In short
A reported history of Condé Nast’s rise to cultural dominance (1980s-early 2000s) and its decline in the digital era, including how it shaped American “high-low” culture and elite mystique, and why it struggled to adapt online.
Guest backgrounds
Michael Grynbaum is a media reporter for The New York Times and author of Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the media dynasty that reshaped America. Peter Kafka is the host and chief correspondent at Business Insider.
Key claims
Condé Nast’s peak influence came when magazines were scarce mass media and advertisers paid premium rates; Cy Newhouse modernized the company by restarting titles and importing British editors like Tina Brown and Anna Wintour; Condé Nast missed the internet by protecting the print brands and building parallel “internet” sites; celebrity editors and lavish spending helped create the company’s “enchantment,” but that myth eroded after 2008/2016-17.
Notable examples
Vanity Fair’s 1980s reboot tied to Reagan-era yuppies; GQ making menswear mainstream (Tom Ford cited); Condé Nast’s early Reddit investment (about $10M to ~$2.1B, later spun out); Tina Brown’s Fleet Street-style rich-people scandal approach; comparisons to The Devil Wears Prada; speculation that Vogue/Vanity Fair won’t be sold while Donald Newhouse is alive.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOMichael Grynbaum on Writing 'Empire of the Elite'
0:04 to 1:23
Michael discusses his motivations for writing a book about Condé Nast.
“Stock up on Welch's Fruit Snacks, made with whole fruit and now made with no artificial dyes.”
Michael Grynbaum on Writing 'Empire of the Elite'
2:29 to 4:00
Michael discusses his motivations for writing a book about Condé Nast.
“and the underlings who scrambled below them.”
The Significance of Magazines in Pop Culture
4:00 to 5:51
An exploration of the impact magazines had on culture before the internet.
“You know, the first thing that attracted me to it was just how fun I thought writing this book would be.”
The Rise of Condé Nast in the Late 20th Century
5:51 to 9:21
A look at how Condé Nast became a dominant force in publishing.
“And there's nothing quite like that today.”
Influence of Key Figures at Condé Nast
9:21 to 14:00
Discussion of how influential editors shaped Condé Nast's success.
“was that I learned so much of this as well.”
The Evolution of Condé Nast's Influence
14:00 to 24:53
Explore how Condé Nast shaped modern media culture and celebrity status.
“The idea that this is a weird combination is just as staggering as the idea of these things existing before the Internet.”
The Evolution of Condé Nast's Influence
24:57 to 25:21
Explore how Condé Nast shaped modern media culture and celebrity status.
“But choosing a snack you and your kids can both get behind doesn't have to be.”
Condé Nast and 'The Devil Wears Prada'
26:22 to 28:00
Discuss the cultural impact of Condé Nast through the lens of the film.
“President, I want things to always be right between us.”
The Cultural Impact of Condé Nast and Work Ethic
28:00 to 38:11
Explore the demanding work culture at Condé Nast and its influence on personal ambition.
“however many, you know, you've got 100 different names.”
The Cultural Impact of Condé Nast and Work Ethic
38:14 to 39:33
Explore the demanding work culture at Condé Nast and its influence on personal ambition.
“Back to school season can be tough on parents.”
Show all 16 chapters
The Future of Condé Nast and Its Branding
39:46 to 42:00
Discussion on the current state and future prospects of Condé Nast publications.
“But regardless of how you feel about Gen Z, it's undeniable that they're changing national politics.”
The Future of Vogue and Vanity Fair
42:00 to 43:14
Discussion on the potential sale of major assets like Vogue and Vanity Fair.
“And then sometimes if you're talking to someone at Wired, maybe Wired counts.”
Cultural Shifts and Condé Nast's Decline
43:14 to 45:36
Exploration of how cultural changes after 2008 affected Condé Nast's influence.
“despite all our lucrative holdings in cable, what people know the Newhouse is for are these magazines.”
Diversity and Leadership Changes at Vanity Fair
45:36 to 47:24
Examination of changes in leadership and the magazine's direction under Radhika Jones.
“I mean, the whole idea of exclusivity that Connie Ness was built on really started to collapse.”
The Ill-Fated Launch of Portfolio Magazine
47:24 to 49:27
A detailed recount of the extravagant and ultimately doomed launch of Portfolio magazine.
“I don't know if there's any way today without the resources they had in the past to kind of make Condé an enchanted place the way it used to be.”
Michael Grynbaum's Independent Perspective
49:27 to 50:29
Michael discusses his motivations and approach for writing about Condé Nast.
“And I remember the portfolio went, Business Week was sold for a dollar to Bloomberg and Forbes and Fortune were, even then, you could tell they were ailing.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Peter Kafka:This episode is brought to you by Welch's Fruit Snacks. Back to school season can be tough on parents, but choosing a snack you and your kids can both get behind doesn't have to be. Stock up on Welch's Fruit Snacks, made with whole fruit and now made with no artificial dyes. It's a snack kids already love and one you can feel good about giving them. Go back to school with Welch's Fruit Snacks, now made with no artificial dyes. chronic migraine 15 or more headache days a month each lasting four hours or more can make me feel like a spectator in my own life botox on a botulinum toxin a prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine it's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month it's the number one prescribed branded chronic migraine preventive treatment prescription botox is injected by your doctor effects of botox may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition.
0:58Peter Kafka:Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue, and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis, or Lambert-Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. Why wait? Ask your doctor, visit BotoxChronicMigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more.
1:32Peter Kafka:From the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Channels with Peter Kafka. That is me. I'm also the chief correspondent at Business Insider. And today we're talking about magazines. Yep, magazines. They are, of course, a relic of the past, but Not that far back in the past. I know a plucky young man who moved to New York City from the Midwest, so he could try to get a job at a glossy magazine, and then he did. And he had a ton of fun, and he learned a ton. And now that person records podcast introductions in his shorts because it's really hot out, and if he puts on the AC, it makes too much noise.
