Better Homes & Gardens editor Megan Osborne on working in and for magazines

Rachel Smith: Hello and welcome to The Content Byte, a podcast for freelancers who use their words to make money. I’m Rachel Smith, a freelance journalist, copywriter, and content producer. I’m also the founder of Rachel’s List, a jobs board and community for Australian writers and other creatives. 

Lynne Testoni: I’m Lynne Testoni! I’m a journalist and content writer as well. Rachel and I are your weekly co-hosts, and every week we bring you all kinds of tips, tricks, and some fabulous guests to help you make the most of your freelance business.

Rachel: Lynne! How are you today? Are you as busy as I am? 

Lynne: I am, I am. This is always a busy time of year with my regular, large project, as you know. It’s all about the block and I’m doing lots of juggling at the moment. 

Rachel: Yes. I feel you. I think we were saying off air. I’ve been on camera all day, basically. So, I was feeling like a bit of an airhead. 

Lynne: But that’s part of the fun of it, isn’t it? 

Rachel: It is, it is. But it is quite busy actually post financial year, juggling school holidays, that’s all ended too. But I’m very excited about our guest today, Megan Osborne, who’s a magazine editor. She has a really varied career and I think it’s going to be a great chat. 

Lynne: Oh, definitely. I’m really excited too. Megan is the editor of Australia’s highest selling magazine, so it’s a big job and I know she’s got a lot to share. So let me read out a quick bio for Megan and then we’ll get her into the hot seat.

Megan is the editor of Better Homes & Gardens Magazine. She has a background as an experienced content director and has led campaigns for publications and brands across varied industries, including travel, food, not-for-profit, FMCG, home and architecture, culture and lifestyle. Everything really. With experience working across agency startups and publishing houses, Megan has developed expertise in understanding and executing strong cross channel integration of content. She’s a very model of a modern magazine editor, and we are thrilled she’s joining us today. Welcome.

Rachel:  Welcome!

Megan Osborne: Thank you. Happy to be here! 

Rachel: It’s so good. We had a lovely chat off air, but we are just so happy to actually be recording now and talking to you about all your magazine wisdom. But for those who don’t know you, give us a bit of background about your career and how you’ve gotten to this point.

Megan: It’s been an interesting full circle exercise for me. I came out of uni, studied fine arts, going way back. Very brief stint in advertising, and then really developed a passion for food. Became a bit of a food writer. I did the stint at the Urban List, a street press in Melbourne, Broadsheet, those sorts of gigs and then evolved to work agency side. I did quite a decent stint as Content Director for Woolworths agency side at NewsCorp at the time. That was for about four and a half years and then my last gig before this was actually working for a comms agency called The Mint Partners and I worked driving content and social solutions for brands like Marriott International, Archie Rose, Volvo, things like that.

Lynne: Wow. It’s so interesting because being an editor is so much broader a role than it used to be because you’re managing print and digital, and I know of course that’s great and with your background, you’re even looking at the commercial side of things. How do you navigate being always ahead in a world that’s moving so fast?

Megan: I think the job description for an editor is probably vastly different than it might have been ten, twenty, thirty years ago. I’ve had a lot of these kinds of conversations with colleagues throughout the industry and there’s a lot of days where it’s more about running a business than being, I guess a creative editor.

Definitely juggling print, digital, commercial, operational is a lot of time as well. I think the biggest thing that ultimately always comes back to, which you guys would be no strangers to, is that knowing who your audience is and being able to meet them with value wherever they are, whether that’s in print or digital or in real life.

But it’s really important to me, and I think from my history working in strategy, is taking a real insights and research lens on things. So, we look at insights across channels, across platforms. All sorts of data owned and external and I think I tap into my team a lot for that. We have a quarterly insights deck that we all contribute to because they’re all experts in their own right and that really helps. I can’t stay across everything that’s happening in gardening and food and DIY. That’s their strength and skillset, and that’s what they’re tapped into. So that’s really helpful. And then I think, not to drink the company Kool-Aid, but being a part of a company like Are Media is super helpful because we can tap into all the different departments and the heads that are looking at innovation, that are looking at new ways of working new platforms, new formats, and helping move us forward as a brand under that umbrella and taking us on the ride.

