News and Society

Robert Caplin for The New York TimesJoanna Coles, editor of Marie Claire, who is set to take over Cosmopolitan.

8:20 p.m. | Updated

 In January, Kate White went to David Carey, the president of Hearst Magazines, and told him she was thinking about stepping down after 14 years as the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine. Given the importance of the franchise to the company, Mr. Carey immediately set about looking for a successor.

He cast a wide net, looking both inside and outside of Hearst, but in the end found the answer just four floors away: Joanna Coles, the editor of Hearst’s Marie Claire magazine.

In six years guiding Marie Claire, the British-born Ms. Coles, 50, has improved the visibility of the magazine — once viewed as an also-ran — by taking it upscale and into some rarefied fashion realms. Her profile has risen along with the magazine’s, with a growing reputation at fashion shows and a regular role on “Project Runway All Stars.”

“The 20s and 30s are incredibly exciting and full of potential, but also a little overwhelming. The things that keep women awake now are the same things that kept women awake 30 years ago.”

— Joanna Coles

Her appointment to Cosmopolitan, announced Tuesday, installs new leadership at a publication that has evolved from a general interest and literary magazine to an aspirational companion for young women, covering fashion, relationships and, more recently, careers — all with a heavy dose of sexual candor. It was largely transformed in the 1960s when Helen Gurley Brown, who died last month, remade it by latching on to feminism and the sexual revolution.

Since then, it has been a stalwart of the Hearst brand, managing to gain in circulation in recent years even as the magazine business has been buffeted by extreme financial challenges.

“I’m incredibly excited about the global footprint,” Ms. Coles said. “It’s big because it talks about things that are really important to women. It’s such an iconic logo.”

Given Cosmopolitan’s youthful audience and the ubiquity of fashion and relationship guidance on the Web, Hearst has put a high priority on ensuring that Cosmopolitan excels in digital realms.

Ms. Coles said she welcomed that challenge. Sitting in the 42nd-floor offices at Hearst headquarters on Tuesday morning, dressed in purple, geometric Prada pants, a black Preen English top and black Givenchy heels, she said she wanted the often-puzzling journey through young adulthood to be as fun for readers as it was for her.

“The 20s and 30s are incredibly exciting and full of potential, but also a little overwhelming,” she said. “The things that keep women awake now are the same things that kept women awake 30 years ago.”

Cosmopolitan advocates a “fun, fearless” approach for young women, as if that were the secret to all of life’s important questions. Ms. White, 61, has worked to modernize the magazine to fit the times and account for the progress women have made in the workplace. Ms. White will remain at Hearst until the end of the year working on some projects with Mr. Carey. But Ms. White, the author of eight mystery and thriller novels, said she had been itching to spend more time writing books. “I’m looking forward to working just 55 hours a week,” she said.

Ms. White is handing off a product that remains in remarkable shape. At a time when most magazines are losing subscribers in droves, Cosmopolitan’s circulation has risen steadily over the last four years and peaked in the first half of 2012 with 3,017,834 subscribers, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Glamour, a competitor owned by Condé Nast, has a circulation of 2.37 million.

Cosmopolitan’s appeal transcends American borders: there are 64 international editions, including those in Slovenia, Ecuador and China. The magazine has also kept up with its subscribers as they have moved over to digital media. While digital subscriptions often make up 1 to 2 percent of total magazine readership, it now has 137,000 paid digital subscribers. It attracts 8.5 million unique visitors to its Web site each month, according to Omniture, and has almost 350,000 followers on Twitter.

Ms. Coles has established her multiplatform credentials. Last December, Marie Claire hosted a private event for the premiere of “In the Land of Blood and Honey” that included a Q. and A. with Angelina Jolie, who directed the film. Ms. Jolie was on the cover of Marie Claire in January, a big seller, and Ms. Coles then orchestrated a live Internet chat with Ms. Jolie across multiple Hearst sites, including Marie Claire, Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, Elle, Oprah and Redbook. It was a trifecta of live event, magazine and digital efforts that made a splash and caught Mr. Carey’s attention.

Ms. Coles is a former reporter who came to the United States to work for The Guardian. She also worked at The Times of London, New York and More, a magazine aimed at women over 40. She now finds herself editing a magazine for women who think middle age is some ancient, distant planet they may travel to one day.

Magazine industry experts say that the biggest challenge Ms. Coles faces is continuing to attract Cosmopolitan’s huge newsstand sales. Steven Cohn, editor of the Media Industry Newsletter, said that under Ms. White, the magazine succeeded in selling 1.3 million copies every month.

“I think Joanna’s job is she’s got to maintain that momentum,” Mr. Cohn said.

Cosmopolitan, which once had a literary bent and featured writers like George Bernard Shaw and Sinclair Lewis, has always shown an ability to adapt and evolve. Ms. Coles pointed to the frank talk about sex and careers on shows like HBO’s “Girls” and CBS’s “2 Broke Girls” as an indication that the rest of the culture shares the concerns of Cosmopolitan’s readers.

Ms. Coles said that when she arrived at Marie Claire she was surprised at how negative many women’s magazines were, and that it underscored the value of a magazine like Cosmopolitan making women feel better about themselves.

“For me what’s important is to be on the side of women when it comes to sex,” she said, and then added, “It’s very important to have a sense of humor when you edit a magazine — at Cosmo, it is much raunchier. I have a lot of learning to do. There are 365 sex positions of the day here and one of them is called the linguine.”

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 4, 2012

An earlier version of this article misstated the number of floors separating Joanna Coles's office at Marie Claire magazine from the Cosmopolitan magazine offices at the Hearst headquarters in Manhattan. It is four floors, not two.

View the original article here