What makes a good reporter? The Financial Times fashion editor Lauren Indvik knows the answer

Fashion is a business. You can have all the talent in the world, if you don’t talk money, you’re not making it. We know this, we’ve heard it a million times, yet we still refuse to let go of the idea that art and commerce don’t mix. “Real creatives don’t care about cash,” we tell ourselves. Fortunately, that is not a two-way street, and there is the occasional finance-savant who cares about creativity. Lauren Indvik is living proof of that. As fashion editor of the financial times, the reporter keeps her gaze fixed on the aesthetics-driven world of high luxury, but always through the lens of finance.

Having graduated during the financial recession of 2009, Lauren’s career started at finance site The Street followed by media startup Mashable. After hitting a growth ceiling, she felt ready for a bigger brand. She found the prestige and access she wanted, first as co-editor-in-chief at Fashionista, then writing freelance publications like the New York Times, and finally at Vogue Business, where she was part of the launch of the platform. But all of these career achievements were just steps towards a bigger goal: a position at the Financial Times. A dream job inspired by Vanessa Friedman, which Lauren landed at the start of 2020.

Why this fashion journalist wanted to work at the prestige heritage title becomes obvious early on in the conversation: independence is what she craves. At the FT, Lauren can observe and analyse the industry without the pressure to please PRs, who hold the power in this industry.

“There is this entire system that incentivizes writers to produce positive marketing copy over and over.” Here, she discusses what she learned from the greats, and how to be a good reporter.

Last time we spoke, you told me you were chasing the Alessandro Michele story. What happens in your office when you receive this type of news? How do you “chase” a story?

Someone had actually given me a tip-off, very late last week, very late after hours, about Alessandro and Marco both leaving. I didn’t trust that the source knew the story, they weren’t very well placed. Then I woke up on Wednesday to a string of WhatsApp messages from the Paris bureau chief asking me if I knew anything. So we then spent the morning making a long list of names of people we thought might be able to comment and cold calling them – cold calling is a big part of my job.

And this list of people – are these just general contacts you’ve made from your time as a journalist?

You always go to the corporate communications team first, so we would have called Kering and Gucci. You might also talk to a recruiter, someone who places creative directors because they might know something. For this story, there would have been very few people who knew that Alessandro was leaving. Louisa’s scoop was fantastic, she’s a very good reporter. I’ve been doing this now for ten years, I have a colleague in Paris and one in Milan, so between the three of us, we usually have enough to go on.

What makes a story “fantastic”?

You can’t publish a story like that unless you have two people or more to confirm the news. The fact that she was able to break that almost a day early... Obviously, the company wouldn’t have wanted that so it’s pretty impressive. But Louisa is a very good reporter, she knows everyone in Milan.

You mentioned that you need to cold call a lot. I imagine you need a high level of perseverance and tenaciousness to do your job…

Or you could call it being obnoxious. [laughs]

"I have a liberal arts education, which means they teach you how to learn, and that stuck with me. As long as I have an interest in a topic, I can report on it." - Lauren Indvik

What other personality traits make a good reporter?

I have to say, when I landed my first reporting job, I was so cripplingly shy, I wasn’t really comfortable speaking to people on the phone. I was at Mashable, and I had never been trained as a journalist, so I remember just listening in on others and learning from them. I was so nervous! I remember even asking not to have my name on my first-ever published feature because I was so shy. So, as a shy person, I would have said that I wasn’t cut out to be a reporter, but that is something you do get over.

That’s great news for the introverts among us! What are some soft skills that would be harder to teach?

I did a degree in English literature, so I knew how to construct a basic paragraph. I knew how to form an argument – in my case, it was on Virginia Woolf but it’s a skill you can apply to any topic. I didn’t have any grounding in business when I started my career. My first job before Mashable was working for a financial news website on Wall Street. I have a liberal arts education, which means they teach you how to learn, and that stuck with me. As long as I have an interest in a topic, I can report on it. I don’t know how to drive, but if I was told to go report on the automotive industry, I would probably find it interesting. You find a way to cover it!

So you just need to enjoy writing. You also need to be curious and find enjoyment in... gossiping isn’t the right word, but it really is fun to find out things that aren’t public and try to construct a story from it. Pattern recognition is very important. If you’re able to see disparate things happen and are able to loop them into a singular story on a fundamental shift, that’s great.

Being a reporter is a lot like doing research and writing papers in school, so if you enjoyed being a student, those are indicators that journalism is for you.

