Many a weekend of my childhood years were spent scouring the shelves of the sacred Blockbuster DVD located a convenient five minute walk from my house. I would sit on the carpet and make a pile of hot-pink cases; my beloved rom-coms and chick-flicks. The hours spent watching reams of 90s and noughties films have certainly shaped my cognitive function. The influence on my pre-pubescent brain still seeps into my early 20s neural pathways.
I’m sure whoever is reading this is no stranger to the awful impossible horrible slippery pole that is the current UK job market. Whilst, at the time of my rom-com obsession, I dreamt of the films’ floppy haired suitors, fast forward to 2026, and it seems as though it would be an easier feat to land a date with Matthew McConaughey than an interview for one of the protagonists’ shiny grown-up jobs at a big newspaper or magazine.
How depressingly dystopian that many of us dream more feverishly of labour than love.
For girls that were conditioned with the turquoise, girl-boss feminism of the early 2010s, the rom-com magazine girls looked like the perfect example of women who had forged ‘important’ careers of their own. The coolest, and most stylish, ‘She-EOs’.
I cannot write about onscreen journalists without paying homage to the queen of all; Sex and the City’s Carrie. Though under constant Tiktok scrutiny, branded ‘bad friend’ and ‘dating obsessed’, Carrie’s job serves as the pinnacle of every writing-driven girl’s dream. The chance to have free rein over a weekly column and multiple book deals. Of which conveniently finance nightly cocktails and an apartment in Manhattan’s Upper East side.
In conversation with People Magazine, Candace Bushnell, the real-life columnist who inspired Carrie, revealed that, in the 90s, she was paid at least five thousand dollars a month for her Vogue column ‘People Are Talking About’, alongside freelancing for other publications. So perhaps, back then, this dream wasn’t a complete fantasy.
If Carrie Bradshaw is the patron saint of the aspiring female magazine columnist, then Andie Anderson is her messier, slightly more relatable disciple. Kate Hudson’s character in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003) writes a column called ‘How To’ for Composure magazine. But it is not the column itself that lodges in the brain of an impressionable nine-year-old. It is everything else it offers. The open-plan office with floor-to-ceiling windows, the easy rapport with her editor, the sense that Andie’s opinions are not just tolerated but actively commissioned. She pitches a story and it immediately lands. Just like that.
What How to Lose a Guy quietly sells, beneath the yellow dress and the Ben Barry love story, is the idea that journalism is fundamentally a game of personality. That if you are clever and charming and have good enough instincts, the industry will simply make room for you. There is no mention of work experience. No internship. No stack of unanswered applications. We rarely hear of how our protagonists land their roles (don’t get me started on The Devil Wears Prada), as if the process wasn’t completely soul destroying and played no part in shaping their character.
This is, of course, a fantasy calibrated for a pre-crash media landscape. In 2003, magazine journalism was still a largely viable industry, Conde Nast titles were profitable, editorial headcounts were healthy, and a sharp columnist could, plausibly, afford a Manhattan rent. These films did not need to lie, exactly.
For those of us now entering a market where local newsrooms are closing faster than they can be mourned, where entry-level roles attract gazillions of applications, and where the word ‘exposure’ is offered in lieu of payment with a straight face, Andie Anderson is less an aspiration and more a taunt. She got the column. We got the group chat about whether unpaid trials are legally enforceable.
And then there is Jenna Rink. If Carrie and Andie at least imply that some work has taken place offscreen, 13 Going on 30 (2004) disposes of that sweet pretence entirely. Jenna, played by Jennifer Garner, wakes up and is simply, miraculously, thirty, flirty and thriving, and, most notably, a senior editor at Poise magazine. She did not climb the ladder. She teleported to the top of it. The film is a fantasy in the most literal sense, and yet the career it depicts felt, to a generation of girls watching from their living room floors, entirely plausible. Because we had been told, repeatedly and in high definition, that this was simply what grown-up life looked like for women who were fun and pretty and wanted it enough.
What makes Jenna a particularly interesting case is that her professional success is presented as an extension of her personality rather than the product of any discernible skill or labour. She is good at her job in the way that rom-com heroines are always good at their jobs. Intuitively, effortlessly, with great hair. Her ideas are brilliant because the plot requires them to be. Her boss trusts her instincts. At no point does anyone ask her to complete a copy test, rewrite a standfirst, or justify her expenses.
There is something almost elegiac about watching 13 Going on 30 now. The magazine industry it depicts, glossy, staffed, flush with advertising revenue, is one that has been substantially hollowed out in the intervening two decades. Between 2008 and the mid-2010s, UK and US print magazine circulation fell off a cliff. Titles that felt permanent and iconic shuttered quietly or retreated entirely with tails between legs online. The junior editorial roles that might once have served as a realistic entry point into Jenna’s world simply stopped being created in meaningful numbers.
The cruelty of the Jenna fantasy, then, is not just that it skipped the struggle. It is that it skipped the struggle and handed us the destination as a promise, and then the destination itself largely ceased to exist.
Still, the fantasy persists, Conde Nast and The Financial Times and BBC and the reams of companies offering applications continue to multiply. Many of us are remain believers.
Image credits – The Movie DB
