It’s true, some magazine editors have to TikTok themselves to the top

By Raiment Young

It isn’t easy being a magazine editor. With print media on a veritable decline, the magazine editor, these days, has to try harder. Now that many also have to play an active role in the digital version of their respective titles, editors have to be masters of more than one medium. In the past, they needed only to be adept at putting together a print magazine—fill the pages with engaging stories and striking photographs. A flair with pagination and packaging (stories), I was told, is a plus. Then some editors adopted Instagram, and they gained visual competency in not only selling products, but themselves too. Personal branding, as with OOTD, became a thing. Once an editor needed only to be good with text, now they’ve gone from shooting photographic selfies to video selfies. The journalist, not to be outdone by influencers, happily and actively becomes one.

A magazine is no longer the sum of its editorial pages or parts, or running heads. The content is not any more merely the editor’s signature. With digital iterations of print and the necessary attendant social media pages intersecting, I see editors have to be able to generate lively content across platforms. And then some: They also need to create personal pages as extension of their paid work, to spin-off the otherwise one-dimensional print page into something that engages so that the editor is then able to personally find new audiences—those who don’t read but view— and, in return, monetise what he/she posts, brilliant or banal, seemly or trite. By extending themselves, editors are also extending the brand. Mastheads need a digital life too; they sent out tweets and social posts, and these do not necessarily promote the content of the original medium. They are not merely a title; they are brands, and, as such, they can be a magazine, as well as a social-media page, a blog, a Youtube channel, a shopping portal, the merchandise, or even an app.

Editors need to be as multi-faceted, switching from the pages of a magazine to the pages of a website, or the tiles of Instagram. They have to show their audience what extracurricular talents they have, too. This is where TikTok comes in, with tremendous might. While fashion’s one-time favourite platform Instagram allows perfectly composed photos, they do not necessarily reflect the subject’s special/natural ability or aptitude. Sure, we can usually see an attractive face, but we can’t hear her voice (and even less in text form of, say, the editor’s page or letter or whatever they like to call it these days) or see his limp wrist limping. Who knows they can cavort so zestfully?! With TikTok videos—even just 15 seconds long—we can have a deeper impression, all the while enjoying, or not, the lowbrow or the high jinks (or high camp). The magazine editor comes alive.

Some editors reveal themselves as natural comedians and lip-sync talents, all packaged with intense fashion—sometimes, thanks to editing apps such as InShot, with multiple OOTD changes, accompanied by It bags, just by snapping fingers or jumping. They have the time! It isn’t clear to me if this is a case of old-fashioned showing-off or more-in-fashion-than-ever funded partnerships with brands. Either way, it’s an I-can-wear-this-many-trendy-and-expensive-clothes-and-you-can’t video brag. Some editors do this so well, I’d never guess they’re not entertainers or jokers by profession. Once virtually unknown, they are now the song-and-dance editors among the other singing and dancing zombies that populate TikTok, but they do it with better clothes or with more pronounced proclamation of their love for a brand. Nothing, as Oscar Wilde said, succeeds like excess.

Editors I spoke to admit that there’s no more downtime to their work, such as the period—even if short—after they put an issue “to bed”. One editor told me how, during her supposed own free time, she has to monitor social media content and create her own posts for her personal accounts that bear her own name. WFH makes it worse. So shackled to the demands of the digital life, professionally and personally, that her husband was convinced she is married to two: he and an indestructible entity that is pulling her further and further away from him. “Social media can really consume you,” she told me. “And we allow it.” It is not surprising then that there are many more addicted to TikTok than those to porn.

The suffix porn, as in food porn (or choose your favourite. Mine, word porn!), is very much a digital-era preoccupation/description (although food porn is said to date back to the late ’70s). Porn, from the Greek porne (which means “whore”), and now quite stripped (pardon the pun) of the intense and pervasive sex that it used to evoke, is an intensifier of the noun that precedes it. Food porn, the most used, and probably the most relatable, usually describes those photos that are exaggerated in their appetite-arousing appeal, with a fidelity that amplifies their sometimes unreal perfection, which, ironically, is un-erotic. Tiktok porn is alike and is not racy, but is more addictive. As reported by App Annie’s State of Mobile 2020, Android users clocked up 68 billion-plus hours using TikTok in 2019. That’s pornographic enough. And one magazine editor I chanced upon, who offered seven outfit changes in one 15-second video post, is without doubt a porn talent, even if he’s no stud, unveiling his cloth-based assets as the pornest of fashion porn.

Illustrations: Just So