2:07Peter Kafka:But enough about me. Today I want to talk about Condé Nast, which defined the magazine business and culture back in the heyday of magazines, basically the 80s and 90s. And now, like every other media empire, it is scrambling to catch up to the internet. It's entirely unclear what becomes of it in the future, but it's definitely worth looking back at the people who ran it at its peak and the underlings who scrambled below them. And that's what Michael Grinbaum has done with his new book. It's called Empire of the Elite. Michael covers media, including Condé Nast for the New York Times. His book is a very readable history.
2:43Peter Kafka:I very much recommend it. this conversation does go back in time to talk about the good old days and maybe what could have been done to keep them going but wasn't and also some prognostication about what's to come spoiler michael doesn't think jeff bezos is buying vogue anytime soon neither do i for that matter so here's me and michael grinbaum i'm here with michael grinbaum media reporter the new york times more important than that, just as important. He's written a book designed for people who listen to this podcast. It's called Empire of the Elite Inside Condé Nast, the media dynasty that reshaped America.
3:21Peter Kafka:Welcome, Michael. Thank you so much for having me. This is fun. I was I was spieling at you beforehand. I said this book was pretty much designed for me. I moved here in 1997 from the Midwest so I could hopefully work at a magazine. I didn't dare dream that I'd get to go work at Condé Nast and ended up getting right out of the Internet. But I still When I moved here in 1997, Condé Nast, first and foremost, Time, Inc., secondarily, were kind of the centers of the media world. And it's kind of wild now in this era to remember that, which is a long-winded way of saying, why write a book about a magazine publisher in 2025?
3:57Peter Kafka:What should an audience today get from this book? You know, the first thing that attracted me to it was just how fun I thought writing this book would be. I broke the news that Graydon Carter was leaving Vanity Fair back in 2017. And when I wrote that story for The Times, it was almost like an elegy of this era of glossy magazines when they were the cultural arbiters, when they kind of told us what movies to go see, what clothes to wear. And I just loved marinating in that world. I think because similar to you, you know, I grew up in New England and I came to New York. Well, probably my first internship was 2004.
4:34for. But I was just besotted by kind of the glamorous media world that Manhattan had represented all that time. And Condé Nast, you know, still was the pinnacle of that. I remember Gawker would have the Daily Report from the fancy cafeteria and like who was in, who was out.
4:51Peter Kafka:Gawker, which is also now outdated, but it's sort of the main premise of Gawker for a while was, we'll tell you what's really happening inside of Condé Nast. So when I was thinking about a project that I could be absorbed in for three years, you know, I thought about Condé Nast, the characters there, the eccentricity of it. And then when I looked around, I couldn't find a satisfying history of the company. There's some great memoirs that editors have written. And Tina Brown's Vanity Fair Diaries is just a fantastic, vivid account. And Graydon Carter just put it as out memoir. That didn't exist when I started writing this.
5:23But what I couldn't find was a book that was reported journalistically and also captured just the sweep and the profound influence of these magazines over sort of the last decades of the 20th century. It's hard to imagine now, but the way Vogue had a stranglehold on fashion, Architectural Digest could make or break, you know, decorators and set design trends around the world. Vanity Fair chose which movie stars that we, you know, worshipped. And there's nothing quite like that today. And so I think a bit of that nostalgia for that era. I was interested in how this company had created such a mystique around it and then how they missed so badly the digital turn and why they've kind of become diminished today.
6:13Peter Kafka:Great, because you've teased the end of the conversation I want to have with you. Just to push a little further, it's very, very hard to wrap your head around in 2025 the importance of magazines in a certain era and the importance of Condé Nast in a certain era. What is what is Peak Magazine in the U.S. and when is Peak Condé Nast? Yeah, I think in some ways they coincide. I think the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s is Peak Condé Nast, where you had kind of magazines that were reaching millions of readers, not just in the U.S., but if you think about the foreign editions of Vogue, I mean, these these magazines were being exported kind of around the world.
6:55and it was a time where I think, you know, to be on the cover of Vanity Fair could make your career.
7:03Peter Kafka:It's interesting, right? Because it's pre-internet for the most part of the time you just carved out, but it's fully mass media, right? People are, it's not like people are waiting by their mailbox for whatever, they're watching television. Why did a magazine matter to pop? Why did any given magazine matter to pop culture and what kind of magazine mattered? Yeah, I think one thing that's hard to imagine today is the scarcity of media back then. Like, yes, we had television and radio, but, you know, those broadcasts came and went. I mean, you know, you didn't have on-demand streaming like you have today.
7:40Magazines, by kind of sitting on your coffee table for the month and sort of coming straight to your home, coming through the post office slot. I remember waiting for issues of The New Yorker because I couldn't wait to see how did The New Yorker writers choose to write about the events of the last week. And, you know, you couldn't log on to a 24 hour news site to sort of get a hot take or get a, you know. Right. And everything was mass.
8:05Peter Kafka:It was mass. Right. There wasn't a sort of the magazines were sort of the Internet. Right. They were the issue. If you found The New Yorker is a great example. Well, lots of these magazines had versions of it. Oh, if you're into a particular thing, you can go deep on it here. You're not going to get it somewhere else. And I think to access what was happening in the culture, the culture outside of your suburb or your small town, you know, before the Internet, I mean, the magazines were sort of the beacons of that. They kind of brought to you what was going on in New York and Los Angeles and Paris.
8:34They were in almost almost travelogues. You know, you could sort of in your imagination kind of journey the world. And it was a way to kind of escape the humdrum day to day life.
