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Joanna Coles, the Chief Content Officer of The Daily Beast sits down with Sam to talk about deciding to leave the never-ending cycle of daily news for a slightly more dependable pace of monthly magazines…and then returning to news after two decades away. They talk about seeing George Clooney in the flesh, the beauty of shopping on resale websites, getting nutritional advice on TikTok and how neither of them has ever met Donald Trump.

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Transcript

SPEAKERS

Joanna Coles, Samantha Bee

Samantha Bee  00:02

Call me old fashioned, but I really do love the feeling of a real life newspaper. I don’t necessarily love the smudgy fingers I get from it, but I can deal and while getting the news on my phone is a little more convenient to my 5am Doom scroll, the content stays the same. I am a big supporter of local news, and I truly do believe that we need a robust free press to keep our world and our democracy spinning, which is why I have some serious choice words for the people who have, like vultures, destroyed some of our great newspapers and newsrooms. And I know it’s on all of us who look for more modern ways of staying informed, but it is also on hedge funds who pick up and pick apart local news organizations. And when that happens, communities suffer because so many of their important stories go untold, or they have a harder time getting news in times of emergency, there is great reporting happening at every level. So once you are done listening to this episode, maybe you would want to subscribe to your local news outlet of choice. I know I have done that, and I have been paid back multiple No, I know I do that. I get so many little newspapers now, and it’s worth it.

 

Samantha Bee  03:09

This is Choice Words, I’m Samantha Bee. My guest today is the Chief Content Officer of The Daily Beast, Joanna Coles. Joanna cut her teeth in print journalism and monthly magazines, and I loved talking to her about what it was like following stories as a young mom, Joanna and I have been crossing paths for years, and we continue to do so, and I was so excited to get to ask her some questions here that I have been sitting on for a long Time. So take a listen and make good choices.

 

Samantha Bee  03:50

Okay, so full disclosure, for people who are listening to this podcast on the Lemonada network, we you and I, I’m here with Joanna Coles, who I think is terrific, by the way, terrific. We’re working on a project together, so that is how we are getting to know each other. For those who are listening, who don’t know that we’re working on a different project for The Daily Beast, and I’m so excited that you’re here, because now I get to talk to you and talk about your business acumen and all the things you’ve done and all the choices you’ve made. So now I get to like, I get to know you in a different way. Is that exciting for you or terrifying?

 

Joanna Coles  04:30

No, it’s completely terrifying.

 

Samantha Bee  04:32

Terrifying, Joanna and I went to an event the other day for the George Clooney Foundation, and.

 

Joanna Coles  04:41

Do you just want to say that one more time.

 

Samantha Bee  04:44

Joanna and I got invited too, like, is it the most sought after invitation, I guess in the city right now?

 

Joanna Coles  04:56

I think it’s probably the most sought after invitation in America. In America, half of Hollywood was there.

 

Samantha Bee  05:02

This was a very this was a, you know what? I’m Canadian by birth. Um, that means I can use the word fancy. And ironically, it was very fancy. It was very elegant.

 

Joanna Coles  05:12

It was pretty fancy.

 

Samantha Bee  05:13

It was pretty fancy. And Joanna took a picture of me talking to George Clooney. That is probably one of the funniest photographs that has ever been taken of me.

 

Joanna Coles  05:21

Well, what I love about that photograph is you have your hand over your heart as if, as if, to stop your heart from leaping out its chest, because George was fangirling over you. George was fangirling over Samantha Bee, and I was standing hesitantly, trying to listen to the conversation, but I did hear that he was fangirling.

 

Samantha Bee  05:46

Well, first of all, Joanna said loudly. Said, we’re doing a podcast. And then he looked at me from across the table and said, podcast. And I was like, You are shameless. And then he came over and talked to me, and my was holding my heart into it, keeping it in my chest, but also my eyes were closed, as though I was speaking to Jesus. It’s a very dumb photo.

 

Joanna Coles  06:10

It’s a very funny photo, but I will post it so people can see.

 

Samantha Bee  06:14

Oh, thank you so much. Okay, so before we get started, we have so much to talk about in our brief time together.

 

Joanna Coles  06:20

We always have time.

 

Samantha Bee  06:22

We always have a lot to talk about. We like to gab.

 

Joanna Coles  06:26

Well, my favorite thing to do in life, and the thing I found most difficult when I moved to America, is I didn’t have anybody to go and have a cappuccino with and just talk. Just talk about everything, about details of their life, details of my life, process the week, because my very best friends are still in London, because I’ve known them for 40 years, and I miss them. And so I’m always thrilled when I find a new person that I think, oh, cappuccino. Like sponge worthy from Seinfeld.

 

Samantha Bee  06:57

It’s so true. It’s just like a little jaunt, and drink. It doesn’t have to be like a sit down dinner. It doesn’t have to it can be just like an informal chat. And you feel like you catch up, catch up on everything, and they’re like, bye, and everybody goes back to their jobs and their life.

