Marie Claire’s Nicky Briger on shooting covers during COVID, moving in with Bauer and the magazine’s 25th birthday
For anyone working in magazines 2020 has been a tumultuous year, but none have felt this as acutely as the staff at Pacific Magazines. A drawn-out sale process which smacked directly into a global pandemic and now another sale has seen a significant number of roadblocks for editors like Marie Claire’s Nicky Briger, so how do you put together the country’s biggest fashion magazine when the industry is imploding around you?
My interview with Nicky Briger is scheduled to take place in mid-June. It’s about a week before the big news broke – Bauer Media’s German owner had made the decision to sell the ANZ arm of the business to private equity business Mercury Capital. It’s about three weeks after the official merger between Bauer and Pacific Magazines, following a very complex sale process, which saw around 250 staff cut. And it’s in the middle of a global pandemic.
You wouldn’t know any of this talking to Nicky. From the second our call begins, she’s a ball of energy, asking me how I’m coping in lockdown, bemoaning the endless Zoom calls of the pandemic and cheering for the fact we can now meet up with a reasonable number of people on a weekend and have a socially distanced wine.