8:46Peter Kafka:I was pleasantly surprised reading your book because I assumed this is a serious book about Condé Nast and we'll go back to the origins of Condé Nast and all the way through. And you do go to the origins, but you really spend most of your time on 80s, 90s, 2000s Condé Nast. And one thing I didn't fully understand, I was a little embarrassed, is that Condé was not, up until the 80s, it was not sort of the dominant magazine publisher in the country, let alone New York. the Condé Nast that we know of today. Who's responsible for the modern incarnation and the power that it had in the 80s, 90s, and parts of the 2000s?
9:21So part of the pleasure of reporting this book was that I learned so much of this as well. And I was, you know, at one point, I mean, this is a company with 110-year history. At one point I said to my wife, well, maybe I should do this Robert Caro style. You know, we can have three volumes of the worlds of Condé Nast. And she sort of said -
9:38Peter Kafka:Everyone who worked at Condé Nast can read it and no one else will. Yes, exactly. And my wife said, well, it's not Lyndon Johnson, it's Condé Nast. And I thought that was a good point. Condé Nast was sort of this chic little publisher up until the late 1970s. And it was read by socialites and sort of the upper middle classes. You know, Vogue was a guide to high fashion, which you have to remember was not something that the average person paid any attention to. I mean, people were watching runway shows across the, you know, across the Atlantic. So it was small. It was really Vogue, Mademoiselle, glamour.
10:15And Cy Newhouse, who is the son of a newspaper mogul and was born wealthy, but was a very awkward, awkward teenager, awkward young man who really had a hard time finding his place in his father's empire. He had this predilection for magazines and he decided to take over Condé Nast, which was at the time the family's money was coming from newspapers around the country, which had huge profit. Advanced publications. And Cy had this interest in art and literature, and he said, well, I'll learn the magazine trade. And starting in the late 1970s, and really I can trace it just to the time when his father dies, which, you know, I'll let the Freudians kind of analyze that.
10:59But Cy decides to go on a spree. He starts a magazine called Self, which is the first magazine that Condé Nast had started anew in something like 50 years. And it was kind of for a yuppie crowd. It was about sort of materialism and making it in the corporate world. And it was a huge, huge hit. And it inspired Psy to then he bought GQ, which at the time was kind of this, again, like kind of a semi-obscure magazine about men's fashion, which was a real niche topic that you didn't really read about in mainstream magazines. And then he decides to restart Vanity Fair, which hadn't existed since the 1930s.
11:38This was a moment, the Reagan 80s. there was a big influx of money into the urban classes, the rise of the yuppie, the Alex P. Keaton era. In fact, Tina Brown's first issue of Vanity Fair appeared the same week that Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous premiered on television. And it really caught the zeitgeist of this kind of new American nouveau riche. And the magazines just they were like right there to kind of service that demographic.
12:05Peter Kafka:And they were it was a money making business. It wasn't a thing you did. I I mean, the way you're presenting it, he was doing it to get out from his father's shoulder. The real money was in newspapers, but he was doing it to make money and to have cultural employment. Yes. You could do both in theory. You could do both. And the truth is, you know, Condon asked for all the crazy spending and we can get into that, but it did make a profit for many of those years. It made less of a profit than Hearst or Time Life, some of the bigger sort of competitors. But it was kind of an also ran. It was considered a third-tier publishing company until Cy Newhouse really reinvented it and crucially started importing these very talented British editors by the name of Tina Brown and Anna Wintour.
12:47Peter Kafka:So you've got the cover here has three faces. You've got Tina, Anna Wintour still there, Graydon Carter not there anymore but still around. Cy Newhouse is not on the cover. I assume it's partly because most people couldn't identify as Cy Newhouse, even a Condé Nast reader. But also, I mean, you're kind of laying up a thesis right on the cover, right? These three powerful editors are responsible for sort of the modern version of Condé Nast as a financial force, as a cultural force. Yes, that's right. And I think what became apparent to me was how much, you know, not only did it become a success in the magazine industry, but, you know, Tina Brown, when she took over Vanity Fair, you know, the way she mythologized movie stars and she brought a bit of that Fleet Street sensibility of sort of tawdry stories of rich people behaving badly.
13:37It really had an impact on journalism writ large.
13:41Peter Kafka:It's really funny reading you talk about this and how she, you know, brought this idea of high low into publishing where today anyone, if you said, what is high low? I think most people listening to this podcast would get it. It's standard, right? You're you're mixing high power and money and high status with low. Right. That's what it means. Murder trials. The idea that this is a weird combination is just as staggering as the idea of these things existing before the Internet. Right. And it's just in the Internet. It's the reason we know all this is it's just, of course, you mix high, low. Of course, you have aspirational stuff with dirty stuff and highbrow stuff with lowbrow stuff.
14:21Peter Kafka:Of course you do. But the idea that it was a novel was wild to think about. It's so ingrained into sort of media culture today, but it really was sort of being forged by Condé Nast in the 80s. You know, the New York Times style section, which got started around 1990, 1991, was in some ways a response to the success of Vanity Fair and some of its imitators that were doing this kind of high, high concept lifestyle journalism. And the New York Times decided that it needed to compete with that. So you sort of see Tina's influence just throughout the ecosphere of the media system. And I would say the same for GQ, a magazine that in the 80s kind of made it OK for straight guys to care about clothes, which now, I mean, our culture is just inundated with menswear blogs and, you know, video sites.
15:13And people are obsessed with watches and what athletes wear to games.
15:15Peter Kafka:And also it's not weird to talk about your abs or lack of them, any of that stuff. And it would have all been considered gay, basically, to talk about up until a certain time. And by the way, you're absolutely right. There was a profit motive there. You know, this was not Cy Newhouse putting out these magazines as some kind of, you know, public service. I mean, he wanted to make money. And by the way, there are sexy girls on the cover. You know, there are semi nude photo shoots of celebrities. I mean, let's not pretend that this was the, you know, had the highest aspirations in terms of art and culture.