 

Joanna Coles  07:11

It’s yeah, exactly, very exactly.

 

Samantha Bee  07:13

Well, first I want to, okay, I want to talk to you about how you make are you? I think that you are very decisive, decision maker. Are you? You have to be in your world.

 

Joanna Coles  07:24

Well, I am at work, work because I’ve often worked in news or with a deadline. So when you have a deadline, obviously it forces you to make a decision.

 

Samantha Bee  07:34

Yes, are you? Do you what about in your personal life? Do you dither? Are you like, just an absolute hot mess? Just a hot mess.

 

Joanna Coles  07:42

Yeah, pretty much, pretty much hot, hot mess would do it.

 

Samantha Bee  07:49

I think that’s often the way people who have, like, really big jobs, which you’ve had a variety of huge jobs, where you just have to, like, you’re guiding a whole team, you have to be very decisive in the moment. Even if you’re not in control, you have to seem like you’re in control. Do you do that? Do you fake it till you make it? Have you done that?

 

Joanna Coles  08:08

Have I faked it till I make it?

 

Samantha Bee  08:11

Till you make it? That’s proper English.

 

Joanna Coles  08:14

I mean, in the process of doing it, you are making it. So what you get is, I actually don’t feel I’ve faked it as much as I’ve just gotten a lot of experience. So even when you start at the beginning and you are inexperienced, you’re not really faking it, because you’re still doing it. So you’re making the decisions you’re hoping. You’re making the right decisions, you’re watching what’s going on. But it gets easier as you get older, because you just have much more experience, right?

 

Samantha Bee  08:48

I guess. I mean faking it in the sense of I totally know what I’m doing everyone.

 

Joanna Coles  08:53

Well, no one ever feels like that. And I mean, I do think that that first sentence of William Goldman’s memoir no one knows anything is the most important thing to keep in your head, because how many times have people told us things that never happened, never came true? I’ll never forget how many people told me they were going to work for Hilary, and how many people told me that they were going to run a department for her, or they were going to do this for her, or they were going to this embassy for her. And these were smart, intelligent people who had drunken, who had the Kool Aid, right, and no one knows anything.

 

Samantha Bee  09:35

I think that’s such a good concept to hold on to. It’s hard to hold on to that because the world wants you to believe or people want you to believe that they really I can’t tell you how many people have approached me in the last couple of months to tell me that this social scientist has predicted the outcome of American elections correctly since the 1980s and I’m like, Okay, that’s great. He’s gonna be. Wrong at some point, because how could he possibly we cannot. We can know what happened in the past, but it doesn’t always divine the future.

 

Joanna Coles  10:09

No, it doesn’t, and we are living in an incredibly fast moving world with very fast communications. And the good thing about having worked in news for a long time is you’re just prepared to expect the unexpected, and you don’t feel the need to predict what’s going to happen, as so many people do. So I literally think no one knows anything, and we lurch from moment to moment. And what you hope is that you have people around who can manage things well.

 

Samantha Bee  10:41

That’s such an interesting perspective coming out of news, because I feel like so much of the news related content that we see now is about like is speculative fiction about what is about to happen that is really so present in our eyeballs. And I actually that’s interesting. When I look at The Daily Beast, I don’t see a lot of that. Is that intentional or because you’re just following your own.

 

Joanna Coles  11:08

Well, I think what we want to avoid as an entire class of the punditocracy who literally make a living from predicting what is going to happen, and I love talking about what we’re doing at the beast, and what has worked at the beast, and what people are responding to, what our readers are responding to when I go on TV and talk about politics, but I try to avoid predicting because you just feel like you don’t you have no idea. I mean, nobody knew the day before the attempted assassination, the first attempted assassination on Trump. And I’m laughing because there’s been three that we know of. And again, not laughing because I want it to happen, but just laughing because two months ago, no one would have predicted that we would run into three attempted assassinations of Trump, two, literally by gun and one by threats and phone calls. We’re just living in unprecedented times, I think, which doesn’t mean that we haven’t had violent moments in politics before, but we’ve never lived at a time where information gets passed so quickly, and where very quickly, people making stuff up can get amplified very fast and be taken very seriously. And where, I think we have bad actors from the Chinese and Russia taking advantage of our social media platforms to sow incredible confusion.

 

Samantha Bee  12:35

Right, what made you decide, I guess, what made you choose to join The Daily Beast? Was it like just an exciting opportunity. What was the catalyst? I guess.

