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Bustle’s Charlotte Owen on ditching the ‘everything for everyone’ era

Charlotte Owen is the Editor-in-Chief of the millennial women’s media brand Bustle and the EVP of Editorial for its parent company, BDG. Rather than see her portfolio role as a challenge, she sees it as a ‘gift’ now that the ‘weird era’ of trying to be everything to everyone is over.

Now based in New York, Charlotte Owen joined Bustle in 2018 to launch the UK incarnation of the brand. “Since I joined in 2018, we’ve acquired a suite of other brands. The goal is to have this full suite of brands that can speak to lots of different audience segments,” she said on The Publisher Podcast this week.

BDG now has 10 brands – from Bustle to Nylon, Scary Mommy to W Magazine – and if you head over to BDG.com, the banner headline on the group’s website proclaims, ‘We don’t just reach, we resonate.”

“You can’t be everything to everyone,” Owen explains, contrasting where we are today with the 2010s ‘weird era’ of search strategy and scale. “A lot of media brands went after eyeballs at any cost, but I think that era being over is such a gift to editors because you can really hone in on a point of view.”

Starting out on a single brand, Owen now works across all of BDG’s lifestyle and parenting brands. “It’s really clarifying to have the whole suite of brands,” she says. “We’ll be sitting in a meeting and someone will come up with something, and I’ll be like, ‘No, that’s an Elite Daily story’ or ‘No, that’s a Scary Mommy story’. It forces you to funnel, to be more selective.”

At the core of that selection process is a simple question: does this story need to exist?

“I think about that a lot with every story we put out,” says Owen. “It’s the way you prove your value proposition… you are able to generate something that isn’t already on the internet.”

Avoiding the ‘mushy middle’

Owen describes Bustle as a women’s media brand, but one that’s working hard to avoid the ‘mushy middle’ trap that killed brands like Mic, Mashable and ultimately Quartz. The target audience is women in their 20s and 30s, but a very specific subset. “We talk about our reader wanting to live a big life, wanting to have lots of adventures, have fun and get out there,” she explains.

Fun is a big factor in Bustle’s editorial ethos. Owen says: “Women love to laugh and I think that really anchors our publishing strategy. We’re always trying to find the funny quirk in the story, the little angle, the little joyful moment.”

With more than 9 million Instagram followers, social media is a big part of Bustle’s publishing strategy,  “Our Instagram account really came of age in the meme and social virality era. There was a moment where we were trying to pivot more towards being a traditional media brand, before realising, actually, we should just lean into [the fact that] we’re funny on the internet.”

She hones in on Bustle’s celebrity coverage, where reporters’ red-carpet coverage captures the poses for the camera, but also the ‘in-between moments’, spotlighting a viral video showing Jacob Elordi taking the chewing gum from his mouth and passing it to his mum.

“We overlaid it with some funny music and Adrien Brody commented that it was ‘relatable’ after his own red-carpet gum moment at the Oscars,” laughs Owen. “We are relatable. We’re trying to show up on the internet in a funny and informative way.”

Getting out of the way

Owen’s EVP role is less about being a ‘creative visionary’ across all her brands and more about coming up with a business infrastructure that allows each brand to thrive within what she describes as BDG’s ‘internal economy’.

One of the biggest lessons she says she’s learned in the last few years is knowing when she is not the right person to answer a question. Her view is that if you’ve hired someone who can do something better than you can, you should let them get on with it. “Doing that means getting out the way as much as getting in the way.”

She highlights her relationship with the Nylon editorial team to illustrate her hands-off approach. The 90s style-bible, reinvigorated by BDG as a multimedia brand, is for ‘cool girls in New York and Los Angeles and anywhere in between’. It runs a monthly ‘It Girl’ series featuring photoshoots of up-and-coming talent in TV, music, or film and increasingly online influencers.

“We used to shoot these as individual mini fashion stories, then we turned them into mini covers and the performance exploded.” Owen puts this success down to the fact that Nylon’s Gen Z audience loves to see their favourites – Devon Lee Carlson, Little Simz, Young Miko – given a cover moment. But she admits: “I often don’t know who the hell they are.”

When Nylon’s talent bookers and editor in chief suggest a cover star, she says she’ll have ‘no clue’. “But I guarantee you, by the time the cover comes out two or three months later, I know who they are. In those scenarios it’s my job to just smile and go, ‘Good job everyone’.”

Access and authority

People who don’t work in the media, don’t necessarily see the power of access, but it’s something Owen identifies as an old-school strength that is central to modern media success.

“Everyone has a phone, everyone has a computer and anyone can tell you what the best lipstick is, in their opinion. Not everyone has access to Bobby Brown or the person who designed the lipstick in the first place, has tried 50 this year and has 10 years experience of trying them.”

For Owen, access is central to building authority with readers. “We want to take them into rooms they can’t go [in]. We want to share experiences that maybe they don’t have.”

Relationships are the cornerstone of maintaining access and Owen says that can be hard. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a site dealing with scientists or celebrities, if you’re reporting about what’s happening in Whitehall. You need those relationships. That is a key part of what we do, and it’s a hard part. It takes real work.”

Gaining and maintaining access is something she thinks is a key for anyone in an editorial role: “Whenever we’re hiring or thinking about editors on the team, people who are comfortable being uncomfortable and walking into rooms and building that access and authority. Access and exclusivity is one of the surest fire ways that you can guarantee that you are putting something meaningful out there.”

Listen to the full episode in this week’s episode of The Publisher Podcast, available wherever you find podcasts.

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