Daily Front Row

2012 February 12

Editor of Steele

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Michael Steele
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(NEW YORK) Us Weekly, formerly the publication of choice to pass the time at the nail salon, has evolved from glossy guilty pleasure to a weekly ogle-fest that’s more than breakup, makeup, and baby bump intel for the starry-eyed. Under the mild-mannered helm of Michael Steele, the Wenner mag has become the ultimate crib sheet for editors across the industry when it’s time to up the addictiveness ante and beef up newsstand sales.
BY ALEXANDRA ILYASHOV

How did you end up in magazines?
I was a social worker after college working as a case manager for mentally ill, formerly homeless residents of an SRO [single resident occupancy] building. Then I applied for an internship at Harper’s. 

Why? 
It began at jury duty. I was reading Harper’s and a woman asked for my thoughts on an article. Turns out she was the assistant to the editor-in-chief, and she told me to apply for an internship. I applied but I never followed up with her, being the excellent networker that I’m not. I finally got an interview with Jim Nelson back when he was an editor there. He’s a really nice guy, but a very scary interviewer.

So after your internship...
I got a job as a fact-checker at New York and I rose through the ranks, eventually becoming a senior editor. I was working on the front-of-book section, plus a grab bag of other responsibilities. After six years, I just needed a change. In 2003, Janice Min hired me to be a top editor at Us.

How were your earliest years at the mag?
The pace was insane. Janice had just gotten here. It was a young and fledgling staff, and the hours were crazy. We’d have a story meeting at 11 p.m. on a Thursday night. There was a lot of turnover in the year and a half that Bonnie was at the magazine, after I’d started. Once Janice took over, structure was put into place and the staff grew up a bit. Ten years later, many of those same people are married and have kids—it seems like half of the office has children under the age of six. The attitude is to get your work done and get out. Mondays are still horrendous—we start at 9 a.m. and finish at 1 a.m.—but we’re much more of a well-oiled machine today. There’s no way we could maintain that crazy, breakneck, finals-week-type pace forever. And we didn’t want to!

How do you and Janice differ?
Well, this is the first interview I’ve done as editor-in-chief in the two years I’ve held the title! I’d done various aspects of being EIC while I was Janice’s number two from 2003 to 2009, whether she was on vacation, maternity leave, or out for a day. But I hadn’t done them all at once—or been the face of a major organization. It’s not my style or temperament. But I’ve found that to be successful, I just have to be myself. I can’t be this larger-than-life personality. 

How did you catch wind of the new gig?
Janice called me on a Friday night, just as I was leaving for vacation, and told me that she was leaving. I said, ‘Yeah, you’ll work it out by Monday.’ I left for vacation, and on Monday Jann [Wenner] called and said, ‘We’re making you editor-in-chief, so come back.’ It ended up being a very short vacation. 

How did life change?
It’s a shift in tempo, and letting go of certain things. I like line editing, but there just isn’t time for it now. I’m constantly being presented with new decisions, so I don’t get to burrow into things. 

What did you learn from Janice?
She never checked her brain at the door. We are a guilty pleasure at Us Weekly, but we’re there to entertain you as well as inform you. On the surface, it might be a silly-sounding story, but that doesn’t mean your approach can or should be any less rigorous. With some of our competitors, you can tell when they’ve just thrown up their hands and said, well, this is just a stupid story so we’re just going to do it in a stupid way. We never let our work feel that way. We’ll write that silly headline 10 times if we need to. The Loose Talk section, for example? We agonize over which quotes to include! 

Which changes have you made? 
We do many more cooperative interviews than we used to. Over time, we’ve built up relationships with Hollywood so celebrities feel more confident having us break their news for them. That’s part of why our readers trust us. They view Us as more credible.

But is the magazine less juicy?
No. Because our core value is breaking news.

Why is Us so addictive? 
We hire a lot of really smart people, and try not to get in the way! A lot of staffers have been at the magazine the entire time that I’ve been around, so there’s a lot of experience. It’s very collaborative. 

What do you think of today’s newsstand?
There are too many magazines! But our readers are smart enough to distinguish us from our competitors. That said, we do get lumped into a category, and we worry sometimes that the more shameless things our competitors do on a regular basis can bring us down. That’s why I sometimes wish they’d go out of business.

How fiercely do you compete?
We compete with People for cooperatives, access to celebrities, and breaking news. Online, it’s only us, People, and sometimes TMZ routinely breaking celebrity news. We will compete with the other celebrity titles for newsstand buyers because they do come up with outlandish stories, which fly off the shelves. But the moment you open up their magazines, you realize it’s all untrue. 

