swirled from task to task, checking tables, her speech, and welcoming the 12 women saluted for their activism. She would have loved to chat with actress Marlee Matlin, who was honored for her work with the American Red Cross, or the New York mom who fought for inclusion of disabled children in public schools, but her focus was Laura Bush. Applauded for her literacy programs, the first lady was "sooo nice," Kunes says later. Yet even as she bantered with Mrs. Bush about twins--the Bush daughters and Kunes' 5-year-old sons--Kunes felt the pressure of Secret Service agents circling, standing, staring.
Little wonder that Kunes crashed at 9 p.m., only to wake hours later, still jazzed from her day. She'll often conk out early, then rise to do some midnight editing, but she's usually back in bed in an hour or two. But on this night of deep fatigue, one son needed cuddling, and then, out of the darkness, a cat sprang through the dining room window of her apartment on the Upper West Side, which, "just so you know," Kunes says, "is on the 16th floor." The night doorman returned the cat to its home on the 15th floor, but how could she sleep after that?
Forget the contact lenses and the make-up. It's a morning for glasses and French roast. Yet no day is predictable when you are the editor of one of the nation's top women's magazines, and this is no exception. The calm she seeks shatters before the Starbucks cup is empty, as Kunes' managing editor bustles into her corner office, fretting about the magazine's shipping cycle. "It's not good for us to have our October issue on the stands when everyone else has November's," says Jennifer Barnett.
Kunes is thoughtful. Changing the cycle is a major move, but it can be done--with sweat. "Let's plan a meeting next week," she says from her perch on the office couch. If this is today's major challenge, she'll be OK. But when do challenges come one at a time? Kunes cradles her face in her hands and sighs. "It is," she says, "shaping up to be a nightmare day."
Although she usually operates on more sleep and without the strain of hosting a president's wife, Ellen Kunes rather enjoys tackling nightmare days, dealing with one crisis at a time, focusing on the most pressing problem. That strategy has served her well. For more than two decades, Kunes has written, edited and freelanced for many leading magazines, landing some of the most coveted positions in an industry known for its fickle nature and ferocious competitiveness. She's served as articles editor at Mademoiselle, senior editor at Self, lifestyles editor at McCall's, executive editor at Redbook and Cosmopolitan, and in perhaps her most notorious role, launch editor at O, Oprah Winfrey's magazine. It's been quite a ride, or as her UNH journalism professor Ron Winslow '71 says, "an incredible career," demanding flexibility, focus and a tenacious grasp on an ever-changing marketplace. And, her peers will add, she has done it without selling her soul.
On this steamy Friday in mid-September, when the bulk of the Redbook staff, mostly 20-somethings, is garbed in hip-hugger jeans, tight tops and stiletto heels, Kunes is dressed simply in black pants and a black wrap-around top with a white collar and cuffs. At 43, Kunes is fair, her shoulder-length hair a pale blonde and her skin absent a hint of summer tan. The reserve Ron Winslow remembers from her college days remains, a cool calm. "She's very low-key," says Janet Siroto, Redbook's executive editor.
"Low-key" may not be the trait readers expect from the editor behind Redbook's sensational cover lines. "Get Him So
Hot He'll Call 911!" is one of Winslow's favorites. While Winslow, who is now an editor at The Wall Street Journal, takes credit for recognizing Kunes' potential--"She was really smart and really talented," he says, "a terrific reporter"--he adds, laughing, "I don't recall any class in which we discussed cover lines."
Yet cover lines, as anyone in the industry will tell you, are key to sales. Amid the clutter at supermarket checkout racks, cover lines for women's magazines--be they "SEX: What Men Want at 25, 35, 45" or "Energy Cures for I'm-So-Exhausted Days (And Months)"--must touch a need, says Kunes, "a woman's core."
