Sometimes you can pick up on the nation’s zeitgeist by looking at
magazine shelves. Last year, there was a wave of interior and home
interest magazines flooding the market. This year it’s health that seems
to be the national obsession. We have seen ZM, Women’s Health and Vital
launch in the last three months and, this week, Attic Futura launched
Real Health and Beauty under the editorship of Charlotte Packer.
Packer only joined the magazine a month ago and has had to turn around
the first issue on a skeleton staff, but as Real Health and Beauty is
bi-monthly she is hoping to have the magazine more settled by the second
issue next January.
Her old colleagues do not doubt her ability in this respect. ’Charlotte
is very inspirational. She has got the ability to look round a story and
find an angle that no-one else has thought of,’ says Harriet O’Brien,
who heads up the lifestyle section of the Independent Weekend and who
used to oversee Packer. ’I also think that the experience she has had
outside journalism will be a huge help to her as an editor, giving her
the depth that some first time editors just don’t have,’ she adds.
Packer’s experience outside journalism includes a year as a paralegal,
work in various art galleries, some extensive globetrotting and a stint
at the small PR consultancy Thornton Associates. While she was there she
met journalists for the first time. ’I was stunned at how unspeakably
rude some journalists could be,’ she explains. ’They’d just hang up on
you in the most insulting way for no good reason. That’s what made me
decide to become a journalist - I thought that if idiots like that could
do it then I certainly could.’
She started freelancing for a local Chelsea magazine called The
Resident.
Her boss Jill Thornton encouraged her and, after getting a few features
published, she won a place on the London College of Printing’s intensive
three month journalism course. Almost immediately afterwards, she began
working for The Independent on the Weekend section and found herself on
the phone to her old comrades in arms in the PR field.
’I try not to be rude to PR people,’ she says. ’I think they’re
essential and any journalist who says otherwise is missing out on a lot.
There’s no way I could get the level of knowledge about what’s going on
in my area without them.’
Real Health and Beauty is the UK version of an Australian title called
Women’s Health. They will carry some similar editorial, but Packer plans
to avoid the obsession with plastic surgery that our cousins down under
have.
Real Health has an older demographic than Attic Futura’s welter of teen
’zines like Sugar and TV Hits, aiming at early-30s women. The heart of
the magazine will be the features section, which Packer hopes will be
weighty and serious. She also hopes to give the magazine a clean, modern
feel.
’I want to treat the reader with respect. There is a demand for an
intelligent health magazine at the moment, and I hope this will be the
one.’
HIGHLIGHTS
1996
Shopping editor, Independent Weekend section
1997
Features editor, Beautiful Living
1998
Editor, Real Health and Beauty
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