 

Joanna Coles  12:46

I love news. For my first 15 years of my career, I’d been in news when I moved to America to be the New York bureau chief for The Guardian and when I had my two boys in my mid 30s, it became clear to me that I could no longer be a foreign correspondent. At that point. I’d moved to the London Times, but I was based in America for them, and I realized I couldn’t do the job with two small children and see the children. You always had to be able to travel right at the last minute, I’d gone up to cover a murder, a double murder, at Dartmouth University, which was a terrible story of two professors who had been murdered in their home. They’d answered the door to two young men who had said they were doing a survey. They’d invited them in, and then the two young men had robbed them and stabbed them to death in an extraordinarily bloody and frenzied attack. Ah, and I had gone up to cover that story. It was a very disturbing story, and as a result of it, I missed my older son’s second birthday. And then the paper actually held the story, which I’d gotten some quite good exclusive reporting on, but the paper then held the story for three days, so I didn’t need to have missed my son’s second birthday. And I thought at that moment, I don’t want to do this anymore. I want to be at home with my son, or I don’t want to not have control over my working schedule, so I left news and moved into magazines. I went to work for New York Magazine. And then, you know, flash forward 20 odd years, and my children are well, the younger ones about to finish college, and I can now throw myself at the news schedule, which I love, and follow the story when it happens. So on, the first Donald Trump attempted assassination happened at, I think I got wind of it at 10 past six on a Saturday night, I had friends staying for the weekend, and actually one of them was the editor of a of a newspaper. And. Large American newspaper, and we all threw ourselves into the story, and you just can’t do that when you have little children. And it wasn’t the job’s fault, it was just my life wasn’t compatible with it. But now I’m thrilled to a come back to work at The Daily Beast, because it’s a wonderful digital news site. Two the opportunity to work with Barry Diller, who was the founder of The Daily Beast with Tina Brown, and then, thirdly, to come back and work with, or to to have the chance to work with Ben Sherwood, who run ABC News, famously and done a phenomenal job, and who I have known over the years, and we often tried to figure out how to work together. This was the perfect confluence of all of those things.

 

Samantha Bee  15:43

So you were like, effort, no work life balance is required.

 

Joanna Coles  15:48

Yeah, no work life balance, but, but you don’t want balance in the in the news. You need to be able to throw yourself at it. Um, just let the story go. Where the story goes.

 

Samantha Bee  16:01

We’ll be right back after this.

 

Samantha Bee  18:31

Are you observing? Because I was listening to this is a huge frustration for me. So I want to know what your take is on this. I mostly just listen to the news. I listen to news related podcasts. Very interested in as well. I listened to a podcast this morning, and they were contract trying to contrast the two political the two front runners, Donald Trump, Kamala Harris. And it was all about, you know, kamala’s perspective on what’s going on in Lebanon right now. And the reporter literally said phrases like, we haven’t yet heard any deep analysis from Donald Trump on the situation in Lebanon. And I was like, well, hold pump the brakes. What do you mean? You haven’t heard any detailed analysis. Yet I was like very frustrated by the thinking that you can treat the two candidates in the same way, that you can ask for details from her, and then you can request details from him. He cannot provide details. There’s no detailed analysis coming. How do you. Wrestle with that. I just see it is ever present. It is so out there right now, this kind of desire to treat the candidates in the same way and ask for more details from her because they haven’t heard details on like grain prices. When he’s off talking about how he has a better body than Joe Biden.

 

Joanna Coles  20:17

He’s off talking about all sorts of things, isn’t he is today. I recommended that we just took the full transcript from his most recent rally and just ran it verbatim, because it tells you more about Donald Trump than anything anybody can possibly say. He says it in his own words. You know you have to take them both seriously. These are incredibly serious roles that they are running for. And they don’t impact just the United States. They clearly impact the world at a moment when the world actually is in various states of power shifting, right? And I think you have to cover Trump as he is running, you know, he’s running as a celebrity. And in a sense, they’re both celebrities at this point, and we have to cover him as he behaves, which actually is, I think, exactly what the beast has been doing.

 

Samantha Bee  21:12

Right? Have you ever met him? Have you ever met him?

 

Joanna Coles  21:15

I have. I have lived in New York for 27 years, and I have never met Donald Trump. And interestingly, when I worked here as a foreign correspondent, the foreign desk at The Guardian would constantly ask me to call him up and ask what he thought about things. And for some, for some reason, I never did. I’ve never met him. Very, very disappointing. I would love to meet him.

 

Samantha Bee  21:37

What would you say? What would your what would your opening salvo be? What would you? Would you? I mean, I don’t think he shakes hands, bump fists.

 

Joanna Coles  21:48

Well, I think I’m sure if he shakes hands, he would do the thing that he does, that Diddy did with you 100% which is to turn to the person next to him and smother himself in Purell.

 

Samantha Bee  21:59

Smother he smothered himself in Purell. If he could have done his whole body, he would have.

 

Joanna Coles  22:05

Yeah, but thank goodness he didn’t, because I’m not sure you would want to watch that. Want to watch that. I’m not quite sure what I would say to Donald Trump. It would slightly depend where, where we met and how we met, but I do worry that he’s in serious cognitive decline. At this point, his conversation just lurches from one non seconder to another, and he just loves attention so much he’s not alive unless he’s got attention on him. You can see it. Can’t stand it when anybody else is talking on the platform.

