higher standards.”
I have no idea where this is going. I thought we were going to discuss my pregnancy, but maybe not.
Cynthia stares me straight in the eye. “Some of the staff seemed to get it instantly, like Alix. Others have had a bit of a rocky start.”
I just nod, trying to stay two steps ahead with a response to what she might say.
“As you know, our newsstand sales have been on the decline for a few years now. It’s been my job to bring the numbers back up.”
It was true. When Paddy Cakes, geared toward Brooklyn’s Park Slope–style mommies in 2000, launched at the beginning of the millennium, we’d had early success. With the dot-com boom, “bourgeois-bohemian” maternity items were the perfect place for people to spend their extra income.
But when mommy websites launched, like The Bump and Babble, we saw the first slump in sales. Then about three years ago, we saw a huge drop, as more advertising dollars were leaving our pages to go to independent parenting websites like Angry Mommy and creative lifestyle bloggers with kids.
Since I wasn’t responsible for that part of the business, I never really thought too much about it. But our editor, Patricia Holden, always did. She’d been asked to launch Paddy Cakes after making her mark as editor in chief at Women’s Health. Earlier in her career, she’d won awards for her investigative features at Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone. I really liked her a lot and felt as though she had an unusual realness and warmth. I learned a lot from her careful edits, which helped me to add more layers of emotion in my narratives. Even though the promotions weren’t huge ones, she was the one who decided to move me up from assistant editor to associate and then to articles editor. While the paychecks never really caught up, I held out hope something bigger and better would come.
Then she got fired. It was a Monday, and we were having our typical production meeting, but instead of Patricia coming in, our publisher entered the room. He quickly informed us that the magazine would now be heading in a slightly different direction, and that Patricia had chosen to move on to pursue other opportunities.
We learned that Cynthia Blackwell, who’d headed up British Glitter, would be replacing her. We all knew exactly who Blackwell was; the fifty-five-year-old ice queen had taken Glitter successfully from a regular to a rack-size magazine to a smaller handheld “subway-size” and subsequently doubled newsstand sales. She’d be making some changes at Paddy Cakes, he’d said. We all gasped at the thought, worrying about our job security, then lamenting that Patricia had been ousted because of factors in the marketplace out of her control.
We’d all heard tales of Cynthia’s hard-line, take-no-prisoners approach to magazine editing. But we had no idea what to expect or whether or not our jobs would be saved. Initially, only a handful of changes had taken place.
The magazine has gotten a lot more glossy and celebrity-driven. Cynthia became obsessed with finding younger, hotter, cooler celeb moms and airbrushing the crap out of them on the cover. She was always harping on us to get more sensational stories to generate more buzz instead of doing the advice-driven stories we had been known for. But aside from the constant fear that a story would be cut at the last minute, which left one having to research and write a replacement until all hours to make the shipping deadline, nothing much changed.
When she’d hired Jeffry, his hard-nosed ways instilled more fear. But I just went along with the changes, too swamped with work to question things. Now, though, I was beginning to realize a focus on higher-end advertisers was probably just the tip of the iceberg.
“You remember the most important rule here at Paddy Cakes?” asks Cynthia, ratcheting me back to the present.
“Sell more copies?” I reply.
“Exactly,” says Cynthia. “So you can imagine my surprise when I was reading your story ideas for October and saw that you’d pitched exactly the same kind of slush-driven muck that made this magazine tank 20 percent on the newsstand before I got here. I’m going to be blunt, Elizabeth. Your lineup was complete crap.”
“I, uh...” I stammer, not knowing what to say, Okay, yes, I mean I had kind of called it in but still, I didn’t think it was terrible.
“For example,” Cynthia continues. “‘This Sucks: Getting Your Baby to Learn to Latch’—this could go in any magazine. Kiddos even,” naming our more accessible mass-market competitor.
“Right, but I downloaded the notes from this year’s American College of Pediatricians conference. It was about a groundbreaking study with new techniques. It’s a good chance to report on the news...” I say my case.
“Sod reporting the news,” says Cynthia in total disgust, “I want to make news.”
“I totally see what you’re saying.” I gulp in air. “I’ll submit a new lineup by tomorrow.” There is no way I’m going to win this one.
“Make it good,” she says, turning away from me toward her computer. “I’m doing a bit of a rethink in terms of staffing over the next few months. Things may be changing. And while someone in your circumstances may have a little more...leeway...it’s not a get-out-of-jail-free card.”
“Yes,” I say, quivering. “No problem.” I get up and walk quickly back to my cube. Jules is there, tapping away on her keyboard, but when she sees the look on my face, she immediately turns to talk me down off the ledge.
I pick up my iced “decaf” and start sucking it furiously. “Cynthia finally brought it up.”
“Seriously! What happened?” says Jules, turning her chair completely toward me as a sign of sympathy.
“Yep. On top of that, she just told me my October lineup was crap, and hinted she may fire me anyway.”
“Eek,” says Jules.
“It’s so unfair. She comes in here, rips up all our stories, leaves us scrambling to write new ones in the time we’re supposed to use for researching new stories, then expects the lineups we pull together in a few minutes to be perfect.”
“It sucks, Liz. I’m sorry. I know she’s come down way harder on features than health.”
“No, not true. Your stories fly through with her. It’s like everyone here seems to get it but me. Write stupid listicles about how you’re lactating wrong and be done with it.”
Jules puts her hand on my arm consolingly. “What are you going to do? Our paychecks have to come from somewhere.”
“I guess I take it personally. I mean, moms out there don’t want to read about the stuff they can’t afford, right? They want real news about baby trends and advice to use in their own lives. That’s what would sell our magazine, right?”
“Maybe, but people seem to like reading the stuff we’ve been doing lately. Like how celebs take off baby weight in two weeks or speed through African adoption agencies. It’s not all bad.”
Jules has a point, but Cynthia’s comments have struck a nerve.
“And she barely mentioned me being pregnant. It’s like she doesn’t even care at this point. Maybe she’s planning on firing me anyway and is just trying to work it out through HR!” I feel tears welling up out of pure frustration.
“Well, you