"Business and finance are the lenses through which I look at fashion and luxury." - Lauren Indvik

I want to latch on to what you said about the “gossip” or at least the excitement of finding a new story. Do you have an example of a recent story that made you feel that rush?

I did Tom Ford the weekend before Estée Lauder, that was a lot of fun. I spoke to a lot of people who knew him. Tom wasn’t speaking and I had to find out what he was doing. Earlier in my career, I used to work in tech, I broke a couple of stories on acquisition, and that was very fun, cause you get a tip-off from an investor or a founder. To be the first one out with the news, before the company announces it, is very satisfying.

My job at the FT is generally much more relaxed though. I do the style pages and the weekend sections, which run as a weekly, so I don’t do breaking news anymore. In general, luxury is very good at controlling the news. Except for acquisition, everything is very controlled by the corporate press teams.

It’s interesting to hear you describe business journalism as an area of such excitement. How did you end up specializing in the topic?

I definitely did not choose a career in business journalism. I graduated in 2009, during the financial crisis. There were no jobs so the only job I could get was as a social media coordinator at a financial news site on Wall Street. They thought, “she’s 22, she knows how to use social media.” So I had to reframe a repackage this business content in a way that people on Facebook and Twitter would want to read it. It was very challenging because I didn’t always understand the original content. I had to read a lot of Business Insider and over time, came to find it more and more interesting. Now, I’d say business and finance are the lenses through which I look at fashion and luxury.

How many of your peers have a background in business?

I would say it’s very hard to find fashion writers with a good background in business. People who work for WWD tend to have an excellent grounding, Vogue Business or BoF too, the skillset is there. Then, Vanessa Friedman, who was the FT’s first fashion editor, is very much the person I’ve modeled my career on. She and Christina Binkley at the Wall Street Journal were the first writers who got me interested in the business side of fashion. So the knowledge is definitely there, they are just far and few between.

You mentioned a couple of different writers here. What was it about their writing or their view on fashion that inspired you?

My dad always wanted me to major in economics, and he knew that I was very much into fashion as a teen. So he would cut out Christina Binkley’s columns and give them to me in big batches. When I went to uni, he would mail them to me in these massive binders! I like to embarrass Christina by citing things she wrote in the past because I’ve been reading her for such a long time.

"There is this entire system that incentivizes writers to produce positive marketing copy over and over because if you do it, the PRs love you and they invite you on lunches and they offer you a nice handbag at Christmas." - Lauren Indvik

The ultimate fangirl!

I got to work with her at Vogue Business, which was the most surreal privilege. She has such good ethics, never took a gift from anyone, is very fair, and really curious. She’s excellent.

Vanessa Friedman did fabulous stuff at the FT. She was their first fashion editor, so she helped them understand that fashion was a really important industry that they should be covering. When I was a student, she had a blog titled “The Material World”, and every single day, she would get up at five in the morning, and somehow, magically, between getting her three children ready for school, managed to write these blogs by nine, and have an original take on whatever the news was in the fashion and luxury industry. That was the best education. Along with Robin Ghivan, she was really one of the first people to write about the intersection between fashion and politics.

"The PRs really hold the power in this industry." - Lauren Indvik

You mentioned the ethics of Christina. I studied Fashion Journalism at Central Saint Martins and this topic was very rarely discussed. We weren’t trained with the deontology of journalism in mind. From your perspective, have the rules around fashion journalism always been this muddled?

I don’t know if it’s always been like that, but it’s definitely muddled now. There was a great story in Vestoj a couple of years back, exposing the freelance economy in fashion journalism, where people who write for big publications are also asked to write press releases, show notes, books, and do all sorts of consulting projects. We don’t allow people to write about the brands they work for, but it happens a lot. Gifting is very rampant. My number one pet peeve, however, is when PRs contact you asking you to “support” a story. That just shows a basic misunderstanding of my role. I’m not their publicity machine. Something has to be important to the FT reader before I can cover it. I’m not here to support your brand, yet that is how people always address me. There is this entire system that incentivizes writers to produce positive marketing copy over and over because if you do it, the PRs love you and they invite you on lunches and they offer you a nice handbag at Christmas. If you don’t… I remember when I first went to Fashionista, I was told by a PR: “We’d love to work with you, but we’re not sure you’ll be able to stay on message.” Coming from tech, that just blew my mind. I have to say, the PRs really hold the power in this industry.