 

Samantha Bee  22:38

No, I know, you know we I think a lot of people who are going to be listening to this will associate you with cosmopolitan, because that was the I mean, that’s how we kind of got to know you writ large. You had Cosmo endorsed candidates write about birth control, talk about how contraception is not just a women’s issue. What was the response like when you tried to make it more political? Did you get pushback for that?

 

Joanna Coles  23:07

Well before cosmopolitan, I’d edited Marie Claire, which had more of a journalistic trajectory. When I got to Cosmo, it needed a bit of a refresh, and weirdly, by coincidence, I went down to the DNC the day the job was announced. I was chairing a panel for Emily’s list. And so many people came up to me, including Nancy Pelosi. And I was like, oh goodness, I’ve got so much to ask you. And they were like, We want to know what you’re going to do about Cosmo. Because everybody felt this incredible ownership, and particularly for older women who’d read it religiously before the rise of the web, there’s so much more women’s content, obviously, on social media now, but, but, but for people who you know, I remember getting Cosmo as a young teenager, and it was like a finger arriving every month, beckoning me to the future. And it was telling me about things that were going to be, that I was going to I could look forward to in life, like love and sex and relationships and fashion and style. But it was also full of, you know, here’s how to negotiate more for yourself. Here’s how to behave well in the workplace, all these things that no one at school was teaching us how to do. And it became very clear to me, as I got to Cosmo that we were on the cusp of a new Feminist Revolution. I think it was called feminism 4.0 or something. And we had in our first issue, well actually, on our first issue, we have Miley Cyrus, who was just fantastic. And in our second issue, we had Kim Kardashian and a 24 page excerpt from Sheryl sandberg’s book. Lean in now I know that Sheryl has taken a lot of flack for what’s happened at Facebook. And Instagram since lean in came out. But if you haven’t read lean in, it’s a very good compilation of all the data that shows that the minute a woman goes into the workplace, she is losing to a man next to her. And I know on your last podcast, you talked about the differentiation still in male and female pay. And then there’s black women, Latino women and white women get paid differently. And Sheryl Sandberg lean in really takes that apart. It was co written by Nell scavell, who is a contributor to the beast and very thoughtful about how she looks at data. And so I felt that we could make Cosmo empowering, not only in the bedroom, but also in the boardroom. And it was time, and we just had an incredible response. People loved it.

 

Samantha Bee  25:50

That’s so interesting. I’ve never had anyone define it for me before, but I agree with you that’s we all read. I read Cosmo growing up, and it really was really directed at like a young professional woman, like a young woman going to work first big job, how do you conduct yourself? And then there’s sex and love and beauty and all of that stuff, which I also love. I know you love the beauty part of it.

 

Joanna Coles  26:16

I love the beauty part. I love all of it. I love all of it. I want a big life. Cosmo readers want a big life, and that was the goal of it, to help you. I mean, Helen Gurley Brown, who, who started it, never mentioned children in it. And certainly there was a feeling, oh, you should never mention children. But I think that the great good fortune of living in America is that there are all these possibilities. I mean, there are in many other countries too. I’m not I’m not saying there are. And actually, there were 65 editions of Cosmo around the world. So there was one in Indonesia, though we started one in Dubai. Obviously, there are lots of them in Europe, but that sense of how to get the life you want, and Cosmo was giving you the tools.

 

Samantha Bee  27:01

We talk a lot about the things that we want to embroider on a pillow, and I think I want a big life is a thing we should put on a pillow.

 

Joanna Coles  27:11

Yeah, and a big life is different for different people. I mean, one one person might want six children, one person might want no children. What you want is the big life of your own making?

 

Samantha Bee  27:22

Yes, a big life is different for everyone. I feel like you are. Your super strength is going into pre existing spaces and refresh and bringing them to life again, refreshing. That’s how I see you. Is that how you think of yourself? You just I think you understand your audience better than almost anybody I’ve ever met. I said it.

 

Joanna Coles  27:46

Oh, well, that’s nice. Well, I hope I’m good at it, and I love doing it, and I think it’s much it’s a much easier thing to do than it is to start something from scratch. I’m always fantastically impressed by people who start something from scratch and really get takeoff or lift off, whatever the expression is. But I love going into something where the bones are strong and you can fiddle around a bit and spend some time trying to understand it and then rehabilitate it, if you like.

 

Samantha Bee  28:18

Right, when you’re getting to know a different audience, which, like The Daily Beast audience, is different from a cosmopolitan audience, or a magazine, like a long lead magazine audience. How do you do that? Do you sit back and take a period of time to observe and see what kind of like emerges on social media or what? What do those tools look like?