15:47But I do think that what Condé Nast did was it did bring kind of the avant-garde and kind of edgy photography and witty and literary writing. It brought it into the dentist's office and it brought it into the living rooms of, you know, the upper middle class families in suburbs around the country. And by the way, for Tom Ford, for instance, we were talking about GQ. You know, he was growing up in New Mexico and he's talked about getting GQ every month and sort of realizing that there was a world out there that understood kind of a young gay kid like him.
16:20Peter Kafka:Did Cy Newhouse understand that he was sort of elevating? I mean, there weren't really celebrity editors. I mean, there were editors of note in New York and New York culture, but certainly I was growing up in Minnesota reading about Tina Brown taking over New Yorker and what a big deal it was. And the idea that someone in the Midwest would know who the editor of the New Yorker was seems bizarre to me. Were there celebrity editors prior to this? And did Cy Newhouse sort of have a model in place when he was plucking these folks from basically obscurity? Did he want to make them celebrity editors or did that sort of happen on its own?
16:57So it's a great question. And, you know, the magazine nerds out there, I'm sure, are going to point to Esquire in the 1960s, which I think it's worth us mentioning. Those magazines were very influential at the time. The George Lois covers. For a certain kind of person in a certain kind of culture. That's exactly right. And a certain kind of person might know the name Clay Felker or Harold Hayes. But the, you know, the person reading Liz Smith's gossip column in Detroit, you know, they're not aware of who that is. Whereas Tina Brown and Anna Wintour, you know, Anna is one of the most famous people in the world now.
17:31Now, the growth of the celebrity editors, I would say it's twofold. One was you have to think about kind of the media culture of the 80s and 90s, you know, the rise of cable TV, of talk radio. I think there was kind of an appetite for these sort of figures that emerged then. But I also think that the way Conde Nast elevated its editors, the way they paid for their mortgages so they could live in beautiful homes, the way they were chauffeured around New York City in a black town car that waited for them outside of restaurants, the way they were in the gossip columns about what they were wearing and who they were partying with, there was a logic to it, which was that Conde Nast itself began to acquire this mystique.
18:16it sort of became seen as this kind of enchanted land where, you know, money flowed endlessly and editors had every resource available.
18:26Peter Kafka:Editors of magazines were celebrities. I just got to sit on this for a second. The idea that that someone who was an actual star, a Hollywood star, music star, whomever, a head of state, would want the approval of a magazine editor who might put them on the cover of the magazine or invite them to a certain kind of party. Again, hard to wrap your head around today. Absolutely. It did feel like writing about a lost world, which was some of the joy and some of the pathos in doing it. I think a lot of people have nostalgia for that era just because they grew up with those magazines and kind of appreciated what they stood for.
19:05Peter Kafka:I was texting someone who used to work at Condé Nast today about something totally unrelated to this. But I said, oh, have you seen the book? What do you think? Maybe you've talked to this person. They said, I hope it's, I have read the book. I hope it's more than the same old town car, this expensive hotel, that, which I've seen in the excerpts. There's a big and more nuanced story, and I'm curious, Michael captured it. So I'll let you and the person I'm texting to resolve the second part. But I want to hear more about the excess, because I think a lot of folks want to. It's not a coincidence, right, that the people who are excerpting at the Times or are excerpting your book are focusing on that expense and the town cars.
19:43Peter Kafka:Um, what funded all of that? Did magazines themselves make enough money to buy editors' homes all over Manhattan and fun town cars 24-7? So you have to remember, magazines were once, believe it or not, a very profitable business. And the luxury advertisers that saw Condé Nast as the most direct route between them and a socially aspirant, nouveau riche, yuppie crowd that would be interested in their wares you know, they were willing to pay very high rates to get access to that audience. And the Condé Nast magazines in the quality of the paper and just the luxurious nature of them, I think, offered the best vessel for those advertisers.
20:27So they were selling huge amounts of ads. I mean, you remember those issues of Vogue that would land like a like a doorstop.
20:34Peter Kafka:Yep. And it was funny for a while in tech, a newly a new a new head of Yahoo or whoever, then Marissa Mayer was head of Yahoo, did this. But a lot of a lot of the people who sort of ascend to the top of a tech organization would turn around one day ago. You know, I was looking at Vanity Fair and it turns out the ads there are just as exciting as the content. And I think advertising on the Internet could be just as exciting as the content. And then, of course, that never went anywhere. But it was true that the ads were something that you wanted to consume as a reader as much as the text. What was bankrolling that as well was Cy Newhouse's family fortune.
21:09His brother Donald was running newspapers around the country at a time when newspapers were some of the best businesses in the world. So advanced publications, the family's holding company, which is private, by the way, so they didn't have to report out profit and loss to Wall Street analysts or deal with quarterly reports. they saw it was up to sigh whether something got spent or not. And if he thought something was worth the expense, something was beautiful enough or lavish enough to fund, then he could sign off on it.
Read the full transcript
21:38Peter Kafka:And something you point out over and over, and you've got several chapters dedicated to the excess, but it was to be praised. It wasn't just that it was tolerated to spend money, right? You were expected to spend money. It was meant to be part of the image all the way down to the lowly assistants. You've got a great anecdote there about John Kelly, who now runs Puck, running around Venice, trying to find a prototype magazine for Graydon Carter. And the way he does that is he takes out the$10 ,000, 10 ,000 euro notes that he has in his hotel, because that's what you traveled with if you were a Condé Nast assistant, because you might have to go bribe gondoliers.
22:17Peter Kafka:Like, it's a wild story. You've got a million of those. Again, 24 hour, 24 seven car services, which seems less of a big deal in an Uber world. But back then, that was a huge status symbol. And on and on and on. And travel, and you could not write forever at some of these magazines and still make a lot of money just being an employee of the magazine. So, you know, when I started developing the idea for the book, I didn't want to fall into the trap of just having, you know, these endless stories about the meals at the Four Seasons where they would just walk up and walk out of the restaurant because the bill went straight to Conde Nast and the Concorde flights to go to shows in Paris.
