{"id":64147,"date":"2012-11-28T13:52:34","date_gmt":"2012-11-28T13:52:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/?p=17674"},"modified":"2017-11-02T14:24:11","modified_gmt":"2017-11-02T14:24:11","slug":"journalist-spotlight-natasha-mcnamara","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/blog\/journalist-spotlight-natasha-mcnamara\/","title":{"rendered":"Journalist Spotlight: Natasha McNamara"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"JournalistNatasha McNamara is the editor of Glamour.com<\/span><\/a> and executive editor of EasyLiving.co.uk<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Natasha started her career as a film journalist and full time film reviewer after doing a degree in film. She moved to online journalism at iVillage<\/a> and then became editor of Handbag.com<\/a>. Natasha moved to Cond\u00e9 Nast<\/a> in 2008 where she has been ever since.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the difference between Glamour.com and EasyLiving.co.uk?<\/span>
\n<\/b>Glamour is a massive website, our visitor figures are rocketing \u2013 1,502,817 unique visitors in October \u2013 and we know what we\u2019re doing, it\u2019s a very news-based website. We wanted Easy Living to be visual and practical. The site was designed to be picture led and give people endless inspiration for homes, food and recipes. The two websites are not wildly different in their DNA, we just present them differently.<\/p>\n

What does your Launch of the Year Award from the BSME<\/a> mean to EasyLiving.com?<\/span>
\n<\/b>I think it is perfect timing really, because the site\u2019s not even a year old and already we\u2019ve exceeded all our traffic expectations with 226,934 unique visitors in October. There are not that many interior, food, fashion and beauty sites with that Cond\u00e9 Nast gloss, beautiful pics and that also are practical.<\/p>\n

How do the two teams work together?<\/span>
\n<\/b>We call ourselves sisters; Easy Living is like the big sister to Glamour. The teams don\u2019t sit together but we do all have the same morning meeting because we need to talk about the news and what\u2019s happening. Although Glamour is much more of a responsive site, there are things we discuss for Easy Living, like a celebrity hairstyle (we don\u2019t go for celebrity too much but it\u2019s nice to have a little bit in there) or something everyone is talking about. My day-to-day life is Glamour.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the advantage of digital over print?<\/span>
\n<\/b>The results are instant, if we put something on one of the sites we can see in seconds if that piece is doing well and we can get to know our market and our audience and keep responding to that. On a magazine you make all the decisions about what goes in that magazine and then it\u2019s gone and done. If you put something online and it bombs you know about it and know that it isn\u2019t something your readers are interested in.<\/p>\n

Does social media help?<\/span>
\n<\/b>We have live Google Analytics<\/a> on a big screen on the wall so we can see traffic spikes instantly and we should know where they\u2019ve come from because we bitly<\/a> all our links. We have various social media platforms and we\u2019re working out a strategy for each of those because I don\u2019t think they\u2019re all the same. A good whack of our traffic comes through social media but it isn\u2019t the biggest traffic source.<\/p>\n

Do the demands of an instant audience affect your style?<\/span>
\n<\/b>The first thing you learn in digital is there\u2019s no time for long, descriptive epics. People online, perhaps more on Glamour, want to look at the picture, know what\u2019s happening and move on. Perhaps on Easy Living there\u2019s more scope for long-form articles, but obviously it\u2019s a different audience and we\u2019re talking about different things. How to match paint doesn\u2019t really go away, but celebrity couples do.<\/p>\n

In terms of digital and in terms of pace, my team doesn\u2019t really stop to catch its breath, we power through the news in the morning and features in the afternoon. I suppose the difference between print and digital is that with digital we find it hard to pack in all the press events, shows and everything we\u2019d love to go to. You have to be really tight with your time, because if you\u2019re not there, it\u2019s not going on the site and you lose traffic. It\u2019s quite a fast pace but I couldn\u2019t live without it.<\/p>\n

Are there concerns that the immediacy stops you considering, or reconsidering, your work?<\/span>
\n<\/b>I don\u2019t think so because we\u2019re all so well trained in what we\u2019re doing. Glamour magazine is very opinionated and we have blogs for opinions but we\u2019re not an opinion site. In terms of reporting the news, we report the news and that\u2019s it. We do have opinions in \u2018Dos & Don\u2019ts<\/a>\u2019 but we\u2019re so nice I can\u2019t imagine anyone would ever have an issue.<\/p>\n

