Death of the media dream job

On Radhika Jones' departure and the current state of professional aspiration

Last week, Radhika Jones announced that she was stepping down from Vanity Fair, where she has been the editor-in-chief for nearly eight years. A lively round of Guess the Replacement has already begun; my own assumption is that it will be either a seasoned Condé operator like Will Welch or someone with a deep, Sara Moonves- or Willa Bennett-esque level of personally networked celebrity relations.

In any case, it looks like Jones will be the last real Vanity Fair EIC; per the job listing, as Puck’s Lauren Sherman pointed out, Condé is only officially seeking a “global editorial director,” a title that does not exactly stir the media aspirant’s heart. It seems more obvious than ever that being a Condé Nast magazine editor now increasingly amounts to a middle management job (unless you happen to be the one person who is both boss of all content and also specifically Vogue content), much less the stuff of movies or even a decent memoir. To me, someone particularly biased for having been hired under Jones and also laid off from VF last spring, her departure only reaffirms something that my cohort of media types and I have been discussing with increasing suspicion: that the media dream job is dead.