Rachel: It sounds like you were you really into the data before starting as an editor or has that always been something you’ve been a bit obsessed by? 

Megan: I think I uncovered that I’m a bit of a data nerd during my time working for Woolies and really understanding. I mean, that was a massive magazine. I think their readership was, oh, I can’t remember, somewhere between four and six million. Its huge and really getting to the bottom of what content was going to perform, what people were searching for. The difference between some really semantic, keyword differences on things and slight tweaks that you would make to a cover recipe and how that would impact sales and just understanding, not just surveys, what people tell you, but what their behaviour shows you. I always found that learning curve really valuable, and it also shaped how I work with people and with my strategies is if a concept or a reason for doing something is based on this really solid rationale, it’s a lot easier to guarantee it’s success, essentially. 

Rachel: I love that. Well, you’ve worked across both consumer and custom magazines. Is there a lot of difference between, I mean, we know there is, but what are the differences as you see it? 

Megan: I think there are and there aren’t. I think in a perfect world, if the job is being done well, then there shouldn’t be a huge difference. But I mean, a good custom brand mag will put their audience first. But it’s always interesting to see how brands and agencies find that sweet spot between business objectives and customer needs. Some brands definitely do it better than others. It’s really nice being back consumer mag again. I think audience is always going to be our number one driver at the end of the day, and there’s nothing that can really compromise that even when we have commercial partnerships, they don’t come with the lack of editorial integrity, which is a really nice position to be in in this day and age. 

Rachel: Absolutely. 

Megan: I think, I have my vision for Better Homes is not just the success of the print magazine, it’s really looking at the brand sentiment and experience and that’s a real objective for me is we want people to feel like they’re part of the Better Homes & Gardens community. What we offer them is purely based on we want to solve their problems, we want to help them, we want to guide them, but we want to be seen as that friend or that neighbour. And so, we’d love them to come back to our community in the future if they want to and that doesn’t have to be through a paid channel, but ultimately, we want to build that sentiment and that feeling for Better Homes & Gardens. Whereas when you’re working on a custom mag, your ultimate driver is product sales of that brands item, right? Or brands underneath their umbrella. 

Rachel: There’s always that lens that you’re looking through and creating content for. It’s interesting. 

Megan: Even when I worked on Woolies I think it’s valuable to be commercially savvy. I think those skills that I learned have helped me understand how to work well with commercial partners and drive results for them with Better Homes & Gardens, but ultimately, it’s like how much did putting barramundi on the cover of the Woolies Magazine drive barramundi sales? 

Lynne: So interesting.

Rachel: Don’t you think as well, Lynne? When you think about, back to when we were in magazines or working on site and that sort of thing, there was such a great divide between that. Now it’s so integrated, isn’t it? There used to be this really big divide between sales and advertising and commercial stuff and the creative and editorial side, or maybe Lynne, you felt differently because you were at higher positions than I was. 

Lynne: I think I felt differently. I think I’ve always found it to be much more integrated. Certainly, the divide was bigger in newspapers. I’ve always felt magazines, even from the early days, were much more integrated with their commercial partners and their advertisers. But it’s different now. I mean, there’s a lot more integration and a lot more collaborative partnerships and things like that that. A melding of brands I think is probably, it’s on another level, which is what I think you are saying. Do you find that Megan? 

Megan: I do. I think, it’s always been a part of what I’ve done, I think in today’s day and age though, it’s also a lot more clearly signposted than it used to be possibly and I think the layman reading it wouldn’t have realised that this brand was putting money behind that or that wasn’t necessarily an editorial integrity choice. Whereas now I feel like it’s pretty black and white. 

Lynne: I know from looking at your Instagram that you’re very busy, but I’m sure it’s not all glamour. What’s a week really like for you? 

Megan: I wish it was all glamour! I’m very lucky, and we said this before the recording started, that I really do love what I do and it’s really nice to also work with a bunch of other creatives who are passionate and dedicated. 

Lynne: That’s lovely. 