 

Joanna Coles  28:43

Yeah, it’s a very good question. Thank you. I mean, there are many tools that we have, lots of data which shows what people respond to when we publish stories, what they love, what they want more of. There’s lots of commentary on Reddit or on x. There’s lots of social media comments that you can pass. And then there’s just your own instinct. It’s half art, half science, and then there’s a team. I mean, none of this is done on your own. You can have instincts about things, and then you’ll have other people say, Oh no, I don’t think you’re going to find that bears any fruit, and they’re on their rights. So it’s a huge joint effort. We have a very talented executive news editor, Hugh Dougherty, who’s got an incredible ability to come up with headlines that you just immediately want to click on. And we have a very good breaking news team that that just sort of almost like when you’re watching a giant those movies of giant squids where they’re just sort of moving with the water, and they just instinctively know which way the tide or the I guess it’s the rhythms of the water. They know how to navigate that.

 

Samantha Bee  29:55

Because it is so different from a long lead magazine, where you’re really set. Thing, you’re kind of predictive. Yes, six or I’m not sure what the lead time is. It’s at least four to four months.

 

Joanna Coles  30:08

44 days was the usual way in which you thought of it. But what you’re always trying to do with a magazine is predict sort of three months, six months, nine months out, what people would be talking about, and sometimes you would know that because of what movies were coming up, what television, what books, you would have a sense of what book is going to hit. You can see themes, but when you’re in the thick of the news, you’re just responding in real time to whatever is going on.

 

Samantha Bee  30:36

I do think that magazines, I mean young women, women, young women, underestimated for millennia, but there is so much strong journalism that has taken place in women’s and girls magazines that people write off. Have you felt the impact of that?

 

Joanna Coles  30:53

Well, I don’t think women write it off. I think men write it off as unserious, but actually the stuff of relationships, having children, having a home, having friends, learning how to create a home, learning the basics of how to cook, all of those things are essential to living a high quality life, which doesn’t mean an expensive life, but it means A healthy life. And for the longest time women’s needs weren’t really met by media out there. Certainly newspapers didn’t cover a lot of the things that women were interested in. It took female correspondence, when they were writing about wars, to realize that children and families were often the victims of wars, and that male correspondents were much more focused on, actually what was going on in the military action, which is one part of war and an important part of war, but the people that are impacted by it are also just as important.

 

Samantha Bee  31:55

So, I mean, are you on Tiktok? Are you personally on Tiktok?

 

Joanna Coles  31:59

I’m on Tiktok, yes.

 

Samantha Bee  32:01

Yeah, I mean, it has replaced so much of those kind of glass, those big heavy hitter magazines in terms of where teenagers, where young women, get their news, where they get their beauty tips, where they get their fashion tips, where they get kind of everything, relationship advice, they learn about trends. What do you think we lose in that trade off? Is it a trade off at all, or are they just two different streams?

 

Joanna Coles  32:27

Yeah again, a great question. Sam, you’re just firing them at me. I feel like you’ve just loaded your just.

 

Samantha Bee  32:33

Oh my god. It’s just, it must be so, so pleasurable for you to get to talk to me in this way.

 

Joanna Coles  32:40

It’s actually rather alarming how much I’m talking, because I feel in our other podcast, The Daily Beast podcast, we actually share the baton back and forth.

 

Samantha Bee  32:50

Yeah, people want to hear you talking here. They want your expertise. Joanna, that’s why you’re here.

 

Joanna Coles  32:56

I’m pretty confident. Nobody, nobody wants to hear but.

 

Samantha Bee  33:00

They do.

 

Joanna Coles  33:02

But magazines, really the problem with them now is the cadence of them. It’s incredibly difficult to compete with the phone because the phone feels so very up to date. I’m always struck when you’re looking at x and you see how fast things are dropping. You know that anything that dropped two hours ago feels completely out of date. I want something that dropped three seconds ago, and this sense of connection that you have with the phone to, you know, hundreds of millions of people that you can’t really comprehend out there, but you know, you are connected, whereas a magazine is about disconnecting, right? And in fact, it feels old by the time you have it, and I think the cadence of them just makes them increasingly sadly irrelevant. I feel it with news magazines too. Who wants to read a news magazine when it comes out? Rather be online getting the latest possible information? I’m much less interested in something that someone wrote a week ago. It’s probably already out of date. I miss them so because they were wonderful voyages of discovery, and the editing of a magazine is such a a fun thing to do, but B as a reader, you might not necessarily appreciate the incredible skill and care that’s gone into creating all the right ingredients. It’s like going to a restaurant. You know, there is one way of making paella which is fantastic and carefully, carefully sort of triaged and or titrated. I should say not triaged. That’s triage is when I’m cooking, it’s like, oh my god, it’s burnt. There’s too much salt in it. Titrated is really what I mean. And you don’t get any of that on Tiktok, you get this extraordinary mash up of stuff, and you keep looking for something that’s going to compel you to stop and you very rarely do, you just keep scrolling through and the algorithm is serving up ever more extreme things to keep you engaged. Reached right? So it’s a very different experience. I find any length of time I spend on Tiktok, I come off feeling pretty listless and frustrated and confused, which is exactly, I think the point of it.

