Professional Profile: Leonie Barlow, editor, thestyleinsider.co.nz

I started out as a reporter on a local newspaper before moving into magazines as a staff writer on Woman’s Day magazine. From there I moved back to Sydney (my hometown) where I worked on Woman’s Day and New Idea before being asked to return to New Zealand to edit the NZ edition of New Idea.

After almost a year at New Idea I was offered a job at ACP NZ where I was editor across three titles including CLEO, SHE and Fashion Quarterly (FQ). I edited FQ for seven years and while this was definitely the craziest time of my career it was also the most rewarding. My next role was editor of The Australian Women’s Weekly (NZ), which I did for four glorious years before leaving to start The Style Insider in May 2012.

New Zealand media has changed in the same way that media has changed globally. The introduction of online media has completely changed the publishing landscape and the way we all consume our media. Readers expect their media to be more immediate and they want more interaction and more reality than ever before. The explosion of how-to YouTube videos shows that readers want to connect with their media on a far more personal level than ever before.

My career highlights would have to be editing New Zealand’s leading fashion magazine, Fashion Quarterly, for seven years. My four years spent editing The Australian Women’s Weekly was a huge highlight too as I grew up with my mother and grandmother reading AWW – it was the holy grail of magazines for me and a real honour to steer the course of that title for four years.

I’m not sure I’d call myself an experienced beauty journalist but I have been a closet beauty journalist for many years. I spent the last few years at AWW compiling the beauty pages and I absolutely loved it. When I was a little girl my mother’s best friend was an Avon lady and she would give me her old empty testers which I would meticulously line up on my bedside table and lie in bed and gaze at all the pretty containers. I kind of think that beauty is in my DNA – I’ve loved it since I was little. The smells, the packaging, and more recently the technology and science behind some of the amazing products available today. I also think that beauty products make a woman look and feel great and there’s a lot to be said for that.

I’d worked in magazines for almost 20 years and had enjoyed some of the best jobs in the industry and felt it was time to try something new. I’d always been a big fan of social media and I had a few favourite blogs that I always followed and so at 45 I felt it was time to take a leap of faith and jump straight in. The jobs I’d had in print were going to be pretty hard to top so online seemed to me like my next logical career move. I love publishing and really wanted to learn more about the exciting new” world of online.

I’ve been amazed at how fast my site has grown. I was completely unprepared when I started getting interest from advertisers so had to quickly rustle up a media kit. My traffic is growing steadily each week and over the past few months I’ve identified what works and what doesn’t work in terms of driving traffic to my site. It has really been a lot of trial and error though. I feel like I understand the formula a lot better now than when I first started so I’m looking forward seeing where this growth will lead.

I love the immediacy of digital. I now know in real time how many people are looking at my site and how long they are spending on each post and which posts they like more than others. In magazines I’d have to wait an entire month after the magazine went off-sale to get the exact figures on what the magazine sold – without all of the accurate insights that digital offers. I’m still getting used to a more relaxed and less formulaic style of writing for online but that is something I also really like about digital media – it’s very personal and friendly. Online media gives you the opportunity for real communication which is two-way. I also like that the online community works collaboratively not competitively. I think we all realise that by working together we can help each other far more than hinder each other and that’s definitely not how it works in print media.

It’s all been a huge learning curve to be honest. One of the hardest parts has been working on my own. You’ve got to be and do absolutely everything. You need to manage the technical side of the site as well as generating the content, attending fashion and beauty launches, marketing the site and selling advertising. There often just aren’t enough hours in the day to keep it all ticking over exactly how I’d like it to. I used to think monthly deadlines were tough!

I want my site to always be evolving and changing, which I think is really important when it comes to online. And I want people to love it!

As sad as it sounds I really do think the old saying still applies: "It's not what you know it's who you know". It's always hard getting your first break into the industry but I believe you need to do whatever it takes to stand out from the crowd. You have to get out there as much as you can and meet people in the industry. I door-knocked the editor of a major national newspaper to get my first break into print journalism. He gave me a job because I had the nerve to door-knock him. To get my first job in magazines I bowled up to the ACP offices (after the applications had closed off for a job at Woman's Day) and did a sit-in at reception waiting for the editor to "come back from a meeting". The receptionist was trying to get rid of me but I wasn't going anywhere. Then, by a stroke of luck, someone I knew walked past reception and saw me, put in a good word to the editor (who was sitting at her desk and not out at a meeting) and I got the job. So in my experience I'd say you need to meet lots of people and be bold and brave and go after what you want.