Megan: You can just sit in office some days and you go; this is nice to be surrounded by people who all really want to be here and that’s lovely and fulfilling. I remember interviewing someone once for an article and it was about therapeutic horticulture, and he said this really interesting thing that just stuck with me. I guess it’s common knowledge, but it’s the things that you don’t think about on a daily basis. And he said, oh, I’m going to paraphrase him and absolutely butcher it. But he was like, people come to this therapeutic horticulture program to basically get to an end goal. Our whole point of this is that it’s not about the objective you get at the end, it’s about slowing down and enjoying the process, and enjoying the stages that it takes you or whatever and I just had this big epiphany where I was like, I love what I do. 

Lynne: Oh nice! 

Megan: But my week is spent in a lot more meetings than should be humanly possible. Keeping my inbox at a manageable level is a real challenge. I think I get around 300 emails a day. So, to any PR’s that are listening to all the press releases I haven’t responded to, it’s not personal, I promise. And look a day or a week in life, it really varies. It could be forming what the business strategy or the issue strategy is. It could be writing, it could be editing, collaborating with my team in so many different ways on set. Beautiful content shoot. I just popped downstairs today and saw they were shooting some amazing things with vegetable dyes. There is really never a boring day and there’s never a quiet day. 

Rachel: How lovely. Well, if I can address the big elephant in the room for a second. Talk to us about the challenges of managing a magazine at the moment. because there’s a lot of talk about the death of print media, but your magazine is still going strong. How do you view all of that? 

Megan: Look, it really is. I think, I’m really proud and I don’t take full credit for this. This is absolutely the team and over years of nostalgia and brand love, but we are the number one most read paid mag, which is a real feather in our cap, and I think they are a real luxury in today’s market to have such a large audience.

Our email and social channels are also growing at a really great pace. I think we hit our email database targets by month three of the year for the full year, so that’s really exciting. I think our magazine is a huge one to create. We do thirteen issues a year and four standalone mags on top of that. We have modelled what a different cadence would look like to see, is this the most profitable way of operating? There’s still such a strong appetite for it that we’re still going strong. We have no plans to reduce the cadence anytime soon. I think the business would love if we could produce more, but my team would probably kill me. At the moment we are balancing the workload obviously is I think an interesting one, but still going strong fingers crossed, finished off the year strong as well. I was just taking my team through the results over the last three months, and we’ve climbed in sales every month, so that’s really exciting. 

Lynne: Oh, that is exciting. Wow. We are seeing journalists decamping from media and retraining. There are a few redundancies. I’ve got two people coming for scones, redundancy scones in the next week and a lot of them are retraining. Has there been a moment when you’ve thought about that or is it this is what you’ve always wanted to do? Is it in your DNA? 

Megan: I definitely feel like I’ve kind of already done that as well. I said to my partner, because this job was really going back into traditional publishing for me, and I said to my partner when I took on the job, it’s a risk of going back into publishing for stability reasons and if I make it a year, we’ll call it a success because it’s that much of a passion kind of project that it’s worth that risk.

I feel like in my career, I did step away from publishing because of that job insecurity. I moved into agency land, especially my last stint being at a comms agency. That was really a bit of, is this the right thing for me? But it was also I had this perception that I couldn’t both really love what I did and make a decent income off of it. And I did end up really loving working there. So that was a nice surprise. But then I think it’s the difference between enjoying your work and really living and breathing it, which is, like you say, perhaps that’s my DNA in publishing. I think constant upskilling is really valuable no matter what role you’re in or what industry you’re in and that really future proofs you in the sense. I have developed a lot of knowledge around social media, content and audience, and those skills I think, I feel are pretty transferable and spending time on relationships never do you wrong, so that I think that’s your safety net. 

Coming back into publishing it feels like coming home in a way, which is really nice. I do sometimes wonder what long term, what my next role will be because I don’t really know how I can top this. If I move up the ladder in this business, I step away from the creative side of it, but hopefully I’ll just be the BHG version of Anna Wintour and I’ll just stick around forever. 