Through surveys and demographic studies and reader response, Kunes has concluded that the typical Redbook reader is a woman in her late
20s to mid-30s, married and juggling work, children, time with her
husband and time for herself. The magazine's objective is to help her balance life's demands, providing information about everything from saving $5,000 a year to preventing lead poisoning to savoring sexier sex. Redbook readers like sex and want to keep their marriage "cooking," says Kunes, "but they are tired." From reader's answers to questions posed on Redbook's Web site, she has deduced that the most effective cover lines promise insight into intimacy.
By all accounts, that deduction is correct: Redbook's circulation of 2.4 million is rising, and advertising pages have remained stable, a major feat in an economically unstable year. Jayne Jamison, vice president and publisher of Redbook, credits not only Kunes' instinct for content, but also her visual sense. Kunes has changed the magazine's palate from bold red to softer purples and oranges. She has added younger models as well as husbands and children, emphasizing, Jamison says, "the me and the we." She understands that readers may not have time to read all of the text, so she incorporates plenty of charts and graphics into stories. And, Jamison, adds, "Ellen has made the magazine more fun," creating quizzes for the reader, such as one that is supposed to reveal who knows a husband better, the mother or the wife.
In some ways, Kunes says, she knows what appeals to Redbook readers because she fits the mold--a little older perhaps, more subway than Subaru, but juggling the same set of demands. Her own experience helps her to create stories and cover lines that capture readers and sell magazines. Still, it isn't easy to keep up. "It is," says Ellen Levine, editor of Good Housekeeping, "a constantly changing business."
When Kunes first took the Hearst Corporation's typing test in 1981, the leading women's service magazines, dubbed the Seven Sisters, targeted women at home, ages 25 to 50. Each magazine had its own personality, but content in most, from Ladies Home Journal to Good Housekeeping, involved crafts and food and fiction, with a few how-to articles on making ends meet and a story or two about women challenged by circumstance or
disease. But as more women entered the workforce, readers' interests changed, and the magazines began altering the formula from articles about crocheting colorful afghans to articles on the benefits of massage.
Fresh out of UNH and a six-month unpaid internship at Boston Magazine, Kunes started working on magazines for younger women--Mademoiselle, Seventeen and Self--with a brief stint at Family Weekly. Beginning as an editorial assistant, typing carbon copies on electric typewriters, she crept up the editing ladder as she leapt from publication to publication.
She didn't join the Seven Sisters until 1991, when she snagged a job at McCall's as lifestyle editor. She had spent the previous four years freelancing, writing countless articles and two books, Live Well--or Even Better--on Less and a biology textbook, but she knew that if she ever wanted to be a magazine editor, she needed a full-time job.
The economy was in recession, and women's magazines were hit hard. The Seven Sisters were warring for readers, each struggling to think of ways to stand out from the others. Redbook was the first to reinvent itself. Instead of entertaining and educating women in their 40s and 50s, the magazine dropped the fiction and the crafts and focused on issues of concern to young mothers. Redbook's new reader was often described as "the Cosmo girl grown up," a woman interested in sex as well as learning how to save for her children's college tuition and how to organize a closet.
Kunes hopped to this new Redbook in the mid-'90s as executive editor. McCall's had been sold, and she sought a position with more impact. After immersing herself in writing and editing articles for more than a decade, she wanted an opportunity to create an entire magazine, arranging all of the pieces into a book that would appeal to readers. She was fascinated by the challenge of figuring out "what people are thinking and feeling across the country" and reflecting that in her magazine's pages.
Redbook blossomed, its readership growing to more than 2 million. Kunes and the magazine's editor-in-chief, Kate White, tried to address all of the issues young mothers might face, from Caesarean sections to daughters maturing faster. Kunes always liked edgy ideas. "She used to start a comment with, 'This is probably a horrible idea,' and I'd think, 'A really good idea is coming,'" says White, who also appreciated Kunes' honesty. "The worst thing you can have as an editor is a 'Yes' person," she observes. "Ellen was always good at saying, 'I don't like that.'"
