Graydon Carter and Tina Brown: How to edit a magazine

They are, perhaps, the most famous magazine editors of our age. And both have prospered in the notoriously competitive American market. So what have they got to teach us about editing, reading and writing for magazines? Trevor White on Tina Brown and Graydon Carter.

One is English, the other is Canadian. Both have edited edited Vanity Fair, the pre-eminent glossy magazine. Tina Brown and Graydon Carter are global superstars of magazine journalism. So what's their secret? How do they judge an article? And how do they fish for new readers?

In a recent profile of Tina Brown, the Observer quotes the Queen of Buzz – a woman who was once described as "Joseph Stalin with high heels with blonde hair from England" – on the battle to seduce new readers:

"Will a racy cover line encourage a reader to read a serious and challenging 10,000 word piece? If it does, hooray. That's what it's about. . Marketing. I won't be satisfied with an issue until everything has been done to make it more exciting and more appealing. I'm completely obsessed with the need to seduce readers all the time. I feel that we're in a fight. In a war."

Graydon Carter has an alternative view on the process; or rather, a subtler justification. In 2004 he told the same newspaper how decisions to put stars on cover of a magazine are "unfortunately" a function of public prurience:

"In a perfect world, I wouldn't have celebrities on the cover of Vanity Fair. But we have to sell 400,000 to 600,000 magazines off newsstands every month and, unfortunately, attractive people sell better than unattractive people. And there are more attractive people in the movie business than in, say, the magazine business."

Carter went on to justify the soft-focus coverage of such luminaries in the following way:

"I don't feel any need to be harder on the celebrities we interview. They're the only stories that we invite in, and if you invite someone into your house, you don't treat them rudely. Why waste your energy on that? There are bigger targets than some poor actor or actress."

Unlike Brown, Carter eschews the dark art of marketing, arguing that editing is a more instinctive process: "An editor should go by his gut. We don't do any reader research on Vanity Fair. I've been an editor for 25 years and I've never asked readers what they want."

I was reminded of that bold claim the other day, on reading Carter's outstanding introduction to the annual anthology of the best American magazine journalism. Here, Carter offers a definition of a first-class magazine article that is concise, authoritative and amusing. Reading it, one acknowledges that Carter's disdain for reader research is coupled with a fierce intelligence and real enthusiasm for the process of shaping great journalism.

When I showed Carter's formula to the smartest magazine editor I know, he shook his head, sighed and said, "Damn. I wish I'd read that ten years ago." Here, then – for the benefit of anyone who loves good journalism – is Graydon Carter's recipe for a memorable magazine article:

"In general, a magazine article needs at least one of three basic ingredients: access, disclosure or narrative. A great article has to have at least two of these components, and a memorable one has all three – along with a distinctive style and a fresh way of looking at its subject. Business-class travel for the writer doesn't hurt, either.

Access lays the groundwork for one of the most satisfying experiences a reader can have – the sensation that he has entered a world foreign to his own, a realm rich in detail and character. Access doesn't necessarily mean the cooperation of a subject. In a war zone, for example, it can mean entering an area that journalists have yet to penetrate. While large news organisations can deploy teams of reporters to cover a major event, there is something to be said for the power of a single, intrepid journalist...

Disclosure, that key second element, is the result of great reporting or interviewing techniques and can result in a story breaking news. It can also attend an article that advances the scholarship on a particular subject.

Then comes narrative. Anyone can relay a sequence of events. But only the best writers have an instinct for telling a story: building suspense, fleshing out characters, shaping the narrative arc of the tale at hand. A great article transcends reportage. In the right hands, narrative journalism can be as insightful and stirring as a novel."