Rachel: Fingers crossed. Well, you just touched on relationships, which is really interesting because one of the toughest things about being an editor is pulling together a strong team and having those really strong relationships and keeping in touch with possible contributors. Is that right, too? 

Megan: Absolutely. I think even with we are starting to plan more and more ahead. We still move fast. We move at such a pace and with unfortunately bring it up again, my 300 emails a day. Just being able to communicate succinctly and quickly with people and having that reliable stable, I think is key.

I’m always meeting people and a lot of that is, I guess commercial and client, but also contributors. So, we work with a lot of freelance writers, photographers, stylists, food preps, et cetera. I think the right fit, it just makes such a difference, and they almost become an extension of your team quality. The speed at which we are operating is crazy, but the quality also needs to stay really high. We are trusted by our audience to be the experts and to be giving them the right information and information that they can’t just get with a quick ChatGPT search or Google search and so trusted contributors that we know are going to do their due diligence as well is really key for us.

I think on a more personal note, this is going to sound terrible, but it’s cutthroat as well. I will continue to work with someone who delivers on brief, communicates clearly and succinctly, there’s not a lot of back and forth and obviously that relies on my end. I have to give a strong and clear brief and obviously be open to giving more clarity where needed, but the people that deliver on time, it’s one email. It doesn’t have ten back and forth emails or images spread across four days. I know it seems trivial, but it just makes my life easier. 

Lynne: You’d have a lot of specialists as well, wouldn’t you? I guess every magazine does, like gardening specialists or food specialists as well as your core team. Does that happen? 

Megan: Well, we do. We are lucky enough that I have a fairly decent sized team here as well. So, we do have some in-house experts, and we’ll often commission out when we feel like we don’t have that expertise in the team and sometimes it is a time issue, but then usually we will reach out to someone that has those qualifications or the connections. And those connections could be whether they’ve worked in that industry in the past, they’ve got the contacts through the industry, or they’ve written on the topic before.

Lynne: I’d have to ask a little bit about social media because the magazine does have a large following. I think I checked when I was running this script, it was about 240,000. Do you think that helps? Because I always wonder if that promotes the magazine, or does it dilute the print version? 

Megan: I feel like it definitely helps and it’s also not a huge crossover in our print and social audiences. As I mentioned before, I’m really focused on building this sense of community for this brand. We’ve already seen this improve massively over the last six months. Our social engagements up by 49%. We use social as a really great kind of fuel for what people are interested in. We use interactivity a lot on social media to ask them questions.

We do this regular segment at the moment. Sort of travel segment and we ask for audience advice and thoughts to go into that, and then that’s what helps us publish in the magazine as well. But also, I think the brand’s been around for so long and has such credibility, but the younger audience just probably see it as the magazine their mum used to read, or the TV show I grew up watching or my parents watch.

Social media really enables us to connect with those audiences and the content that we’re using to do so we are trying to shift perception of, oh, hey, like I am interested in gardening, or I wanted to do it myself, that project in my rental and that’s the kind of content that we haven’t always created. So, it’s about sort of reigniting that relevance in that younger audience, which we’re not going to change user behaviour of the Gen Zs. They’re not going to suddenly go out and start buying Better Homes Magazine, and we know that. But how do we still have something that we believe is a value to them. Social media and our website and our other channels are really valuable for that. We don’t think of it as print versus digital or social. I know that was definitely a historic view, but for us, it’s where our audience is. Who are our different audiences? How do we evolve, how people perceive us and find value in us as a brand? My vision is future state BHG is a household name, not just because of one channel. 

Rachel: Interesting. I’d like to go back a bit. Just back to the freelancer thing because, you mentioned that you do use freelancers, you do use contributors. What would be your tips for people listening? Because there will be many who would be wondering, how can I get my foot in the door there? What do I need to do to get noticed by Megan? 

