Interview: Emma Soames, Saga magazine (Evening Standard)
By David Rowan
IT WAS, at the time, widely seen as a bizarre career move. Emma Soames, the magazine highflier who had edited Tatler, ES and latterly the Telegraph Magazine, was moving to Folkestone to run a subscription-only monthly read by pensioners. Sure, her £150,000 reported salary would put her among Britain's best-paid magazine editors. But why, colleagues asked, would such a well connected live-wire want to swap her glamorous London life to promote stairlifts?
Two years on, they have just received their answer. This week, the Saga Group was valued at up to £1.4 billion after its founder's son decided it was time to sell. And although Soames, as editor of Saga Magazine, will not discuss how she personally will benefit, she is in no doubt that she made the right call.
"We're storming ahead," she says of what is now the country's largest-circulation ("and very profitable") subscription monthly - at 1.24 million, of which half are paid for, it is 400,000 ahead of Reader's Digest.
While most editors have been courting the fashionably young, Soames believes that she has identified the next publishing boom.
"If men's magazines were the hot publishing strategy in the Eighties, and celebrity magazines in the Nineties, I think this demographic is set fair for more magazines to start taking it very seriously indeed," she says in the company's glass-and-steel headquarters overlooking the English Channel.
"Ignore the over-fifties at your peril."
SAGA estimates that 19 million people in Britain fit into this demographic, controlling 80 per cent of the country's wealth. The company's own database includes 7.6 million of them, to whom it provides everything from pet insurance to holidays and financial services, which are relentlessly cross promoted throughout the magazine.
Soames hopes the vast valuations being mentioned this week serve as a wakeup call to a "pretty ageist" media industry to stop neglecting an often marginalised group.
"Our readers are interested pretty much in what everybody else is interested in - books, film, arts, even if health and money are higher up their list of worries," she says. "People don't suddenly have a brain bypass when they hit 50." If anything, they are more inquiring than younger readers, and - to Soames's clear relief - less obsessed by the passing fashions on which her earlier journalism flourished. "Someone said to me last week, 'You really must do a piece about Kabbalah'. I explained that the joy of editing this magazine is that you don't need pieces about passing fads."
Since arriving in March 2002, Soames has been having "a fantastic time", adding what she calls "pizzazz" to enliven the magazine.
Her initial proclaimed goal was to "put the hip into hip replacement", which in practice has meant bringing in fresh voices and features that "push the envelope" - such as Marcelle d'Argy Smith on sex in later life (prompting complaints from outraged readers).
She also admits that some readers "left in a huff" when she dropped columnists such as Clement Freud in favour of Alexander Chancellor, Val Hennessy and Michael Brunson. "But that," she says, "is what new editors are for."
Saga Magazine has inevitably succumbed to the prevailing celebrity obsession. This month, Soames introduces her readers to a new photo-led montage of "cavorting celebrities" called The Mix, not entirely dissimilar to the Telegraph Magazine's opening Wildlife spread. "We might not always like what's on it," Soames explains in her editor's letter, "but the red carpet is now part of the zeitgeist."
Still, the relationship works both ways. Celebrities will talk to Saga Magazine. "I spent five years at the Telegraph trying to get Carly Simon and did not succeed," Soames says. "Now she's on our October cover. She's fine talking about being over 50."
But Soames is no campaigner for older people's rights. "If grey power gets itself organised, they'll be the most fantastic force in the land," she says.
"But we're a brand and a company so it's difficult to campaign. If Saga had wanted a Rosie Boycott type, they wouldn't have hired me."
Surely a pensions campaign would be popular? "I have a personal view that we should go for a universal £105 pension," she says carefully, "but that's not the magazine's view." She seems a little disappointed with her readers for not taking more action themselves.
"They get all furious, then the Government gives them an extra £100, and most of them got back in their baskets." She prefers "feisty": "Old age isn't for wimps."
So how does Soames, 55 this month, feel about getting older?
"Surprisingly relaxed," she says.
"As long as I can keep my grey cells in place, my stomach muscles working, my chin up and possibly my hemlines slightly longer.
Hemlines are my one concession to fiftydom."
Turning 50, she adds, is "like swimming in England in August.
It's a bit of a shock initially, but lovely once you're in."
BESIDES, 50 is no longer old. "It so isn't. We used to say that 50 was the new 40, but I now wonder if it's not the new 32 and a half." It is now the age at which her readers are "hitting their stride careerwise, moneywise, getting their lives back post-children". They also have the spending power that is attracting advertisers such as L'Oreal alongside the bunion treatments.
Soames's Chelsea accent - talking about a "frightfully good book" or an "adorable man" - is a stark reminder that this is the granddaughter of Winston Churchill and the sister of Nicholas Soames.
So how is she coping with lessthan-posh Folkestone, where she lives for half the week?
"There isn't much groove in Folkestone," she admits. "Moving here was tricky to start with, for all sorts of reasons, but it's fine, absolutely fine."
These reasons included the death, three weeks after arriving, of her long-term boyfriend, Christopher Bowerbank, whose marriage proposal she had just accepted.
"Look, life gets boring if you stay in the same place," she says firmly.
"There are people still breathing outside London, you know. And I still go to lots of parties in London - people very sweetly don't seem to have forgotten about me."
Besides, she works long days in Folkestone so that "when I go to London I can make up for lost time socially and cosmetically.
I'm a VBW, you know. A Very Busy Woman."
When she took the job, Soames declared that HRT was "the new cod-liver oil".
Has she revised her view at all? "Actually, cod liver oil is the new HRT," she says. "You need both nowadays." And what of the elegant blonde-tinted hair treatments that she so forcefully recommended? "Oh, Knightsbridge blonde is still the new grey," she says. "That's a definite."