 

Samantha Bee  35:14

So do you take a break from I mean, I definitely, I take a I take long breaks away from social media. I personally have to, I think my brain gets, I don’t know, my brain disconnects from reality in a way that’s really not healthy. But when you’re in news, when you’re doing what you are doing, now you have to be so in the stream. And I remember that from having my own show, which I was constantly, just constantly on social media. Now I can take a pause from it. Do you ever take a pause or you can’t? Right now.

 

Joanna Coles  35:45

I don’t take a pause from it, but I don’t find it debilitating, like some people talk about it, and I don’t have any problems switching it off and going to sleep. I don’t have any problems putting my phone down if I’m having lunch or something. I’m not. I don’t feel I’m I’m not an addicted personality. No, I don’t feel addicted to it.

 

Samantha Bee  36:05

We’ll be right back after this.

 

Samantha Bee  38:09

What is your news diet? What’s the first thing you okay? Because you know it’s, it’s different for everyone. But I definitely know that there are some like for myself, if I get, when they get the Sunday New York Times, literally, the first thing I read is whatever the Sunday routine is. It’s so silly. I go straight to the Style section, you know what I mean, or I go straight to whatever section that’s in metropolitan.

 

Joanna Coles  39:27

Metropolitan, I think, yes. Well, my first news diet actually is based on a British habit. The Brits have different media habits to the Americans, and the Brits tend to just switch on the radio. So the first thing I do when I get up in the morning is switch on the radio, and then I push downstairs, and I flick open my iPad, and I read The Daily Beast. And then I often have Morning Joe on, or I’ll have CNN on, and then I’ll read the New York Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street. Street Journal, and then I’ll go on x and start seeing what’s happening on X.

 

Samantha Bee  40:05

So you’re not only having because I just read it and I listen to the radio, so I’m a radio kid, also NPR immediately, yeah, but I don’t put on the television. You put on that the full television. You’re just like, assault on all fronts.

 

Joanna Coles  40:21

Assault on all fronts. I tell you what I don’t do anymore, which really is actually the thing that alarms me is I don’t read. I do what I’ve I think I want to trademark this word. I actually screed which is, I scroll read as I’m going down, and I think it’s called screeding. I think I’ve just decided that that’s a word, and my goal is going to be to try and get it to be the word of the year in a couple of years time, because that’s what I’m doing now. And I realize I find it pretty difficult to read on screen. I can read books, and I’m pretty disciplined about making myself read every night, but I can’t read properly online anymore. I’m just re I’m trying to take in so much information. I’m screeding.

 

Samantha Bee  41:07

So you’re screening, you’re screening headlines. You’re like, what’s my workplace? What’s my workplace up to now? What are the big stories emerging all over? Headline, a little morning.

 

Joanna Coles  41:19

Yeah, I remember once, a friend of mine, the author, Flora Fraser, who’s a very good British author, and wrote that book, the unruly queen, which was a fantastic book, told me that she speed reads, and she reads a page diagonally of a book that she doesn’t actually read from left to right, back and forth. She actually reads it diagonally, diagonally. I know it’s impressive, and I think I do something similar when I’m faced with words on a screen. Really, I think that the eye and the brain somehow works to absorb the information in a different fashion, and you come away with the essence of it, if not the very specific detail.

 

Samantha Bee  42:06

I’m going to police myself and see if I because I do read very quickly, also very quickly, but not in a way that retains the information on a screen. Like if I really want to hold the information in my head, I have to sit with it a little bit. Do you find that? Or you could.

 

Joanna Coles  42:24

Yes, well, and you have to print it out. There’s lots of evidence that shows just the way the neural pathways work, that if you hold something in your hand when you’re reading it, you’re actually taking in the information in a different way. And the thing that’s so frustrating I find about reading books on screen is that you can never remember where you were, whereas I’ve got a relatively good memory for remembering a line in a book where it is, which side of the page it’s on, okay, where it is on the page, which you can’t do on a screen if you read on a Kindle, or if you read on your iPad.

 

Samantha Bee  43:00

And you just, you’re very disciplined. You read a physical book before you go to sleep.

 

Joanna Coles  43:04

Well, I don’t read the whole book, and then I then I read two pages and conk out.

 

Samantha Bee  43:09

Just a full conch. Nothing, conch, nothing makes me sleep faster than a great book.

 

Joanna Coles  43:16

But actually, what’s good about it is, if you’re reading something that’s well written. What I like is trying to read one or two pages of something incredibly well written, so that you hope that when you’re sleeping, those words and those phrases are somehow dancing around in there to it’s nutrition, it’s nutrition. There’s nothing nutritional about being on Tiktok. You just need to know what people are talking about and thinking about.

 

Samantha Bee  43:44

Yeah, it’s like a big, wide paintbrush, and you’re like, Okay, this is what the world kind of looks like today. And then it changes, and it blows up by the end of the day, and that’s fine.