Megan: Goodness. I think it really does come down to what I was saying before around expertise and bringing something to the table and it doesn’t have to be, you don’t have to have a degree in horticulture or have been a builder for twenty years.  I think just being able to demonstrate that you can offer something that isn’t just Googleable. I had an adjective and I feel like we might get to this in a minute, but with AI, you’d be surprised at how many pieces of content I get from contributors where I can blatantly see that ChatGPT has been used to create that and that’s a bit of a bug bear for me because I can just put it in ChatGPT. I didn’t pay you to do this. I paid you because I want your human tone. I want your first-person narrative. Maybe that’s something that people may not know about where BHG is going, but I’m really keen to have more of that. What is that real human story? So, if you’ve got a story that you can tell us about your grandma, or you can tell us about how you learned to knit at whatever age. We’re interested in some more of that relatable content as well as just the how-to’s. 

Rachel: If I can just jump on that bug bear that you were talking about. I think a big bug bear for journalists right, is when they go to interview a subject matter expert, and the quotes are all ChatGPT generated. So, the expert is not even more the brain anymore to give you answers from their brain. 

Lynne: You have to work really hard at getting personal interviews because speaking to somebody rather than get anything on emails because ChatGPT is everywhere and well, AI is everywhere, and people are using it in all sorts of insidious ways. 

Rachel: Also, editors are using it to brief people. 

Lynne: Yes, they are, definitely.

Rachel: Good for a lot of things, but. 

Lynne: It is handy. 

Megan: I think that’s it. I think the knowledge of some AI tools, it can help with structure or speed, and I think that we’ve done definitely done some Q and A’s digitally in recent times and felt like a lot of the answers that have come through have been ChatGPT. We also get reader letters sometimes that come through that have clearly been ChatGPT.

Lynne: Really? How funny.

Megan: And look to a degree, we are in a world of faster, better, quicker. I can understand the appeal of AI, but if I can read it and see the hallmarks quite clearly, and I’m sure there are a lot that I’m not picking up as well. It feels really impersonal or if that’s going to compromise the quality of the content and that real human voice and authenticity of the content then I’m sorry that freelancer is probably just going to go straight to the bottom of my list, and we are unlikely to reengage many times soon. 

Lynne: Fair enough. What sort of skills do you think are freelancers? Obviously, you’ve talked about that human led content, but you also mentioned earlier, I think about the basics following a brief filing on time. Are they hard to find? 

Megan: You’d be surprised.

Lynne: Really? 

Megan: We get some people are great in some areas, but then they just drop the ball in others and it’s a really unforgiving landscape because of how much competition there is. We’ll get sent versions of drafts of articles and then drip-fed photos or drip-fed quotes, or we need to fact check things that are wrong. That’s a big issue for us if some of our content, especially if there’s any sorts of health claims. We have 1.8 million readers; we can’t be telling people inaccurate things. Fact checking is a big one that a lot of our editors in-house spend a lot of time on. But I think, communication, clarity, succinct, easy to deal with. Makes our lives easier, not harder. Essentially, I think, again, this may sound mean, but we are commissioning a freelancer because we are time poor. We don’t have the time to do it ourselves because nine times out of ten, we are qualified to do it ourselves in house unless it’s an expert article and even then, we could interview someone and still write it. We’re commissioning it out because we can’t facilitate it in-house. We don’t have the time to do so just make our lives easier please.

Rachel: I know we had another editor on recently, or it was probably a while ago now, and one big thing I think for editors as well is, once you’ve filed the story, don’t disappear. Do you find that’s a big thing for you as well? 

Megan: Yes and no. Sometimes we’ll get an article and it’s great, it just needs a couple of tweaks. It’s good to go, we don’t need to come back. But then other ones we will need to fact check or we’ll need to get something changed or, and then definitely it prompts, and availability is great. I guess depending on how organised myself or whoever commissions it is, we may have a really generous lead time from when we’ve asked for your deadline to when it goes to print, and we may not, or we might come up with a problem that needs to be solved right close to our print deadline, we might have missed up until that point. So, I think being responsive always helps. 

Rachel: Well, what do you think about the future of magazines? Is it all about multi-platforms and digital, or do you think print is still the anchor point?