What sets you apart?
We tend to be nicer than our competitors when we’re reporting a story very aggressively because our readers like celebrities.

OK! recently shook up its production schedule by shipping issues earlier to cut costs. Discuss! 
It’s hilarious. They’re closing issues on Thursday nights, but will crop up on the newsstands each Wednesday with all the other weeklies. So their competitors will have an additional three days to break news. It’ll be hard for them to stay competitive, not that OK! is really competing right now. I guess they’re more interested in saving money at this point. 

How do you win at the newsstand? 
Everyone here focuses exclusively on what the reader wants to know about. We often take the ‘I’ out of it. We became the paper of record for Teen Mom.

How did you get to Teen Mom first?
If it’s a show on MTV, and a good one at that, chances are someone in our office won’t shut up about it.

Other favorite triumphs?
We broke the Tiger Woods story. Some other publications get the credit, but we were the first to break that he actually cheated on his wife and have an on-the-record interview with one of his mistresses. 

What else consistently piques reader interest? 
The Bachelor franchise. It creates a news cycle of its own. These people want media coverage, which is always nice—and they bring lots of scandals with them. We also dominated the category with our coverage of the royals. One of our reporters in London was approached by reporters from British publications, and from our U.S. competitors’ publications, with offers to buy their reporting because our people were better-sourced. To be able to out-report the Brits on the royals is quite a coup! 

In general, what sells best? 
Breakups and weddings are big. Baby news of varying kinds also sells. Weight loss is also big—those four categories are sort of the cornerstones of our category! Oh, and cheating.

How ethically sound are your anonymous sources?
Many of our reporters have been here for a while, so we would never go out with a risky story based on a source we have never used before. We try to get two sources for anything remotely controversial or scandalous. Reporters are closely supervised on both coasts—their supervisors know who the anonymous sources are, and we’re often in constant conversation with those sources. We always cross-check sources to corroborate a story. Yes, you usually get two different sides from celebrity reps about the same breakup—but we’ve been doing this long enough to be able to suss out what’s PR spin and embellishment. It’s a key value with our readers that we maintain credibility, and that we’re usually right. 

How do you really feel about the Kardashians?
We love them. I personally have met Kourtney and Khloé, but I haven’t met Kim yet. They’re great. They’re currently suffering a PR crisis because of Kim’s wedding, but I hope they’ll recover. They’re very hardworking. They’ve opened their lives up to the world, and they don’t take themselves too seriously—which is great for a magazine like ours. I would never compare them to Heidi [Montag] and Spencer [Pratt], but they’re an example of a celebrity that sold really well at one point—some of our top-selling issues of all time had Heidi and Spencer on the cover—and now they can’t even get themselves arrested. Or, say, a Kate Gosselin. In the reality sector, it’s possible to reach a point where viewers just say, ‘No more!’ Lindsay Lohan is an example of that response. I don’t think the Kardashians are anywhere near that point, but if enough people stop liking you, you’re done. We don’t want that to happen—they’re great material, and they’re fun to cover! 

Does Us often choose a team when breakups hit?
We try to remain neutral whenever possible. We’re in the business of selling magazines, so you usually need to be on both sides, except in the case of someone like Kim. We covered Angelina [Jolie], and we covered Jen [Aniston]. Some of our readers passionately felt like Jen was wronged, and other readers are all about Angelina. You need to appeal to both—there is a way to have your cake and eat it too. 

Is your staff as interested and sympathetic as your readers?
Are we all cynics behind closed doors? No! I think some cynicism can definitely creep into your day-to-day work, but for the most part, our staff really loves celebrities.  If you don’t enjoy it, it’d be pretty hellish since it’s a lot of hours, a lot of hard work, and a lot of information to constantly process. 

How interested were you in celeb news before arriving at Us Weekly? 
Not very! I was certainly aware of what was going on, and I definitely read Us Weekly, but more because it was fun, humorous, and clever. Back in 2002, when Janice and Bonnie were reinventing the magazine, it was exciting to see what they were doing as a magazine editor. My interest was  more on that level than on Jessica Simpson and her personal life. 

Did that latter skill set subsequently develop? 
Oh, yes! It doesn’t take long. Before you know it, you get sucked in. 

Who do you hope gets lots of play in 2012? 
I’d love it if Adele would hook up with Ryan Gosling.