Janice Min: The star editor behind US Weekly and The Hollywood Reporter is running one of media’s buzziest start-ups

Janice Min’s reputation precedes her. Dynamic executive. Hands-on, results driven editor. An industry titan credited with two of the most venerated turnaround jobs in magazine publishing: US Weekly and The Hollywood Reporter.

Today, Min is at the helm of The Ankler, one of the very few media startups that is still having — as Semafor’s Ben Smith described it this week —? “good, clean, careful fun.”??

The Ankler, which was spun from a newsletter of the same name written by veteran Hollywood reporter Richard Rushfield, is much leaner and more contemporary in its outlook than the legacy media brands Min once presided over. There is a heavy focus on newsletter-generated subscriptions, for instance.?

In her latest role, Min is growing accustomed to start-up incubators, valuations and a bootstrap business ethos. It’s all a long way away from where her career began, in a modest setting, reporting for a local newspaper that worked out of a free-standing office set on a dreary Westchester County parking lot.?

“Not even the populated part of Westchester County,” she jokes, “I was in the sticks!”?

Born in Atlanta, she spent most of her childhood in Colorado after her professor father relocated the family for work. After completing her Masters at Columbia Journalism School, Min joined Gannett’s Westchester paper The Reporter-Dispatch and diligently covered local town hall meetings and school board gatherings, working a 2-10 pm Tuesday to Saturday roster.?

“Historically, in journalism you pay your dues,” she says. “I was rejected for so many internships. So I never had any expectations that I would land at a big place. My thought was, ‘This is not the White House, but I'll try to be really good at it.’”

Determined to land a gig in the early 1990s in New York City , she began papering Manhattan’s news and magazine publishers with writing samples.?

“This was the glory days of magazines in New York, which are long gone, rest in peace,” she says.?

She heard back from two: People Magazine and Entertainment Weekly. Excited merely to land an interview at the historic Time Life building on Sixth Avenue, she took a job at People because, simply, they called her back first.?

“This goes to show you the role chance plays in life,” Min notes.

She joined People at just 23 and became, she estimates, the magazine’s youngest ever staff writer at that time. Less than a decade later, the truly transformative moment of her career arrived: she joined People’s beleaguered rival US Weekly as executive editor. After just 14 months, she was thrust into the editor-in-chief role, where she turned the magazine from an also-ran into a financial powerhouse that earned its owner — Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner — hundreds of millions of dollars.?

Who: Janice Min

Resume: CEO and Founder, The Ankler; Head of Daily Content, Quibi; Co-President and Chief Creative Officer, The Hollywood Reporter-Billboard Media Group; Editor-in-Chief, US Weekly.??

Stars are just like us: At its peak in the early 2000s, US Weekly became part of the nation’s pop culture lexicon. A raft of podcasts and features have since reflected on the era’s significance. “There's a sweet spot of nostalgia according to scientists that is 20 years,” she says. “We’re now pretty much 20 years out from that era. I don't think a museum is gonna open about that, but I like that it's been recognized as an ‘era.’”

Here in her own words – lightly edited for space and clarity – Min takes us through her career in publishing and her latest start-up venture.

When I joined People, it was filled with these erudite Ivy League graduates and people who took this job of writing about Princess Diana really, really seriously. There was a whole science and art to being an editor and writer there at the time. You were writing in the brand voice, in the voice of People magazine. You were kind of on the assembly line. Readers knew exactly what it was every week and it was probably the greatest magazine factory in history. They did an amazing job of it.?

But the whole time I was at People, I never thought it was for me. Probably a lot of the people who worked there did not think it was for them. Many were, for example, 50-year-old men taking the train home to Princeton and knowing what they were making. If you’re making a ham sandwich, make the best ham sandwich in the world. But I was sort of bored there. I was a senior editor and it was very clear, at 28 years of age, you have to wait your turn to rise. And I was just a brat and young and I'm like, ‘I am not gonna wait’. So I quit, which was a combination of the stupidity of youth and also feeling there was a thriving job market. I would not recommend this to my kids!?