We feel we compete more with sites like Mail Online<\/a> rather than Look<\/a> magazine or Marie Claire<\/a>, because our traffic numbers are so big in terms of our news. Mail Online is the biggest website in the world but that doesn\u2019t stop us from trying. The difference between us and them is our tone and our Glamour approach \u2013 we\u2019re not going to judge and we\u2019re a bit pickier about who we cover.<\/p>\n

How do you plan to continue to compete?<\/span>
\n<\/b>We have plans in the system to take our news element much deeper which will hopefully surface early next year and be a huge project for us. We\u2019re certainly taking the competition seriously. We\u2019re not able to go into too much detail about the depth of news but we\u2019re focusing on increasing our reporting and pictures because that\u2019s what people want.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s your relationships with PRs like?<\/span>
\n<\/b>Pretty good, they need us and we need them. It does unfortunately suck up a lot of the team\u2019s time answering calls but there\u2019s nothing much you can do about that, it\u2019s the nature of the beast.<\/p>\n

Do you prefer emails?<\/span>
\n<\/b>Yes, but even then I spend most of my life deleting emails that aren\u2019t relevant to us. I think the PR phone calls are kind of annoying. If people send us a press release and we\u2019re interested we\u2019ll go back to them; we really don\u2019t need the follow up phone call.<\/p>\n

We do some great stuff via PRs, especially with celebrities, which are our bread and butter these days. I know the celebrity editor Charlotte Duck has got a great relationship with some of the big PRs. We did a Robert Pattinson Twitter takeover last week which is the first time he\u2019s ever been on Twitter. That\u2019s through years of working on relationships with the Twilight people and it was thanks to that we were worldwide trending with our hashtag #GlamourRob<\/a>, which is great. We\u2019ve got another extremely high profile takeover on Monday 10\u00a0December so stay tuned.<\/p>\n

\n

Take Five<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

On your Glamour profile your style icon is listed as Courtney Love. Does that still stand?<\/b> I\u2019d probably change that, I was pregnant then and hormonal. My style icon now would be SJP \u2013 Sarah Jessica Parker.<\/span><\/p>\n

What\u2019s your favourite fashion brand?<\/b> Actually, it\u2019s probably going to be Topshop. You can\u2019t beat Topshop.<\/span><\/p>\n

Who would play you in a film?<\/b> We were talking about this the other day; Naomi Watts. I think I\u2019ve got a girl crush on her. She\u2019s probably a bit more my age group as well. Chloe Moretz can play me as a younger girl. It\u2019s literally going to be my entire life, so she can play me when I am younger and Naomi Watts can play me when I am older. I\u2019ll get my oldest daughter to play me as a child (she\u2019s six) so I\u2019ve got the full range.<\/span><\/p>\n

If you could have a superpower what would it be?<\/b> Basically what your superpower is says a lot about yourself but I am going to go for invisibility. It probably means I\u2019m quite nosey, but there are things you could do, you could go places and see things you probably wouldn\u2019t normally be able to do. Obviously I\u2019d use it for good; world peace would literally be within our grasp. No one would know it was me but that\u2019s cool, I could live with that \u2013 I\u2019m like a mild-mannered unassuming super hero and that\u2019s one of the things you have to accept. Either that or a vampire slayer\u2026 obviously.<\/span><\/p>\n

What\u2019s the one thing you can\u2019t live without?<\/b> Probably wine.<\/span><\/p>\n

You\u2019d just be invisible drinking wine?<\/b> Nobody\u2019s going to judge me \u2013 it\u2019s perfect.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Editorial information on Natasha McNamara, Glamour.com, EasyLiving.co.uk and thousands of other media contacts, can be found in the\u00a0Vuelio\u00a0<\/span>media database<\/span><\/a>.<\/strong>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Natasha McNamara is the editor of Glamour.com and executive editor of EasyLiving.co.uk. Natasha started her career as a film journalist and full time film reviewer after doing a degree in film. She moved to online …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":322,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[248,3532,5741],"tags":[844,1951,4097,4098,4099,4100,4101,4102,4103,4104,4105,612,729],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64147"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/322"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64147"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":109525,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64147\/revisions\/109525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}