Megan: I think for us, print is very much still the heartbeat. Just because BHG is such a really, I want to say tactile, trusted brand. People have experienced it in their houses for so long, but we are really focusing on our digital channels of where we reach new audiences and where we diversify our content. It’s where we try new things, where we connect with people in a different way to the print mag. We want to catch people where they are in a way that suits where they are and so we can’t just lift a print article and put it on social media or put it on the website and expect it to resonate in the same way.

I think in the next ten years, if I’m doing my Anna Wintour, I’m sticking around with that long that the brand has so many more touch points than just where you expect traditional media. We’re not just in print and tv, email and social – we are in your experiences, in your day-to-day life, there are more touch points, whether that’s through product or through activities or through transport. I don’t know where I’m going with that, but there’s just way more ways to connect. 

Lynne: So interesting. Well, we’d love to ask all our guests about their favourite tech tips or the tools that they can’t live without. So, I’d love to hear yours because I’m sure they’d be different from some of our writer guests.

Megan: This may sound a bit strange, but I think the thing that stands out to me as the most valuable is actually a really good Spotify playlist and I listen to binaural beats, usually on some sort of focus frequency. I don’t know if you guys have experimented with that. 

Rachel: No, I haven’t.

Megan: It’s essentially, it sounds like you’re doing a meditation or something, but it plays a different frequency in each ear, so you have to listen to them wearing headphones. The science behind it is it triggers this state of focus, and I find it really works for me. I put them on and the first ten or fifteen seconds I’m like, oh, it’s woo woo music and then I look up and three hours have passed, and I’ve just completed like this whole strategy day. 

Rachel: Wow. Okay. I’ve got to try this. 

Megan: I do it on my one work from home day where I’m not in meetings or needing to be available. But, binaural beats, focus, flow, definitely helpful. I think for me as well, I err on the spectrum of innovation and people and less on the spectrum of organisation. As much as I love a good list and I love a good structure, it doesn’t come naturally to me. It’s something I have to kind of force myself into. So, depending on if you’re working solo, a tool like Asana, for me, I just love Asana. I love that it’s free and I find it really helpful in terms of structuring my to-do list based on urgency and you get a little shiny unicorn when you complete a task. 

Rachel: I love that. 

Megan: I don’t use it as frequently as I should, but I use it when I get really, really overwhelmed. It’s just the Eisenhower model, the Matrix, just filtering your tasks by important and urgent and it just helps me. I get swept up as I’m sure many people do in the urgent tasks, and I don’t always put aside time for the important ones.

Lynne: Well, I think we can all relate to that. 

Rachel: Yes, absolutely. Oh gosh, this has been such a great chat, Megan. So tell us where our audience can find you and if they wanted to pitch to you, how would they go about doing that? 

Megan: Absolutely. BHG obviously is bhg.com.au and if you want to pick up the mag to do a bit of research, go for it we’re available in newsagents, Bunnings and supermarkets. My email is megan.osborne@aremedia.com au. Remember, I do get 300 emails a day, so if I don’t respond, it’s not personal. And you could probably just find me on LinkedIn as well.

Lynne: Fantastic. Oh, thank you so much, Megan. It’s lovely to meet you face to face, even on the camera, so it’s lovely. Thank you so much for being, our guest, because I think our listeners will find it really valuable to hear what it’s like being a magazine editor today. I think it’s really interesting. 

Megan: Thank you so much for having me. This has been lots of fun.

Lynne: That brings us to the end of the show this week. But thanks to everyone who’s listening, leaving ratings and reviews, which we love, don’t we, Rach? 

Rachel: We do. Leave more! 

Lynne: I’ll put all those links on how to contact Megan in the show notes and maybe we’ll even put a link in to see how you can sign up for the Better Homes & Gardens newsletter as well. So that would be great. 

Megan: Do it. It’s lots of fun. 

Lynne: Alright. Thank you and we’ll see everyone again next week. 

Rachel: Bye everyone! 

Megan: Bye!

Lynne: Bye! 

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Credits:

Connect with Megan via LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/osbornemegan/ 

Find Lynne www.lynnetestoni.com 

Find Rachel www.rachelsmith.com.au 

Rachel’s List www.rachelslist.com.au 

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Episode edited by Marker Creative Co www.markercreative.co