LMFF Report: Is The Internet Killing Fashion Journalism?

“No other industry creates – through its products, marketing, and business dealings – such a misleading and malignant sense of intimacy as fashion,” wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning fashion journalist Robin Givhan last month, in a provocative online op-ed for New York Magazine.

Intimacy in fashion journalism is both bad and isn’t. Certainly, the clichés cling: That fashion is an elite, insider world ruled by cosy PR relationships, self-entitlement and bitching over who gets which perks, invites, and front-row seats; That veterans jealously protect their turf from wide-eyed interns and bloggers.

These ideas are coloured by fiction, gossip and war stories. But digital technology has made fashion journalism more intimate than ever. There are fewer gatekeepers. Journalists, publicists and audiences know more about each other, and communicate directly and instantaneously.

Yesterday, six prominent fashion journalists – plus one publicist – discussed these issues at a somewhat awkwardly-titled L’Oréal Melbourne Fashion Festival business forum, The Fashion Media Landscape Transformation. Here are five things we learned.

1. Everybody’s Mates With Everybody Else

Freelance journalist Glynis Traill-Nash chaired the panel. The other speakers were The Australian fashion editor Damien Woolnough, Vogue Australia editor Edwina McCann, former Age fashion editor Janice Breen Burns, News.com.au entertainment editor Melissa Hoyer, Herald Sun executive fashion editor Kim Wilson, and Rae Begley, of boutique PR agency Little Hero.

These guys have worked together for years, and a relaxed, matey atmosphere prevailed. They called each other nicknames – “Jan”, “Ed” – and giggled at each other’s jokes. LMFF’s chief executive, Graeme Lewsey, introduced the panellists in a strikingly effusive way, emphasising how well he knew them all. During the session, Lewsey could also be heard chortling.

I want to give you a quick sense of this industry cross-pollination. Traill-Nash has worked at InStyle, Grazia, Harper’s Bazaar, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Sunday Telegraph. Breen Burns was a Fairfax fixture but left in last year’s purges; she’s just launched her own online publication, Voxfrock. Woolnough, once Vogue’s online editor, is about to jump ship to the new Australian edition of Elle. Hoyer has written for Grazia, InStyle and The Australian as well as The Herald Sun, where Wilson works. McCann, meanwhile, moved to Vogue Australia from Harper’s Bazaar, having moved there from Grazia. Prior to all that, she used to have Woolnough’s current job as fashion editor at The Australian.

The panellists joked that publicists sometimes get the names of their publications wrong – mixing up The Sun-Herald with The Herald Sun – or mistakenly address correspondence to their predecessors in the job. But these embarrassing rookie errors reveal how personalities and relationships navigate a media landscape that’s both fluid and closely knit.

2. The Old Ways Are Still The Best Ways

And the more fluid fashion journalism becomes in the digital age, the more insistently its practitioners will defend time-honoured journalistic values. “There’s always room for an authoritative and respected voice,” Woolnough insisted. “Traditional journalistic skills are going to be as important now as they ever were,” agreed Breen Burns.

McCann vividly sketched how tumultuous the changes at Vogue have been, while arguing that old-fashioned ‘news sense’ remains vital. Today’s multitasking editorial team works simultaneously across the print magazine, its ‘digital editions’ (for the iPad and other tablets) and the website. Vogue.com.au is updated a dozen times daily with news, and scheduled blog posts from a stable of ten bloggers. Journalists have had to become multimedia producers and data analysts, but “you’ve still got to know it that’s a good story,” said McCann.

Meanwhile at The Herald Sun, Wilson is “always on”. She got a big laugh from the audience after explaining that, technically, she works part-time.

Hustling to meet a range of print and online deadlines, Wilson writes her runway coverage after attending designers’ dress rehearsals; she uses the actual shows for networking and identifying broader story angles. In the meantime, she’s tweeting and Instagramming – she picked up 100 new Instagram followers this week with her LMFF coverage. “There’s such a breadth of what fashion means at the Herald Sun,” Wilson explained. But it’s still a business of ‘hooks’ and ‘angles’: “Pitching a story to your editor is a skill in itself.”

3. It’s Hard To Measure Audience Engagement

Now that fashion journalism relies on interactivity and instantaneity, publishers and publicists alike are scrambling to quantify and monetise these intimate relationships. Begley said there aren’t yet tools to measure the value of social media ‘influencers’: she’ll show her clients a link, “and they don’t always understand the power it has.”

McCann has spent a lot of time researching ‘return on investment’, and her understanding of readers’ behaviour is uncannily personal. She can catch a Voguette on her desktop computer on Mondays at 11am, or on Facebook at lunchtime and at night. Hoyer added that News.com.au responds to readers’ everyday rhythms – for instance, a hangover story will run at 10am on a Sunday.

Yet the industry is still struggling to figure out a way to measure audience engagement. Is a ‘like’ or a retweet more valuable than a page impression?

4. Ousted Reporters Are Entertainingly Bitter

“Newspapers for many years wrestled with where to put fashion,” said Hoyer. “Now it’s ‘pop culture’.” Well, make that ‘entertainment’ or ‘lifestyle’. Breen Burns, particularly, bristled at the way the blokes who run newspapers think of fashion as “the premise of wives and silly girls”. “Five to six years ago, I noticed a nervousness about protecting the integrity of the masthead,” she said drily. At the same time fashion coverage itself was being infiltrated by gossip, scandal, celebrity… “the icky stuff.”

“Fashion became a mercurial issue that was handballed around the newsroom,” marginalised from a legitimate newspaper round to the weekend lifestyle lift-outs. Breen Burns found her ex-editors at Fairfax demanding more salacious, less analytical stories, and spiking half of what she wrote. Now, she said, there’s no more daily fashion coverage at Fairfax. Michael Shmith, an Age colour writer, is covering LMFF, “which I think says it all.”

I found myself enjoying her willingness to take this personally. Over at News Limited, Woolnough has enjoyed the freedom of working behind a paywall, and Hoyer has redefined herself as a roving entertainment “editor-at-large”. But Breen Burns seems quite jaded by shifts in fashion media.

5. There’s Still A Place For Thoughtful Writing

Breen Burns’ new publication, Voxfrock, is proudly reactionary, championing opinionated, long-form writing. Rather than trading in optimistic futurism (“It’s an exciting time,” Hoyer said, “You can’t look at it negatively”), Voxfrock conflates nostalgia and authenticity, calling itself “the real fashion pages”. “Nobody’s as real as I am when it comes to fashion!” Breen Burns said archly. “I wanted to get away from the idea of the bedroom blogger,” she said (to an audience that included many bloggers).“They have their little niche audiences, but I wanted to be a little bigger than that.”

If you’re still reading this, you’ll realise there is a place for long-form journalism online. Begley argued that such stories “educate and inspire”: “If we’re only reading tweets, what are we learning?”

For McCann, the fashion media can sustain its highest ideals, just as a fashion label subsidises its couture lines with lipstick sales. “Fashion is all about dreaming, and if we cease to have that at our core, what are we?”

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Mel Campbell is a freelance journalist and cultural critic. She is the founding editor of online pop-culture magazine The Enthusiast and the national film editor of the Thousands network of city guides. Her debut book, Out of Shape: Debunking Myths about Fashion Sizing and Fit, will be published in June 2013 by Affirm Press.