23:00And that's all true and it's delightful. And I hope that, you know, the book has those details, their sort of rewards for the reader. But I actually, I wanted to write about a cultural institution that I thought hadn't quite gotten its due as a real exporter of American cultural influence in the late 20th century. I really think of Connie Nass almost like one of the movie studios, the old Hollywood studios of the 1930s, kind of this culture factory that was almost creating this idea of the high life and what it meant to be affluent and then exporting it out to literally aspirational.
23:37Peter Kafka:This is what you should aspire to. And it's going to cost us a lot to put it on. So that's what we're going to do. We can't do this on the cheap. I think when you look at the history of Conde Nast magazines, you also get a history of what it meant to be elite in America over the course of these decades. And that changed quite a bit. I mean, you know, the Conde Nast of the 60s and 70s catered to this waspy Eastern establishment that was, you know, very, very rigid and narrow. And by the time you get to the 80s and 90s, you know, people are much more flaunting their money. There's a sort of a showiness to it.
24:11New money is not an insult. And Vanity Fair, you know, of that era is in some ways the ultimate expression of that philosophy. So, you know, I think class is a topic that is not it's it imbues all parts of American life, but it's also kind of one of these dirty topics that people don't really bring up that often. It's sort of like sex and politics at a dinner table. And I think that, you know, part of people's like kind of excitement about Conde Nast is it sort of in a way tackles those class, those questions about class straight on. And I think people kind of, they secretly do want to like engage in that conversation.
24:47Peter Kafka:We'll be right back with Michael Grinbaum. But first, a word from a sponsor.
24:53Peter Kafka:This episode is brought to you by Welch's Fruit Snacks. Back to school season can be tough on parents. But choosing a snack you and your kids can both get behind doesn't have to be. Stock up on Welch's Fruit Snacks, made with whole fruit and now made with no artificial dyes. It's a snack kids already love and one you can feel good about giving them. Go back to school with Welch's Fruit Snacks, now made with no artificial dyes. Chronic migraine. 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more, can make me feel like a spectator in my own life. Botox, onabotulinum toxin A, prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine.
25:32Peter Kafka:It's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month. It's the number one prescribed branded chronic migraine preventive treatment. Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Allerge your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue, and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness.
26:02Peter Kafka:Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis or Lambert-Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. Why wait? Ask your doctor, visit BotoxChronicMigraine.com, or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more. Dear Mr. President, I want things to always be right between us. I also know I've been distracted all week, forgetting to eat throughout the days and even forgetting to sleep. I never want to bring you anything but joy.
26:37Peter Kafka:I'm sorry I lost my focus. You are all that matters to me. I don't ever want to let you down. Thank you for being my guardian and protector in this life. I have learned so much about myself on this trip. For the first time in I don't know how long, you forced me to unplug. I didn't have to be human printer. Thank you for always being there for me. To modify a classic, I could not have parted with you to anyone less worthy. And I will add, it is I who is unworthy. With all my heart, Natalie. What is going on with Natalie Harp, President Trump's human printer, on Today Explained from Vox?
27:24Peter Kafka:You have an aside in there. you say the devil wears Prada, which is sort of most people's understanding of Condé Nast, or at least Anna Wintour and Vogue, even though they don't call those, they're not called Anna Wintour and they're not called Vogue, is actually more or less accurate. Not in the details, but sort of the gestalt, right? The vibe of working at that place, the terror you might feel as an underling who isn't wearing the right kind of shoes or anything else and doesn't know how to pronounce so-and-so's name who may not. You have the test in there that a Condé Nast low-level employee was supposed to recognize however many, you know, you've got 100 different names.
28:04Peter Kafka:So if you've seen the movie, does that, do you have a, do you feel like you've got a decent sense of Condé Nast? Well, it's cartoonish in some parts, but actually, so The Devil Wears Proud is one of my favorite movies, and I think it's one of the best movies ever made about professional ambition. And I actually my my interpretation of that movie is that her friends who are encouraging her to work less and go out and party are actually the villains of that movie because she wants to succeed in a very competitive industry. And she wants she's being held to an extremely high standard by a very demanding boss.
28:36But she's at the very top of Connie Ness represented the very top of the magazine game. And, yeah, it like, you know, she has to devote her life to it and she can't go out and see a play with her father. And, you know, that's unfortunate. But I always thought that the friends who were attempting her to kind of, you know, well, why? You know, you're young. You should. I mean, you know, if you're going to succeed in a cutthroat industry, that's what it takes. And I think Condé Nast was a place that demanded a lot of you. And I don't think that's a bad thing.
29:03Peter Kafka:Yeah. Although we talked to like a recent college graduate and they'll start telling you about work-life balance and they might have a different take on who the villain is. Well, again, Devil Wears Prada goes back to I think it was 2001. It was a different time. So now things are very different today. And, of course, the tradeoff, right? I mean, if you were sort of a young grunt at Connie Nass getting paid very little, at least you had these perks of, you know, you would sort of have access to these celebrities. You could go to parties. There was like a bit of glamour to it. I think, unfortunately, today, as it is across all of media, I mean, media is a little less fun than any.
29:35Listen, I love being a journalist and I'd rather do it than anything else. But I think that it's just a little less fun these days. And so, you know, when you're thinking about the cost, you know, the cost benefit of it, you're thinking I'm doing all this work and, you know, to get clicks on an SEO optimized website. There's no marginal glamour associated with it.
29:54Peter Kafka:Exactly. You mentioned at the beginning that, you know, these guys were sort of blindsided or couldn't figure out the Internet. And I was going to ask you about that, but I don't really know who I can't think of another major media company, let alone media organization that said, oh, we see the Internet coming. We're going to react appropriately and we're going to thrive. Some of them have sort of fumbled their way into it, and Conde actually accidentally has made billions of dollars by investing in Reddit early on. But that certainly was not core of the strategy. What's your take on sort of, and you mentioned this a bunch, the idea that sort of the importance of Conde Nast has now been replicated and consumed, subsumed by TikTok and Instagram and the high-low.