For people job searching, you can never underestimate serendipity. Bonnie Fuller was running US Weekly, the latest person to come on and try to save this magazine. She was a legendary figure, notorious for appearing in The New York Post’s Page Six. She needed a number two, an executive editor. But 14 months after I joined, she left. I was on vacation at the time, my first vacation in 14 months. My time there had been insane. Like, walking out of the office as the sun is coming up in New York… Just crazy work hours. (US Weekly owner) Jann Wenner called me on my vacation and told me Bonnie had left — would I like to take over? That was just wild to me.?

I wasn’t scared of the work, but the scrutiny an editor in chief got in the New York press in that era was daunting. There was so much focus on the fact I was 32 when I got that job. The thing is, I was sort of already doing the job. Anyone who knows what that number two job is like at these publications, you're the one keeping everything from spinning completely off the axis. That's what I had to tell myself when I talked myself into taking it.

There had been many attempts to revive US Weekly. When it was my turn, I thought about how to start addressing this younger market of celebrity-loving people (largely women) in their twenties and thirties. That was the space US Weekly ended up owning and sales eventually began to climb. When SNL did a skit based on our story I thought, ‘OK, we've arrived.’

It was really predicting and laying a bet down on what the zeitgeist of the country was. The crazy thing is, every decision is just based on a human decision — who to put on the cover, who or what people are going to talk about that week. We started leading other major media in the (pop culture) conversation, which was a big deal. We became the top selling publication in California — also a huge moment. For a publication that had struggled for a long time, they were huge validations.

The ability to package material in a highly engaging way was a big part of it. We took our very silly space seriously. And the audience who appreciated that was professional women. We were a little bit in on our own joke, which I think made it palatable to, you know, those who would otherwise turn their nose up at celebrity news. We made people laugh and I remember in focus groups, when we did them, the consistent phrase women used when they described reading the publication was like, ‘it's me time.’?

My going away video the staff put together when I left was pretty hilarious. It had Kim Kardashian, Tori Spelling and, you know, a bunch of the other people we covered. That decade was a turning point for celebrities who went from these controlled messages by publicists and the typical People Magazine cover story to the wall sort of coming down, with reality TV happening (and presaging social media). Their public and private lives were getting lived out loud. And that really endeared the celebrities more to the public, rather than the opposite.

We watched the sales ferociously each week. You're talking about the difference between, I mean, really millions of dollars on the line every week. You would get these numbers back by Monday from the previous Wednesday’s issue and it would dictate your mood for the rest of the week. Anyone who's ever worked with me knows what a control freak I am. So every caption, every word, every color was labored over in a painstaking way. But all of that is in service of making something highly consumable.?

At the time, we had to sell more than 550,000 newsstand copies to break even. After that, you’re making $1.89 per issue. So our biggest issues were selling like 1.3-1.4 million copies on the newsstand in addition to this massive subscriber base, I think of 14 million people. It was just massive. Absolutely insane as a business model. This is why all these publishing companies have tried to hold on for so long to these business models because they were so lucrative for so long. This is the dark side — private equity likes to come into these businesses and ring out the last pennies while the getting is still there to be gotten.?

I can still picture the contract that was put in front of me and how much it had to stay at US. Looking at the amount Jann was going to pay me, I thought ‘You're crazy (to quit).’ So, in some ways, I can't believe I did that. This is not saying I wasn't enjoying it and grateful to be there, but it's so debilitating to do one of these jobs. Also, I felt like there is a skill when leaving on a high and I didn't think publishing would collapse to the extent it did.?

By then my husband and I had two little kids and wanted to get out of NYC. We started to think about Northern California. Then Richard Beckman, who has been in the news recently regarding The Messenger, reached out. He had partnered with two characters, one was Jimmy Finkelstein, also in the news because of The Messenger, and Todd Bowley, who remains in the news because of his ownership of everything, including the Dodgers and Chelsea, the soccer team. They had acquired publishing assets out of Nielsen including The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard and Ad Week. But they specifically wanted to try and save The Hollywood Reporter.

My husband thought the idea of LA sounded awful. Remember, I had just come out of US Weekly and all he could think of was like Paris Hilton's LA. So over the course of a few months we talked and decided this might be the last gasp of being able to get a project like this: The Hollywood Reporter at the time was a very middling daily trade paper that was almost thinner than a sheet of paper. And I had a mandate to do almost anything I wanted. It felt like two things: it got us to California, maybe not the California we were expecting, but it was also a good opportunity to take another swing at something.?

