Rosie Wrighting tracks Prada 2’s buyouts and layoffs
rosie wrighting sees The Devil Wears Prada 2 turn Runway into a magazine on borrowed time, with Miranda Priestly forced to fly economy and eat in the cafeteria. A new owner takes over, and Andy Sachs is made redundant along with her entire paper after a buyout.
Patrick Lenton’s media crash
Patrick Lenton said, “I don’t know a single journalist my age who hasn’t ricocheted around the rapidly shrinking media industry, through multiple buyouts, redundancies and pivots to video”. He also said, “The Devil Wears Prada sold me the journalism fantasy.”
Lenton said he rage-quit from an editor job at a digital youth media publication at the beginning of the pandemic. His team had been slashed to an exhausted handful who cried every morning, while his freelance budget had been cut to zero even as he was still expected to reach traffic targets.
Runway on brand ads
By the time he quit, the publication was sold two weeks later. Lenton said many elder millennial journalists were sold a rose-tinted version of what working in media would entail, and that his own career began at an online outlet juggling real news for a young audience with silly online content.
He said that outlet struggled with the tension between progressive ideals and earning minimum wage from advertising. He remembered “the best minds of my generation writing lists about which of the Muppets were most fuckable” and ranking Disney princesses based on how likely they would have been to die in the Challenger disaster.
Andy Sachs at the award
In the sequel, Runway’s physical edition is little more than a book of brand ads, and the damage does not stop at the magazine. Andy Sachs learns while accepting a journalism award that she and the entire paper have been made redundant after being bought out by a new owner.
That is the sharpest part of the sequel’s media picture: glossy print is hollowed out, then the newsroom follows it. For journalists watching their own budgets, headcounts and business models shrink, the film is not really about fashion at all; it is about the price of surviving in a market that keeps asking for more traffic from fewer people.
