Why did she take up journalism?

M: Tina White, some people describe you as the best magazine editor in the world and you are only in your 30s. Can you tell us how you started your amazing career?
W: Well, when I was 20, still at college, I was asked to write a weekly column for a local paper. The paper wanted me to write about famous people, you know, their wonderful life styles, the sort of thing people like to read about. Instead, what I did was to concentrate on people who the general public didn’t know about, but who had something original to say.
M: And you got away with it? Now, in the early stages, your family was important. How far did they influence your career choice?
W: My father was a film producer and my childhood was spent around international actors and directors. So with such influences I should have become an actress, something my father would have loved. But I chose to be a journalist in spite of my family’s wishes. I think the biggest influence was my school, not so much the people, but the materials that gave me access to. The hours and hours spent in the library.
M: From being a journalist, you then went on to become an editor, I understand the first magazine you edited Female Focus wasn’t much of a success.
W: Well, I was the editor for a year and then I resigned, mainly because of disagreements with the owners. They were reluctant to change things, because they had faith that it would eventually make a profit. But when you think of it, the magazine had been losing millions of pounds a year before I became its editor. When I left, it was still losing money, but nothing like as much as previously. Also when I took over, it was selling around 650, 000 copies, that soon increased to 800, 000, so it was seriously all improvement.
M: And now you are editing Woman’s World and you’ve made the best selling woman magazine ever. How do you make people want to read it?
W: For some of my competitors, the most important point is what you put on the cover of your magazine , but they forget faithful readers look beyond that. The real challenge is how you encourage a reader to read a serious piece, how are we going to make an article that people want to read. You have to get their attention and nothing does that better than a very lively, even shocking opening line.
M: Do you sometimes worry that you might lose your fame and wealth?
W: Yes. When you work as an editor, you are praised today and criticized tomorrow. It wouldn’t be the end of the world. Much more serious would be if the people I work with no longer admire my work and most of all, I wanted to stay that way.
M: What about the future?
W: Well. People often think I’ve planned my career very carefully. But in fact lots of things have happened by chance, lots of opportunities have come my way. As a youngster, one of my dreams was to be a writer to write a novel that would become a best seller and a one in the world winning film. Well, it may seem silly, but I still hope that will happen one day.
M: Tina, thank you very much for joining us today.