I thought everybody at The Hollywood Reporter would hate me when I arrived. And I'm sure a lot of them did. Many were immediately suspicious. But it’s interesting, all humans have the same instincts. They want to be part of a team and they want to win. And they hadn't won in so long… It had been almost decades of cutbacks and second or third place status to Variety or Deadline. I felt like I was pretty good at getting them on board.?

I talk about this a lot, people get really accustomed to these cultures of mediocrity. It's almost comfortable to be in a mediocre culture because nothing is really expected of you. You can't fail in a mediocre culture. But it's also pretty exhilarating when someone takes you out of mediocrity. And so one of the things I'm most proud of for my time at The Hollywood Reporter is that almost the entire original staff stayed and many became some of the biggest players in the space. It was kind of like recognizing all these diamonds in the rough and knowing the effect of leadership on people is that most people would like to rise to the occasion.

When I started there, it had a tragic website with an online audience too small to be measured by Comscore. So I don't mean this pejoratively, and there had been some attempts at it, but nobody had really brought proper New York publishing experience to the Los Angeles media economy.? So I brought in editors, a creative designer, a creative editor, a photo director and a whole other sensibility to it. I wanted to make trade journalism interesting, accessible and fun enough that people outside of the industry would want to consume it. Pretty much out of the gate, the website ended up becoming massive.?

After finishing at The Hollywood Reporter, I talked to people about running cable networks and many publishing jobs in New York. But I would characterize them more as rescue projects. I knew we would be staying in Los Angeles. So your choices are not infinite here for what I do. People had talked to me about The Los Angeles Times, another place that's fallen into disrepair. But then I went to Quibi sort of on a flier. I felt like, ‘Okay, we'll see if this works and if it doesn't, I could create news programming there.’ But none of how the story ended up there surprised me.

There has been this homogenization of the voice of the trade publications today. I thought there was an editorial opening. When Richard Rushfield (The Ankler’s original email writer) and I reconnected, I had this thought he should be doing something more with his email. There was an opening for the expertise of Richard. He had the whole C Suite of entertainment subscribing to him. He had this voice that was completely refreshing in the space. But Richard's very easygoing. He's not a business person. So he agreed to work with me and we did a little fundraising.?

One of the first things we did was to start publishing on Substack. Hamish McKenzie, one of Substack’s founders, introduced us to Marc Andreessen. His advice was to raise as little money as we possibly could and bootstrap this thing into success. For me, who had worked with these giant places that were very well funded, I wondered, ‘Can I really do that?’ But we did. We joined (start-up incubator) Y Combinator and sort of muddled our way into launch and it took off. I'm glad we didn't raise one penny more than we did.?

We ended up raising $1.3 million on a $20 million valuation and have been profitable from day one. So we've sort of lived in this depression-era mentality because I realize some of this is on me, it's not on the business side anymore if this sinks or succeeds. I'm very proud we have never touched our $1.3 million raise. So we're trying to think like, ‘Does it make sense to do a capital raise and be much more aggressive in how we expand? Or do we grow organically?’ And I think we really like being in the entertainment space, but we are also thinking about how we more broadly define entertainment. The audience of CEOs and executives is not an infinite pool, so we know we'd like to reach larger corners of the broadly defined entertainment universe.?

I erased some of my (older) publishing habits and learned to curate things and just go and see what works. We were able to add more voices so it's not a solely Richard-dependent operation anymore and we have lots of voices that people love. That has been huge. And thinking about how you extend that into events and podcasts and growing the ‘Anklerverse.’?

Sean McNulty, who writes our ‘Wake Up’ newsletter, is an example of someone who is a part of this new journalism economy. He was doing this on his own and I asked him if he wanted to meet and two days later we had an agreement to do it for us. He’s really benefited from The Ankler audience and we've benefited from his expertise. It's very hard to make writing smart and accessible. Sean has that and the way I edit, I think we work really well together because it's all about making the reader walk away with a feeling that they're smarter or they were amused or that it was an escape. They can't walk away feeling nothing.

As an editor today, I’m still the best-worst person to edit for you. I will be in your stuff, but will hopefully make it better, though. I also think I've been very good at helping it land on the other side knowing that the story is not done until we know how it plays in the world and what we can do to make that happen.