 

Joanna Coles  43:53

Yeah, and it’s fast information. I mean, it’s very similar to food in that regard, regards that it’s not deep nutrition, it’s fast energy, and then at the end of the day, I like to have some real nutrition, because I think before I go to bed, it stimulates what I’m going to dream about. Although I have to say, I never dream you don’t you never dream? No, I’ve had one dream in the last seven years.

 

Samantha Bee  44:18

Was it about me?

 

Joanna Coles  44:21

It was about you, Sam was about it wasn’t really about you. Do you know the strangest thing? It must have been influenced by Harry Potter, because I was standing in the middle of Edinburgh station. The only, the only dream I can remember over the last seven years is standing in Edinburgh station unable to find my train.

 

Samantha Bee  44:40

Oh, my goodness, do you are you a person who sleeps with? Sorry, now I’m gonna get real shallow. Are you a person who sleeps with, like, do you need gizmos and a white noise machine and, like, one of those ostrich heads that you put your whole head into?

 

Joanna Coles  44:55

I like the idea of an ostrich head. I’ve never heard.

 

Samantha Bee  44:57

Haven’t you seen those?

 

Joanna Coles  44:58

No, what is that?

 

Samantha Bee  45:00

They’re so funny, I think that they were on goop wants, but they are just these like pods that you put your whole head into, and you look like, well, a lunatic, and people wear them on airplanes. I think Gwyneth Paltrow may have popularized them. I have yet to see someone on an airplane with one of these lunatic contraptions, fantastic.

 

Joanna Coles  45:24

I have to say, if Gwyneth is doing it, I obviously need to do it. Obviously, Gwyneth does look pretty fabulous. So I would be very happy to, I’m always happy to, you know, the Yoni egg, whatever Gwyneth is suggesting. We had someone, actually, when I was at Cosmo, and this became a scene in the bold type, who inserted a Yoni egg and then couldn’t get it out, and another editor had to go in and help her remove it, which became a very funny episode for the bold type.

 

Samantha Bee  45:51

That’s true, the Yoni egg went too far.

 

Joanna Coles  45:55

Well, she just couldn’t get it out.

 

Samantha Bee  45:58

Oh, I feel sick.

 

Joanna Coles  46:01

What would happen if you put one of those ostrich heads on and then you couldn’t get it off your head? You’d have to go to work.

 

Samantha Bee  46:07

With immediately. Know what my holiday present will be to you?

 

Joanna Coles  46:12

Please, give me an ostrich head. I’m very excited.

 

Samantha Bee  46:16

I’m just writing it down for myself. I mean, we do talk a lot about how much in our project together, how much we actually want to talk about moisturizer and clothes.

 

Joanna Coles  46:27

Always talk about moisturizer and clothes.

 

Samantha Bee  46:31

Yeah, exfoliation.

 

Joanna Coles  46:33

I brought it this morning. I brought in my friend Melora Hardin. Is starring opposite Robert Downey Jr in the new play at the Lincoln Center McNeill. And I brought in to wear for the opening night, which is tonight, a silver jacket, which I bought in the middle of covid. I happened to be walking down Fifth Avenue. There was nobody else on Fifth Avenue. It was peak, peak early covid, and Bergdorf Goodman was open, and I thought, well, you know what? If there’s nobody else here, I’m just going to go and have a walk around. And I saw this magnificent silver jacket hanging there by Alexander McQueen. And I just thought, at some point this covid thing will be over. I’m going to buy that jacket as my grappling hook to the future. And so I bought it, and I brought it in today, and I’m looking forward to wearing it tonight.

 

Samantha Bee  47:24

My grappling hook to the future. Oh, I love it. I also love that a classic blazer like that just lasts forever. It’s kind of a forever cut. And I’ve seen this blazer, and it is beautiful.

 

Joanna Coles  47:41

I hope you’re not suggesting it. I overwear it.

 

Samantha Bee  47:43

You wear it every day. You’ve got to stop. Yes. Alexander McQueen, oh, my God.

 

Joanna Coles  47:49

I have an awful feeling I was wearing it to the George Clooney Gala.

 

Samantha Bee  47:53

Well, of course, you were, you can’t they were.

 

Joanna Coles  47:56

I love this jacket. I love the jacket and everything it represents, which is optimism in the future.

 

Samantha Bee  48:01

Yes, and also, when you buy something like that, you have to wear the living hell out of it because it’s so expensive.

 

Joanna Coles  48:08

Cost per wear. I need to wear it every day for the rest of my life and be buried in it.

 

Samantha Bee  48:12

What draws you to fashion? I am so upset I love to buy now, you know, because I have my own show, and when you have your own show, people buy you clothes, and they dress you and make you look like you know what you’re doing. And now I just buy my own clothes, but I still love fabulous things, and I go on resale sites all the time too, because I love to see what’s out there.

