia.
Johnson denies that such coverage is "nasty" or exploitative. "She wanted to do that interview as there had been a lot of negative 'anorexia' pieces in the papers that she was quite hurt by," she says. "And she chose Closer. I think she'll be pleased with the result."
DIET is one of the magazine's more consistent topics, from features about a threestone woman who became a glamour model, to extracts from Carol Vorderman's latest recipe book. Isn't this obsessive coverage merely adding to women's anxieties?
"I think we're enabling a lot of women to feel, if they aren't happy about their weight, that there's a way of dealing with it that's not scary or awful," Johnson answers. "Diet is a definite preoccupation women have. We're reflecting what the modern woman thinks about and talks about."
It may seem odd that the job of "shaking up" women's magazines, as she puts it, should have gone to an Oxford English graduate with a penchant for TS Eliot. But Johnson - who started with a graduate job on the Southport Star, and rose from jobs on Chat and Bella to be the Mirror's women's editor - refuses to accept that she has contributed to a "dumbing down" of the sector.
"What we're doing is modernising the women's market," she says. "We've just made it more exciting. It's all about raising your journalistic standards and finding your own stories. That's what we've learned pays off."
(Evening Standard, May 5 2004)
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