30:35Peter Kafka:The idea of a magazine being something that's important in 2025, as we've said over and over in this conversation, is archaic. Is there an alternate history where Cy Newhouse had a chance to sort of maneuver the properties in the face of the Internet? So I agree with you. And Kanye is, you know, far from the only offender here in missing the Internet. Every media company struggled with it. And I tried to calibrate that in the book. You know, part of the reason why I didn't sort of the book, I would say the last couple of chapters look at the recent decline, but I really sort of focused on the heyday.
31:08And in some part it was because, I mean, the story of how the Internet, you know, has eroded the business model and afflicted these companies. It's true across every company.
31:16Peter Kafka:And we cover it every week on the show. So it's not a new idea. Now, that said, I think what Conde, to me, their biggest sin. And now I'm going to now again, this is all clear in hindsight. And now I'm going to use some jargon from today's media consultant class. But if you think about the brands of Condé Nast, and by the way, anyone at Condé at that period would flinch at the idea of Vogue as a brand. I mean, Vogue to them represented a way of life. But it was a brand. These were some of the best known brands and magazine titles in the world. And instead of planting the flag on the Internet, creating GQ.com, Vogue.com, Conde wanted to protect the magazine.
31:59Cy Newhouse said, well, I don't want to cannibalize the business for Vogue, so I'm going to make Style.com. We're going to do Epicurious instead of Gourmet.com. And so they created sort of this parallel Internet world of Conde Nast. It's less than. It was always less than. It never had the imprimatur of Cy and his top lieutenants. and it didn't take advantage of really what was Conde's most potent asset, which is the worldwide recognition for its magazines.
32:27Peter Kafka:Do you think, though, that even had they done that and they went early in and said, Vogue.com, and by the way, it's Anna Wintour, and here she is, you know, writing captions for your slideshows. Do you think that would have worked, though, given, I mean, what we have today is that, you know, again, a bunch of people know who Anna Wintour is, but a lot of people who care about fashion probably don't, and they're scrolling, and they don't really care about what an older lady who may or may not still be working at Condé Nast does. And just the way that people consume everything, let alone culture, is just so radically different.
32:58Peter Kafka:Is there any way do you think that would have worked? Well, I mean, you know, it's impossible to say. I would point out that so very few young people get Vogue, the physical magazine, and you could read any number of websites talking about how out of touch it is. And yet when they run photos of Lauren Sanchez or they put Jill Biden on the cover or they put Kamala Harris on the cover wearing Converse sneakers, you end up with this whole cultural conversation about why Vogue did what it did. And there's this bizarre kind of distance between the fact that people say, well, I don't read that magazine.
33:34But it still means something. It still symbolizes the establishment. And I think, listen, as our generation grows older and younger people who never encountered Vogue become the main consumer base, that will dissipate. But for today, I still think people care what Kande thinks.
33:55Peter Kafka:I mentioned Reddit. You spend very little time on it. I guess it's probably not that interesting to talk about in the context of this. But just for our listeners, since Reddit is very important to a lot of people who listen to this podcast, how did Condé Nast end up owning slash not owning, but really kind of owning Reddit? it. Stephen Newhouse, who's the Newhouse who's sort of now in charge of Connie Nass in advance, you know, I always felt he kind of got a bad rep because he was the one member of the family who got interested in the Internet early on. And he actually went to the MIT Media Lab back in like 92, 93 and was studying with Nicholas Negropon and sort of got interested in the Internet when all his family members were like, what is this newfangled thing?
34:39So he was kind of in charge of some of these internet investments. And around 2004, 2005, I think one of his scouts kind of heard about this company called Reddit being, you know, built out of a dorm room in the Boston.
34:49Peter Kafka:This is after the first internet boom, sort of the bubble has burst, but people are plugging away and working on interesting stuff. MySpace has started to be a hot property back then. That's right. And, you know, you have to remember, it kind of did buy Wired, which I suppose is the most old media type of tech publication, but they did have a foothold in there. Steve Nuwes got very interested in Reddit when the email came in to the Reddit founders saying Conde Nast wants to meet with you. They had to Google Conde Nast because they had no idea what it was. And here's what else I really give them credit for.
35:19They acquired Reddit. It was later spun out. But for a while, Conde owned it and they kind of let them do their own thing. It was like a skunk works.
35:27Peter Kafka:I always wondered about that. How much of that was a decision to let them do their own thing and or when someone like me would call up because reddit for a long time was the cesspool of the internet was considered that and they're you know look what some terrible redditor said on reddit today and periodically i would call up condi and ask and say do you have any comment and they'd say well we don't control that property you know uh and i kept waiting for it to sort of bleed over into condi nast world and and i don't know whether that was intentional or not but they seem to really be able to wall themselves off from any downside attached to Reddit and instead only benefited, again, I think I've mentioned this, they made about$2 billion on that investment.
36:06Yeah, that's a good point that sort of keeping it at arm's length actually benefited the sort of pristine Conde brands. On the other hand, you know, think about all the companies in metal. And in a way, you know, the new houses built their empire by acquiring other publications, and they often let kind of the local leadership take charge of it. And I do give credit to business executives who are able to kind of hold themselves back. So, you know, Reddit grew up the way it did. And, you know, look, you could say it was kind of a wild bet that happened to pay off. You know, it was it was red on 21 at the blackjack table.
36:40But the reality is they put about 10. They started with a 10 million dollar investment and came out with two point one billion dollars. And by the way, the fact that Vogue and Vanity Fair and The New Yorker are still publishing and I don't think the new houses right now are looking to sell them. The family has that money from their Reddit investment. They have that money.