 

Joanna Coles  48:34

So is that your porn?

 

Samantha Bee  48:37

It is my porn. I wish porn should be my porn, but actually, it’s just resale shopping.

 

Joanna Coles  48:43

Well, I would say resale. I actually don’t do resale, and I should do shouldn’t I? Why don’t I do resale? Because I always think they wouldn’t have my size.

 

Samantha Bee  48:54

Oh no, they’ll have your size eventually. There was a blazer that I wanted to buy this year, and it was expensive, and I thought, You know what? I’m going to see this in about three months on a resale site, and I’m going to get like, it’s going to be half price, and it’s going to be my size, and it’s going to be fine. I can wait. Isn’t that very future, thinking my daughter’s in fashion, and she would admire that perspective.

 

Joanna Coles  49:18

Yeah, that shows incredible patience. Because usually I see something and I wanted, no,

 

Samantha Bee  49:24

I’m on Fifth Ave. I’ve got my hand.

 

Joanna Coles  49:28

It’s very scary. Shopping is very scary.

 

Samantha Bee  49:31

Do people send you things? Did they send you things? When you were at Cosmo, they must have.

 

Joanna Coles  49:36

When I was in magazines, lots of people sent you things, and often they were the things that you didn’t want. They never sent you. I mean, without wanting to sound ungrateful, they often sent you something that they wanted you to wear at an event that you would never want to wear. It’s really funny, but often the best thing was to be able to borrow things. Actually, that was a wonderful luxury. You could borrow the thing that you wanted to borrow, and you would wear it once, and then you didn’t often want to wear it again, or it was just such a magnificent piece that you couldn’t, because you weren’t allowed to be photographed in something more than once. But it’s an incredible privilege to be at a fashion magazine and be allowed to poke around the ateliers of the of the great talents and to borrow things and try things on. You know, designers are fascinating, and I will tell you my favorite designer story, which is shortly after I arrived at Marie Claire Valentino was celebrating 40 years of incredible work. You know, hugely talented designer, and they he was having a huge party in Rome, which we went for. And then I got summoned to meet Mr. Valentino on Sunday, Sunday after the big party. And the big party was quite interesting for me, because they, they sort of put me in a beautiful red dress. I Elle Macpherson, literally elbowed me out of the way to get to the red carpet. I almost went flying. But there’s always a good moment when when someone is so hungry for the red carpet that they literally elbow you out of the way. And that was that was sort of interesting, so I jotted that down for the memoirs. But then the next morning, I went in, and just as I was about to go in, and the door was opening, they said to me, whatever you do, do not mention the war in Iraq. And this was 2006 and the war had started in 2003 as you will remember, as a direct result of what happened at 911 so I thought, well, perhaps he’s just had someone die in it, or, you know, maybe he’s had a nephew or something shine. How awful. And I said, oh, goodness, you know, is there any particular reason why I mustn’t mention it? And they said, he doesn’t know about it.

 

Samantha Bee  51:57

I was what?

 

Joanna Coles  52:00

What do you mean? He doesn’t know about it to see not read the newspapers. And they said, I’ll never forget it. They said, No, no, no, no newspapers. No bad news for Mr. Valentino. Mr. Valentino is a man of beauty. He live in a world of beauty. No bad news. And start with my Italian accent, but I’m trying to create some atmosphere here. I was absolutely flabbergasted, but I thought, good for Mr. Valentino, good for him. How much better to live in a world of beauty with no bad news.

 

Samantha Bee  52:33

Joanna, you didn’t get that memo about me. I live in a world of beauty. No bad news for me either.

 

Joanna Coles  52:38

You do live in a world of beauty you live on the Upper West Side.

 

Samantha Bee  52:44

Oh, boy, that is the best way to conclude a podcast recording that is possibly imaginable. Oh, my God. Thank you so much for talking to me in this context. This was wonderful. I’m gonna follow I follow all your projects, Joanna Coles, and to see the most embarrassing photograph of me that has ever been taken, go directly to Joanna’s Instagram.

 

Joanna Coles  53:14

I’m posting it now.

 

Samantha Bee  53:16

Oh my god. Thank you so much.

 

Samantha Bee  53:26

That was Joanna Coles, and I had no choice but to look up one thing Joanna mentioned that the legendary Cosmo editor, Helen Gurley Brown, never even mentioned children in Cosmo. Of course, I did not have time to go through every old issue, but the best I could find was an article that did indeed say that she seldom, if ever, mention children, and that’s good enough for me. Thanks for joining us, I’m Samantha Bee and see you next week for some more choice words.

 

CREDITS  54:08

Thank you for listening to Choice Words, which was created by and is hosted by me. The show is produced by […], with editing and additional producing by Josh Richmond. We are distributed by Lemonada Media, and you can find me @realsambee on X and Instagram, follow Choice Words wherever you get your podcasts or listen ad free on Amazon music with your Prime membership.