(Evening Standard, September 29, 2004)
IT WAS, at the time, widely seen as a bizarre career move. Emma Soames, the magazine highflier who had edited Tatler, ES and latterly the Telegraph Magazine, was moving to Folkestone to run a subscription-only monthly read by pensioners. Sure, her £150,000 reported salary would put her among Britain's best-paid magazine editors. But why, colleagues asked, would such a well connected live-wire want to swap her glamorous London life to promote stairlifts?
Two years on, they have just received their answer. This week, the Saga Group was valued at up to £1.4 billion after its founder's son decided it was time to sell. And although Soames, as editor of Saga Magazine, will not discuss how she personally will benefit, she is in no doubt that she made the right call.
"We're storming ahead," she says of what is now the country's largest-circulation ("and very profitable") subscription monthly - at 1.24 million, of which half are paid for, it is 400,000 ahead of Reader's Digest.
While most editors have been courting the fashionably young, Soames believes that she has identified the next publishing boom.
"If men's magazines were the hot publishing strategy in the Eighties, and celebrity magazines in the Nineties, I think this demographic is set fair for more magazines to start taking it very seriously indeed," she says in the company's glass-and-steel headquarters overlooking the English Channel.
"Ignore the over-fifties at your peril."
SAGA estimates that 19 million people in Britain fit into this demographic, controlling 80 per cent of the country's wealth. The company's own database includes 7.6 million of them, to whom it provides everything from pet insurance to holidays and financial services, which are relentlessly cross promoted throughout the magazine.
Soames hopes the vast valuations being mentioned this week serve as a wakeup call to a "pretty ageist" media industry to stop neglecting an often marginalised group.
"Our readers are interested pretty much in what everybody else is interested in - books, film, arts, even if health and money are higher up their list of worries," she says. "People don't suddenly have a brain bypass when they hit 50." If anything, they are more inquiring than younger readers, and - to Soames's clear relief - less obsessed by the passing fashions on which her earlier journalism flourished. "Someone said to me last week, 'You really must do a piece about Kabbalah'. I explained that the joy of editing this magazine is that you don't need pieces about passing fads."
Since arriving in March 2002, Soames has been having "a fantastic time", adding what she calls "pizzazz" to enliven the magazine.
Her initial proclaimed goal was to "put the hip into hip replacement", which in practice has meant bringing in fresh voices and features that "push the envelope" - such as Marcelle d'Argy Smith on sex in later life (prompting complaints from outraged readers).
She also admits that some readers "left in a huff" when she dropped columnists such as Clement Freud in favour of Alexander Chancellor, Val Hennessy and Michael Brunson. "But that," she says, "is what new editors are for."
Saga Magazine has inevitably succumbed to the prevailing celebrity obsession. This month, Soames introduces her readers to a new photo-led montage of "cavorting celebrities" called The Mix, not entirely dissimilar to the Telegraph Magazine's opening Wildlife spread. "We might not always like what's on it," Soames explains in her editor's letter, "but the red carpet is now part of the zeitgeist."
Still, the relationship works both ways. Celebrities will talk to Saga Magazine. "I spent five years at the Telegraph trying to get Carly Simon and did not succeed," Soames says. "Now she's on our October cover. She's fine talking about being over 50."
But Soames is no campaigner for older people's rights. "If grey power gets itself organised, they'll be the most fantastic force in the land," she says.
"But we're a brand and a company so it's difficult to campaign. If Saga had wanted a Rosie Boycott type, they wouldn't have hired me."
Surely a pensions campaign would be popular? "I have a personal view that we should go for a universal £105 pension," she says carefully, "but that's not the magazine's view." She seems a little disappointed with her readers for not taking more action themselves.
"They get all furious, then the Government gives them an extra £100, and most of them got back in their baskets." She prefers "feisty": "Old age isn't for wimps."
So how does Soames, 55 this month, feel about getting older?
"Surprisingly relaxed," she says.
"As long as I can keep my grey cells in place, my stomach muscles working, my chin up and possibly my hemlines slightly longer.
Hemlines are my one concession to fiftydom."
Turning 50, she adds, is "like swimming in England in August.
It's a bit of a shock initially, but lovely once you're in."
BESIDES, 50 is no longer old. "It so isn't. We used to say that 50 was the new 40, but I now wonder if it's not the new 32 and a half." It is now the age at which her readers are "hitting their stride careerwise, moneywise, getting their lives back post-children". They also have the spending power that is attracting advertisers such as L'Oreal alongside the bunion treatments.
Soames's Chelsea accent - talking about a "frightfully good book" or an "adorable man" - is a stark reminder that this is the granddaughter of Winston Churchill and the sister of Nicholas Soames.
So how is she coping with lessthan-posh Folkestone, where she lives for half the week?
"There isn't much groove in Folkestone," she admits. "Moving here was tricky to start with, for all sorts of reasons, but it's fine, absolutely fine."
These reasons included the death, three weeks after arriving, of her long-term boyfriend, Christopher Bowerbank, whose marriage proposal she had just accepted.
"Look, life gets boring if you stay in the same place," she says firmly.
"There are people still breathing outside London, you know. And I still go to lots of parties in London - people very sweetly don't seem to have forgotten about me."
Besides, she works long days in Folkestone so that "when I go to London I can make up for lost time socially and cosmetically.
I'm a VBW, you know. A Very Busy Woman."
When she took the job, Soames declared that HRT was "the new cod-liver oil".
Has she revised her view at all? "Actually, cod liver oil is the new HRT," she says. "You need both nowadays." And what of the elegant blonde-tinted hair treatments that she so forcefully recommended? "Oh, Knightsbridge blonde is still the new grey," she says. "That's a definite."
(Evening Standard, September 29, 2004)
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