"This industry can make you feel very small. I’m not gonna pretend that things like that don’t bother me." - Lauren Indvik

You mention that writers can be “punished” for not playing the game correctly. Has this ever happened to you?

I remember one time at Fashionista, we wrote about a London-based luxury brand opening an office in New York. Because the news had already broken, we published the amount they paid per square foot. The agency that handled the story was so furious for putting that line in there, we were banned from the show for two years and we didn’t have access to any of their other brands.

Fashion shows are good for punishment. You might not get invited, you might get bad seating. Hedi Slimane famously stuck Robin Ghivan behind a pillar, leading to the most brilliant response. It’s petty, but at the end of the day, the stories that come from publicists aren’t fun to write anyway.

This answer also adds another personality trait to the “how to be a good journalist” list: to know what your values are and stick to them. Perhaps it comes from maturity, but you do need to know what you stand for if you want to resist the PR game.

It’s not fun. It doesn’t feel good to barely get standing tickets as a seasoned writer. This industry can make you feel very small. I’m not gonna pretend that things like that don’t bother me.

"I ended up writing about the Kardashians so often! Unless you have a trust fund, you need to be mercenary about where and about what you write." - Lauren Indvik

You have experience working both as a freelancer and as a staff writer. Could you compare those experiences?

Most journalists I’ve known have been freelancers for a large part of their careers. I had been at Fashionista for two years and it was the most intense job I had had in a while. I was completely exhausted by the end. I used to start that job every day at 7.30, I was at dinners until 10. I was deeply exhausted and burned out. It was a very exciting time, but we published a story every 45 minutes and we had a small team, so I was very tired by the end of it. I was sitting at my desk editing other people’s stories for two years, so I decided to go freelance.

That was a bit scary because most of my predecessors went from editing that website to editing a larger online platform. When you go freelance, you suddenly start to panic: Will I ever find a good job again? Will I be able to pay my rent? Are all my relationships going to disappear?

I did freelance for a full year and it was an absolutely wonderful experience because I got to write all types of stories I had never written. I got to write for editors I had never been able to meet before. Having not been managed for most of my career, having editors to provide feedback and improve my writing was very valuable. What I did discover… you think that as a freelancer you can choose your stories and that they’ll all be big and important… but I had to pay rent so I needed to write for trade- and women’s magazines. I ended up writing about the Kardashians so often! Unless you have a trust fund, you need to be mercenary about where and about what you write. It’s great though.

Lauren Sherman once said this to me: “If you can file clean copy on time, you’re better than 90% of writers out there.”

"There are only a handful of jobs, and the people that occupy them stay for decades." - Lauren Indvik

Why do you think the freelance route is so popular in fashion and how does it affect the industry?

There are barely any staff jobs, right? When I started in New York, there was a financial crisis, but all the jobs at legacy media were still there, while there were also the startups like Mashable, Buzzfeed, and Glossy,… all this venture capital money went into online native brands, so that’s where my peers and I got our start.

After moving to the U.K., I have been shocked by how few jobs there are. There is only legacy media, and they’re shrinking, so… I know there are so many talented journalists who are just waiting for a position at the New York Times to open up. I thought I would have to be in my fifties before landing a position like the FT. There are only a handful of jobs, and the people that occupy them stay for decades. There just isn’t a lot of progression. The only way to advance and get better is to go freelance. Also, it gives you more flexibility to do commercial jobs, which you can’t do when you’re a staff writer.

How long did it take you to become financially independent?

It was two months after I graduated. New York jobs pay better, I must say. I also lived with flatmates until well into my thirties, journalism is not lucrative. I knew that getting into it, there were no surprises. In my twenties, I actively chose a creative career over money. But by the time you’re thirty, the roommate thing does get old, and you want the things your friends who are lawyers and bankers have.

But, I would have never excelled at anything that I wouldn’t do for free. I always think it’s a tremendous privilege to be able to do a job as fascinating as journalism and being at the FT is a dream.

The reality used to be that entry-level jobs were really badly paid but you knew there was a bigger salary waiting for you as you climbed the career ladder. The starting salary at Condé Nast used to be 28k, you cannot afford to live in New York on that salary. But the editors-in-chief were getting half a million, and the editors just below them made hundreds of thousands. So the idea was that you just had to hold on. Now, an editor in New York makes about 150k, which isn’t bad, but it’s not like it used to be.

Words: Aya Noel