36:58Peter Kafka:They have a bunch of money from cable, cable TV. They owned a lot of that. Who put them into cable TV earlier? Donald, Cy Newhouse's brother, was the one who did the early cable system investments that now became a part of Charter. He also was the one who led the investment in Discovery way back when who the hell knew anything about Discovery? And now the Newhouse's, well, up until a few days ago, I think were one of the biggest shareholders in Warner Brothers. They just sold a bunch of their shares, yeah. They did just sell a bunch of their shares, which I thought was very interesting because at first I wondered, well, geez, did they have like a margin call?
37:30Like, did they need, you know, liquidity? And my understanding is, you know, actually some of it might have been a bit of a judgment on Zaslav's stewardship. Which is what the rest of the market has done. When the merger happened, the new houses received a premium for their shares, but the value of their investment, you know, has dropped along with the public stock. So it might have just been cutting their losses. They're still, if you look at the 30, 40 year arc of discovery, the new houses are still going to make out like bandits. But it was very intriguing to me that they said, we don't want to be part of this spinoff, you know, Warner Brothers split.
38:03And we're just going to take our money. We'll be right back. But first, a word from a sponsor.
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39:19Peter Kafka:Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis or Lambert-Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. Why wait? Ask your doctor, visit BotoxChronicMigraine.com, or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more. So like any good millennial, I have a love-hate relationship with Gen Z. It's the phenomenon rattling millennials. They just look at you. They want something bigger themselves. Lifestyle is a priority. Motivation is being inspired.
39:54Peter Kafka:But regardless of how you feel about Gen Z, it's undeniable that they're changing national politics. Generation Z is increasingly showing less loyalty to traditional political parties, many now more likely to identify as independents. So what is going on with the kids? I think the biggest misconception about Gen Z's politics right now is that all of a sudden they're all socialists. That is just not the case. They are embracing candidates who are offering new, bold ideas in the absence of those ideas from establishment Democrats. This week on America Actually, Gen Z researcher Rachel Jambaza joins us to separate Gen Z fact versus fiction.
40:32It's not rocket science. And this is, you know, I keep saying like young voters aren't that complicated after all. It's pretty simple.
40:37Peter Kafka:Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
40:48Peter Kafka:And we're back. So let's talk about Condé today. So the family still has a lot of money for the reasons we just discussed. The property, some of them are still very important. Do we know if Condé Nast as a publisher, as a standalone publisher, is profitable today? I don't have an answer to that. They remain incredibly opaque. And I should say, by the way, that Connie Nass did not cooperate with the book and, in fact, actively blocked me from interviewing some current editors. They were very polite and friendly about it, but, you know, they didn't want to be involved. You talked to a lot of people from this book.
41:20It's well reported. I talked to more than 200 people, including some current people there as well, despite the kibosh on the interviews.
41:29Peter Kafka:So the magazine business is the magazine business, right? It's in decline just across the industry. You've got a sort of technocratic CEO, Roger Lynch, with no sort of attachment to the business. And he's clearly there to sort of tidy it up. There is perennial speculation about whether they're going to sell off this title or that title. The remaining new houses are not getting younger. What do you think happens to this property? Do you think they end? The thing you always hear is they'll never sell Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, or Vogue. And then sometimes if you're talking to someone at Wired, maybe Wired counts.
42:05Peter Kafka:but they're never going to sell off their most prestigious, biggest names. Do you think that's true? Do you think there's a day where someone with enough money comes to them and says, actually, I would like to own Vogue. My name is Jeff Bezos, and I'd like to own that as well. So I'll speculate on this, and by the time this podcast posts, I'll be proved wrong. I have to say, although Anna Wintour's recent decision to give up her title as editor-in-chief of American Vogue was very well-timed for the publication of my book, I cannot say that I predicted it. But let's talk about these central assets, Vanity Fair, Vogue.
42:35Um, the next major turning point for me is Donald Newhouse's death. Cy's brother Donald is still alive. He's in his late 90s. I'm told he's in very good health and I wish him many more years. He mostly spends time on the family's estate in New Jersey. I, my understanding is that the family would not sell Vogue and Vanity Fair or The New Yorker, which are sort of seen as Cy's prizes, family heirlooms while Donald is alive, because Donald would see that as a betrayal of what size stood for. Now, it's possible that after Donald dies, they still would, the family would still think that this is what the Newhouse name, you know, despite all our lucrative holdings in cable, what people know the Newhouse is for are these magazines.
43:19Peter Kafka:These are our literal trophy properties. On the other hand, we could have said the same about the Bancrofts and the Chandlers and how many of these families have we seen in the Grams that eventually did sell them off. So until, while Donald is with us, I really do not think a sale would happen. After that, I think bets are off. And in terms of how the properties are run until that point, I mean, do you think it sort of stays on this course where it's at, where it's a trim here and a cut here, and the new editor is not going to be as famous as the last editor, and that person also is going to make a lot less than the last editor, just sort of on that conveyor belt?
43:57Peter Kafka:It's a slog. It sounds like a slog, doesn't it? It's still a pretty glamorous slog. They have nice offices down the Trade Center, and it's still important. Lots of people I work there. I admire many people who work there. But it seems like it is much more of a conventional business than it ever was. I should say, by the way, I've been impressed. You know, Wired has had fantastic reporting on Doge and Elon Musk. And by the way, let's just make it let's pause and make the point that where we've seen major wealthy media corporations acquiesce to threats from the president, pay out millions of dollars to settle lawsuits.
