Turning the Pages at Hearst

By Andrea Sachs

Cathie Black is sitting as close to the top of the world as you can get in midtown Manhattan. In her corner office on the 43rd floor of the shimmering new Hearst Tower, Black, the president of Hearst Magazines, gazes through her floor-to-ceiling windows at Central Park to the north and the Hudson River to the west. Tall, blond, self-confident, Black has a style that's polished to a high gloss.

But don't confuse her looks with a lack of seriousness; it's all part of the mission. Black, as head of one of the world's largest magazine publishers, is the exemplar of the successful, fulfilled woman that her readers aspire to be. She is responsible for 19 titles, including such flagship women's magazines as the 122-year-old Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan and O: The Oprah Magazine, her most recent blockbuster hit.

The million-dollar view is also a reminder that these are boom times for women's magazines. "They are doing much better than the magazine business overall," says Edward Atorino, a managing director at Benchmark, a brokerage firm in New York City. "Everybody thinks the Internet is the only place where things are happening, but the women's magazine field is not getting the attention that it deserves." Ad revenues in Black's division, a unit of Hearst Corp., have tripled since she took over, soaring to $2.5 billion in 2006, from $841 million in 1996. The magazines are being powered by the rising incomes and aspirations of women, the prime consumers of lifestyle, fashion and celebrity titles.

Black has revealed some of her secrets to ambitious young women, with a smart new advice book cum memoir called Basic Black: The Essential Guide for Getting Ahead at Work (and in Life). Ambitious would certainly describe Black at the beginning of her career in 1966 as a lowly sales assistant at the now defunct Holiday magazine. She moved fast from the start, sometimes too fast for her own good. She once left her resume on a copy machine at work, where it was found by a senior executive at Curtis Publishing Co., Holiday's owner. Oops. She learned to ease up on what she thought was her firm handshake after a male colleague snapped, "Cathie, you don't need to break my hand!"

She moved on to one of the hardest jobs in publishing--advertising manager at the newly launched Ms. magazine--in 1972. "It was a hellishly hard sell for its advertising team," she writes. The magazine's outspoken feminist message and its famous co-founder, Gloria Steinem, were too much for some ad buyers. "Gloria was a lightning rod anywhere she went," Black writes. When Steinem went with her on sales calls, "people were leaning out of their offices to see what these freaks and weirdos looked like."

In 1979, Black made publishing history at New York magazine when she became the first female publisher of a weekly consumer magazine. She then made a leap into newspapers in 1983, joining Al Neuharth, CEO of Gannett, and his fledgling newspaper USA Today. Like Ms., it was groundbreaking, but critics derisively called USA Today "McPaper." It ended up revolutionizing journalism, influencing a generation of newspapers and magazines with its colorful graphics and bite-size articles designed for television watchers. Neuharth, she says, was sometimes ruthless--something she tried never to be--but she admired his strategic vision. "He always had the bigger endgame" in mind, Black says.

She would need that perspective when she arrived at Hearst. Black had already proved herself; now she would have to prove that there was still life left in the old magazine industry. "It's time to blow the dust off the curtains at Hearst!" she announced at a management conference. And she did. Black launched O: The Oprah Magazine in 2000, which has generated $1.3 billion in ad revenue since then and all but invented a new category, the celebrity-driven lifestyle and self-help magazine.

Given her success in the male-dominated world of publishing, Black is surprisingly silent in her book on the subject of discrimination. It never affected her "in any way that was life-threatening," she tells TIME. "Because I have a strong and forceful personality, I could either see it coming or do a sidestep so it didn't have to happen."

Black is candid, though, about her belly flops, most notably Talk magazine. Its superstar editor, Tina Brown, hosted "the party of the decade" to launch the celebrity and politics magazine in 1999, but it never connected with readers and went out of business two years later. In her book, Black admits that Hearst was seduced by the hype around the magazine. "Don't allow the siren song of the buzz to keep you from paying sufficient attention to the basics," she cautions.

The basics--advice on sex, beauty, fashion and health, delivered with a sincere belief in the power of self-improvement--still hold the interest of 74 million readers a month. "All those kinds of things women forever have loved," Black says. And in the Internet age, they still love to read it in big, fat, glossy magazines.