I never really left magazine publishing behind

Since The Devil Wears Prada 2 was released at the beginning of May and entered cultural discourse, a surprising number of former magazine staffers have reflected publicly on their time in the industry, and the people they became because of it.

It's something I've thought about a lot.

I started my career in magazines nearly 20 years ago, at a time when print still felt like the cultural zenith and editorial jobs retained a certain kudos and glamour, or at least the illusion of it. There was excitement in those offices: frantic production schedules, marked-up flatplans, launch parties, celebrity cover shoots, and the feeling that, just maybe, you were helping shape conversations people might actually care about.

I loved magazines. I still do.

But around a decade ago, I found myself wanting something different from my work. Perhaps something more altruistic. Like a lot of people in the media, I’d unknowingly developed a set of highly transferable skills: learning how to understand audiences, shape narratives, build trust, communicate emotion clearly, and find the human story underneath the noise.

At the same time, the industry itself was changing rapidly. Content cycles had accelerated. Metrics began replacing editorial instinct. Social media blurred the boundaries between our identities and our work. Many of us who entered magazine publishing because we loved ideas, culture and storytelling found ourselves spending increasing amounts of time feeding systems that seemed to value speed and volume above all else.

So I moved into the charity sector.

At the time, it didn’t feel especially strategic or brave. It just felt increasingly difficult to spend my working life creating content untethered from anything meaningful. I wanted to use those same editorial instincts in service of organisations doing tangible good in the world.

It turned out the overlap was much greater than I’d expected.

A surprising number of former magazine people now work in charities, education and healthcare. Places where communication has the power to effect change.

The best charity communications still rely on many of the same things good magazines do: empathy, curiosity, clarity, emotional intelligence, and an understanding of what makes people shift their focus outwards, onto someone else.

In many ways, I’ve spent the last 10 years doing the same work I always did, just with different outcomes attached to it and, perhaps, more at stake.

Which is partly why this year has felt unexpectedly full-circle.

On Friday, the second issue of The Cat magazine under my deputy editorship will land on the doormats of Cats Protection supporters across the UK. Every time I sit in planning meetings, commission features or work on the flow of an issue, I’m reminded how much those early magazine years shaped me. Not just professionally, but creatively and emotionally too.

The strange thing about career pivots is that they’re rarely as clean-cut as they appear in hindsight, or from the outside. We tend to talk about them as departures: leaving one world behind for another. But I don’t feel as though I abandoned magazine publishing. I carried the best parts of it somewhere new.

And judging by the number of former editors, writers and creatives now finding themselves in more human-centred roles and sectors, I suspect a lot of us are still trying to work out what to do with the skills that industry gave us, and what work now feels worth our time.