3.6/The Lived Worlds/The Magazine

The Masthead: Race, Access, and What Diversity Stopped

The Title With No Duties

The Ladder’s Missing Rungs

Where the count did exist, informally, it showed a masthead that narrowed by tier. Editorial assistants, fact-checkers, and the interns feeding the pipeline beneath them were the most integrated rank on the page — still overwhelmingly white, but not exclusively — because the rank itself sat behind a filter that did the sorting before any editor had to. The main entry points into magazine work were unpaid internships and a short list of journalism schools, chief among them Columbia’s, and both, as the CJR account noted, “tend to favor people who come from wealthy backgrounds,” with jobs that were “never posted” filled instead through the personal networks of editors who tended, without deciding to, to “affiliate, and empathize, with those like themselves.”¹ A student who could not work a summer for free in Manhattan did not clear the first rung regardless of what came after it, and an applicant’s college — the Ivy League English departments that fed Columbia’s program most reliably — narrowed the field again before a single writing sample was read.

Above the assistant tier, the ladder’s remaining rungs told the same story with fewer people to tell it about. Associate editors and staff writers of color existed at most prestige titles, but singly — a presence, not a cohort. Senior editor, features editor, managing editor: these ran almost entirely white at Vogue, at Vanity Fair, at The New Yorker, at Esquire, at Harper’s, and at The Atlantic alike, six titles spanning fashion, politics, and literary criticism. Editor-in-chief at a mainstream Condé Nast, Hearst, or Time Inc. title was a chair no person of color held. The one visible exception ran in the opposite direction from where a masthead usually looked for prestige: The New Yorker’s own fact-checking department was, by outside account, meaningfully more integrated than the editorial ranks above it — and fact-checkers were not credited on the masthead at all, which meant the department’s diversity was invisible to any reader who only scanned the editor’s page.

The pressure that eventually reached this arrangement came from outside the industry’s own reckoning. The Anita Hill hearings, in October 1991, coincided with the first wave of media-company personnel offices committing diversity language to paper at all; around the same years, the New York Association of Black Journalists, a chapter of the national body founded in the mid-1970s, began naming individual magazines in its annual reports rather than describing the industry only in aggregate.² What the pressure produced was hiring at the assistant and associate level — the entry ranks, already the least closed — without a matching current of promotion into the senior ranks above them. Diversity on the masthead stopped at the same line industry-wide: the “senior editor” rank, and, for the rare candidate who cleared even that, the courtesy appointment described above.

The Only Ones in the Room

André Leon Talley held the clearest view of that ceiling because he came closer to it than almost anyone else in the decade’s mainstream press. A North Carolina Central graduate with a master’s in French literature from Brown, he came up through Interview, Women’s Wear Daily, and a stint as the trade paper’s Paris correspondent before Condé Nast brought him to Vogue. He joined the magazine as news director in 1983, and in 1988 became its creative director under Anna Wintour — the first Black man to hold a decision-making position of that rank at a Condé Nast title.³ For decades of fashion-show seasons that followed, in Paris and Milan as much as New York, he was, by his own account, typically the only Black person seated in the room. A Yves Saint Laurent publicist, by his account, had taken to calling him “Queen Kong” — a nickname built from the oldest slander in the American vocabulary about Black bodies. Talley, recounting the episode years afterward, did not soften what it was: “It dehumanizes us, implies that we are less than human beings.”³ He held the creative director title until 1995, moved on, and returned to the magazine in 1998 in the one role the industry had, in effect, invented for people in his position: editor-at-large, a title carrying prestige and a byline but no line authority over anyone.³

He was, for most of the run, close to the only such figure any reader could name. Former Vogue staffers, speaking to a New York Times reporter years later on condition of anonymity, described a working culture at the magazine so uncomfortable for its few Black employees that some had adopted what they called a “white alter ego” — a second, performed self, gotten through the workday and set down at the door — and Black journalists who had passed through the building traded a private name for it: “Condé Nasty.”⁴ None of this ran in any trade paper at the time. It ran, when it ran at all, only in the accounts the people who had lived it gave once they no longer had to ask the building’s permission to speak.

The New Yorker took its own version of Talley’s exception in 1989, when Hilton Als — who had already written for the Village Voice — began contributing unsigned Talk of the Town pieces; he became a staff writer in 1994, one of very few Black writers on a masthead built, since its founding, almost entirely from one demographic.⁵ What that masthead had actually produced, across three decades of its own back issues, was tallied only well after the fact, by the magazine’s own archive editor, Erin Overbey, who ran the count herself and published it. The tally found zero film reviews credited to a critic of color in the entire span; zero pieces of art criticism by a critic of color; zero classical-music criticism by a woman or a critic of color. Black critics had written a sliver of the book reviews — under one in twenty. A Black editor had touched a vanishingly small fraction of the magazine’s print features across the same stretch, a figure Overbey rounded, without exaggeration, to essentially nothing.⁶ Her own verdict on what the count showed: mastheads at magazines of this rank “resemble member registries at Southern country clubs circa 1950.”⁶

The Parallel Masthead

None of this reflected a shortage of talent; it reflected where the mainstream titles had declined to look. A separate press, older than the prestige glossies’ unease about the subject, had been promoting Black editors into senior chairs for a generation. Susan L. Taylor ran Essence as editor-in-chief from 1981 to 2000 and in 1998 became the first Black woman to receive the Magazine Publishers of America’s Henry Johnson Fisher Award, one of the industry’s own highest honors — awarded, by the trade body that had never counted its own masthead’s race, to a woman who had spent two decades running one.⁷ Ebony, under John H. Johnson, carried a monthly circulation that passed two million in the mid-1980s and stood near that mark through the 1990s, from a company that had grown, over the same decades, into the largest Black-owned publishing house in the country.⁸ Newer titles kept opening through the decade: Emerge, launched in September 1989;⁹ and Vibe, tested by Quincy Jones with Time Warner backing in a single 1992 issue before regular publication began the following year.¹⁰ A Black editor could hold a senior chair in her twenties at one of these titles in a way she could not at a mainstream monthly twenty years further into a career. Editors crossed from the Black press into the mainstream titles far more often than the reverse ever happened, and the mainstream press did not, on the whole, notice what it was declining to learn from the arrangement.

The Building Made It Legible

Condé Nast’s 1999 move to 4 Times Square, a tower designed by Fox & Fowle, put the company’s existing hierarchy on a floor plan for the first time. The company’s space ran from the fourth floor to the twenty-third; its flagship glossies each held a floor to themselves near the top of that range, while other titles shared floors with each other and with corporate departments that produced no pages at all.¹¹ The building carried the era’s usual signals of progressiveness — a cafeteria designed by Frank Gehry, energy-efficient systems the developer publicized as among the first of their kind in a commercial tower of its size — around a floor assignment that simply relocated whatever the company’s masthead already was.¹¹ The move did not change who held which job. It took a distribution that had existed all along, informally, unremarked, and printed it onto the floor directory in the lobby, where anyone waiting for an elevator could read it. A visitor who knew which floor she had been asked to report to knew, before the doors opened, roughly where in the company’s opinion she stood.