The two worked together so well that when White accepted the post as editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan in 1998, she took Kunes with her as executive editor. Figuring out the 18-to-25-year-old reader of the magazine that calls itself "the single girl's guide to sex and life and love" exercised a different part of her brain, says Kunes. "How many outrageous ideas can you come up with?"
But the industry was changing again. A new breed of women's service magazines--Martha Stewart Living, Southern Living and Real Simple--were giving "class to mass," providing women with more sophisticated ideas for living richer lives with tasty meals in finely appointed homes. When Oprah Winfrey announced that she would join this new breed with a magazine espousing her own empowering message, Kunes won the editor's post by articulating what she thought the magazine should be: a "personal growth guide for women in the 21st century, giving readers all the tools they need to get what they want out of life."
While industry tongues wagged during Kunes' tenure at O, describing a messy management with too many bosses impeding her decisions, Kunes maintains that she left O after the second issue for the same reason many women leave demanding, high-powered jobs: her children.
"I had a good relationship with Oprah," Kunes says. "She stays in touch with her roots and looks at the world through a great big prism." But the job was too consuming. Her twins were infants when she was hired and toddlers when she left in the summer of 2000. Her son Winston was diagnosed with learning disabilities during her time at O, and she says she recognized that she couldn't give what was expected at the magazine when she was needed so much at home. Few of her peers were surprised when she quit. "Ellen is a wonderful mother," says Kate White. "She doesn't want to look back and say, 'I chose the Prada fashion show over curriculum night.'"
For the next year, Kunes consulted for Hearst and spent a lot of time pushing swings at playgrounds. The period was calming, centering, but when she heard of the editor-in-chief opening at Redbook, she applied. This was her opportunity to create a whole magazine while retaining control over her hours. As White says, "The great thing about being editor-in-chief is that no one is telling you you can't leave at 5 p.m."
Now this," says Kunes, stopping at a newsstand and picking up an issue of Rosie, "is a collector's item." Rosie, which replaced McCall's, had been axed earlier in the week after a series of disagreements between the magazine's namesake, comedienne Rosie O'Donnell, and the publisher. It is almost 2 p.m., and the day has grown steamier, the New York air a combination of hot tar and car exhaust. Kunes is walking down West 57th, a few short blocks from her office, to Hearst's headquarters on Eighth Avenue, where she will be interviewed for a Magazine Publishers of America video.
Kunes has transformed from the exhausted editor recovering from a major event to the glamorous editor we know from the photographs above her monthly Redbook column, "You and Me." The contacts are in and the make-up is on, deftly applied moments before she left her office. She's not fond of the photo shoots at which she's groomed by professionals. In fact, she's not fond of pampering at all. She runs five miles around Central Park to relax.
Kunes admits that her day isn't glamorous, that lunch isn't escargot at Le Cirque, but Cheerios at her desk. Afternoons don't allow for leisurely dining; there's a lot to do before she leaves by 5 p.m. This afternoon is devoted to the December issue, which will feature singer Shania Twain on the cover. Readers like celebrities to whom they can relate, Kunes says. Meg Ryan and Jennifer Aniston are always hits. Sharon Stone is poison. Jennifer Lopez sold OK. "She has an edge," Kunes says. Readers don't like edge.
Now there are cover lines to write. "The Best Night Your Husband Ever Had," among others, may need reworking. This weekend, she and her husband, David Freeman, and their twins will drive to Salisbury, Conn., where they rent a house year-round, their escape from Manhattan. Her life, she says, "is impossible" right now, as she tries to squeeze in time to research primary schools for her boys and look for a new baby-sitter.
Kunes says she sometimes tries the time-saving tips that appear in Redbook. She buys toys in bulk for the endless birthday parties her boys attend, and she wears a scuba-diving watch that won't die when she forgets to remove it at bath time. Someday she'd like to use the October issue's suggestions on arranging and filing family photos, but she's not sure when she'll get around to that. She turns to face the white board in her office, where the pages of the December issue are mounted. Right now, she has cover lines to write. ~
A UNH associate professor of journalism, Sue Hertz is an author and frequent contributor to national magazines.