Bonnie Fuller on Working in the Media Industry

[Music Playing] Well, I always want to be a reporter when I was a teenager. I loved to read the newspaper. So, I started working at the college paper called the Varsity at University of Toronto, and it was great because it was -- it came out three times a week and I loved it and I just put covered whatever they ask me to do. And then I decided to try and get into journalism school, but I have had to go in Toronto just for financial reason because that is where I am from. Did not get accepted and so I went to law school instead but I was so bored that I would work in the evenings and on weekends for the Toronto Star which was big daily paper there. I have freelance for them and again cover whatever they needed and I just loved it. So, I have decided to after a year to quit law school and I focus on it full time and trying to get a full time job and I ended it up getting enough a job as a young fashion reporter for the Toronto Star because that is all there was open. It seems like I like my career is always been in a recessionary time. Every time that I had to find work, it always been a recession. So, it was recession then to so I work for many jobs and so I knew nothing at all but fashion, but I think that was the job so I had learned and I did and did that for three years and then ended up getting that. I really want to move to New York because I had boyfriend who threatened to move to New York and I got the idea of applying to Women’s For Daily because it was trade publication I read all the time. And they did not give me the time of day until I actually turned up in New York and then they said okay, well since you are here, then sure you know come up. Turned out though that when I got here and they saw what I did that they had a hard time finding young fashion writers at that time too. So, they offered me a job on the spot. And it was at Women’s Wear that I made the transition of magazines because I would freelance again just to pay the rent for Canadian Magazine. It was a young fashion magazine called Flair and I do a column for them every month from New York. And one day their editor up and quit. She just got bad or upset about something, so she quit and they were desperate for another in somebody recommended me. And I was like wait I am 26 years old. I never even worked in a magazine, how could I be the Editor-in-Chief? But it was such a growing field, it was new, people were not doing fashion magazines. Make a sound like at the ancient times ago but I was not that long ago they were that many -- that Canada even had a fashion magazine and this was really the first. So I had experienced in fashions so I ended up getting the job. So, that is how I get started. [Music Playing] That did not happen until after I edited a lot of big magazine. After Flair, I edited YM which was a teen magazine, then I launched Marie Clare in the States, then I was promoted to be Editor-in-Chief of Cosmopolitan and from there, I went to Glamour. And at Glamour, I ended up not getting renewed and so I was again in the middle of a major recession and looking for work and as Weekly had been launched, as a Weekly, it had been a monthly magazine and it really had and taken off yet and so Yon Waner was looking to--although Editor-in-Chief got actually got a great job, he got a great job as Sports Illustrated as Editor-in-Chief which he really where he was more interested in. So, Yon Waner was looking for an Editor. I was unemployed. I would always love reading Europeans celebrity magazines, there was nothing like them in this country and I just thought why would an American Women want to read something like that too? I want too. So, I went to talk to Yon and I actually create it like on my family room table like cutting and pasting and the xeroxing the kingko. Created like a whole bunch of pages for what I thought as Weekly should be and he loved it. So, that is why I got into a celebrity magazine. [Music Playing]