44:33I haven't seen any, you know, Conde Nass has stood behind David Remnick in the reporting at The New Yorker. They've stood behind Wired. I mean, the family -
44:40Peter Kafka:If you're listening to this podcast and you haven't heard my conversation with Katie Drummond, which I did like a week ago, or no, sorry, a week ago, a month ago, you can go back and listen to that as well. She's very impressive. So credit where credit's due. The question is, can they restore any luster without the resources they used to have? And I agree with you that in some ways, okay, they changed the title editor-in-chief to global editorial director and the job listing on LinkedIn, a Condé Nast listing on LinkedIn. Talk about Ghosh. Couldn't believe it when that was the case. I'm like, there's no way they posted this job.
45:09And it read like, you know, you're applying for a job at D.E. Shaw. And, you know, to me, I mean, Condé lived and died on its myth. And actually, as much as the Internet and the smartphone and all of that is probably the major cause of the decline of the company. I also think we need to look at the way the culture changed in the area of 2008, 2009, where our relationship with elites really shifted. You know, it was no longer, people weren't interested anymore in sort of worshipping the wealthy and emulating their lives. I mean, the whole idea of exclusivity that Connie Ness was built on really started to collapse.
45:48And I think that culturally that change had a lot to do with the magazines losing their power over the last 15 years.
45:56Peter Kafka:Yeah, I think you can extend that to like we generally are less interested in titans. And if we are, we're really angry about them. We call them oligarchs. Same thing with, you know, a lot of our stars, you know, the Me Too era was bad for them. I think a lot of the stuff that sort of existed, you said 2008. I think 2008 is a good marker. I also think 2016, 2017, sort of the culture sort of turning, at least for a while, on sort of the myth-making power that these titles had. Absolutely. And listen, I mean, for a long time, this was a very white, very rich company. And, you know, there's no question about that.
46:33And I think they've, you know, made some efforts to diversify the leadership there.
46:39Peter Kafka:But— I think one of the major complaints you heard about the Radhika Jones era, she replaced Graydon Carter, came in after Graydon Carter, was that she put a bunch of people who weren't white on the cover. And it wasn't just because of the race. It was because they were sort of edgy and or people didn't know who they were. And she did that intentionally. She wanted to sort of set Vanity Fair apart from what had come in the past. And I think that was not well received inside the company. Yes, there was sort of an old guard inside the company who looked at it solely from, well, my advertiser, my ad clients don't understand the vision of the magazine.
47:08And it was sort of like, well, listen, the world is changing and this company needs to change with it. And really, actually, when you look through the history of it, you know, when Anna Wintour came into Vogue, it was because Vogue in 1988 was getting stale and they decided that they were kind of losing touch with the culture. I don't know if there's any way today without the resources they had in the past to kind of make Condé an enchanted place the way it used to be. It's kind of becoming just another magazine company. And that, I think, is in the long term a death knell.
47:38Peter Kafka:Yeah, I agree. Was there a white whale for you in this book? Was there something that you'd already always heard about, couldn't tell if it was true, able to get to the bottom of it finally? The elephant photo shoot in Portfolio magazine was always a source of fascination. Explain this one. So Portfolio, which was the big highfalutin business magazine. The last big magazine launch really ever. $100 to$150 million to develop it. It launches in 2007, right when everyone wanted to read big, glorious profiles of CEOs. and Conde was spending like it was 1985. And there was a story, it's actually a fantastic story by Jesse Isinger, quite prescient about the credit derivatives desk at JPMorgan Chase, which months later helped, you know, lead to the collapse of the economy.
48:27The headline was the elephant in the room. The photo editors looked at the headline and said, you know what, we need to hire an elephant. They spent$30 ,000 to rent an elephant. And I, you know, I talked to every photo editor at Portfolio to try to figure out the exact details. I ended up reaching the photographer on the shoot who recounted how he was driven down from Connecticut, brought into a soundstage to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. And this is all for a photo of an elephant bellowing as an office worker cowers next to him. About a credit derivative story. It was one of these classic opulent Condé Nast photo shoots that, by the way, you could get a stock image of an elephant for a$15 licensing fee off Getty.
49:10It didn't run on the cover. It was buried inside. And by the way, the shoot happened two weeks before Lehman Brothers collapsed.
49:17Peter Kafka:And portfolio itself lasted, what, a year, a year and a half? About a year and a half. And then it was shut down. And it was kind of, that was the last great print magazine launch. Yeah. I remember that era. It was very exciting. And I remember the portfolio went, Business Week was sold for a dollar to Bloomberg and Forbes and Fortune were, even then, you could tell they were ailing. at the time. By the way, a lot of people would start to tell me anecdotes and then they'd stop and say, well, you know, I need to keep these because I'm going to write my memoir one day. And there is a literature of Condé Nast memoirs written by editors, some better than others.
49:53I think what I really wanted to do here was, as somebody who never worked there, who could kind of report it out from an independent lens, I wanted to bring a more journalistically rigorous look at the place. And that's what I hope the book achieves. It's a great read.
50:05Peter Kafka:If you listen to this podcast, you are automatically interested in this book. Go read it. Thanks, Michael. Thanks, Peter. Thanks for having me. Thanks again to Michael Grimbom, who came into the studio on a very, very warm day. Don't worry, I wore pants for that one. Thanks to Charlotte Silver for producing and editing. Thanks to our advertisers for keeping free media free. And to you guys for listening. See you soon.
From the publisher
Here's one way New York Times reporter Michael Grynbaum described Condé Nast to me in this week’s chat: “A real exporter of American cultural influence in the late 20th century.” And here’s another one: "A kind of enchanted land” but also a “lost world."
And here’s one way I’d describe it: it’s hard to imagine in 2025, but just a few decades ago, magazines were incredibly important — and Conde Nast was the most important, most glamorous magazine publisher in the world.
We know why all of that has changed — in large part because of the technology that allows you to listen to this conversation. But Empire of the Elite, Grynbaum’s excellent new book, focuses mostly on how Conde reached its peak influence, and how it sustained it for years.
Also discussed here: Money money money. Also: Why Jeff Bezos is very unlikely to buy Vogue in the near future.
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