The Coveteur just launched a new series called Deskside, which features interviews with leaders in various creative fields about their career trajectories. Their first interview subject is Stella Bugbee, Editorial Director of The Cut, and for a relatively short interview, she provides numerous gems on fashion journalism. These range from deciding what to cover to daily editorial schedules, whom to employ and how she strikes balance between print and digital. She’s also responsible for bringing Cathy Horyn out of retirement, so she’s plenty accomplished in my books. I find her mantra about “cover[ing] dumb stuff really smartly and smart stuff really lightly” very astute, just as her belief that a good knowledge of different disciplines strengthens your work, that “really good content does get the audience it deserves,” to “push your ideas as far as they can go” and that an interpretation of the news is more important that merely reporting it. As a whole, these nuggets are as good as it comes in terms of advice for fledgling writers, but my personal favourite is her insistence on not dumbing down content:

“I think we are in a really exciting moment where the audience is super smart and they want to be spoken to smartly. You know, you can have a site like ours the reader, she’s a super smart woman who wants to know about politics and trends and shopping, and read a super personal essay about someone’s mother. Treating people like whole people—I’m hoping that’s the trend. I think online is just getting more and more ambitious. I really hope that’s the trend going forward.” 

Read the full article here.

Image Credit:
Photograph of Stella Bugbee by Erik Tanner from The Coveteur