Marcy Medina

The journalist turned consultant discusses finding a better work-life balance after more than twenty years working in media.

By Lindzi Scharf

Photography by Kate Jones

InStyle, Entertainment Weekly, Health, and Parents are among the most recent print publications to fold – joining the likes of Teen Vogue, Glamour, and other legacy lifestyle outlets who have become digital-only properties in recent years. 

Veteran editor and journalist turned consultant Marcy Medina is no stranger to the shifting media landscape.

The former longtime West Coast Bureau Chief of Women’s Wear Daily (WWD) began her career at Vogue when print reigned supreme and the digital world was an ongoing experiment that few had interest in tackling. It was an era in which Los Angeles was just as much of an afterthought for most in media.

Medina puts it differently.

“Going from New York City to here, it was like you were killing your career,” she says, seated in the living room of her west side Los Angeles home. “L.A. wasn’t cool yet. I’m not trying to pat myself on the back, but I was an early adopter of it. InStyle had just launched; US Weekly was a monthly; and Janice Min didn’t exist. Los Angeles was unchartered territory. It was the nineties.”

At the time, Medina was one of the few fashion editors willing to leave a highly coveted position at Vogue in New York City to move to the west coast.

“I remember my boss was like, ‘Why are you leaving Vogue?’” Medina recounts in mock horror, mimicking her former colleague’s exasperated voice.

Medina pauses, then gets serious and asks aloud, “I mean, I was working at Vogue – like why the hell would I move?”

In short, Medina moved to Los Angeles for a boyfriend. They met at a party in the Hamptons and carried on a long-distance relationship. Over time, she fell in love – with both him and Southern California, although one love affair lasted longer than the other. “I knew I didn’t want to marry this guy, but I was definitely in love,” she says. “He’s a Virgo. They say that two Virgos should never be together and it’s true.” She continues, “He asked me to move and then of course as soon as I moved, we broke up and he said that I ruined his life because I moved here. We don’t speak anymore, but I’ll always be grateful to him because I would still be in New York working at Condé Nast if I didn’t meet him.”

The blessing in disguise allowed Medina to forge her own path on the west coast — exploring print, digital, and everything in between over the course of her career, long before other New York-based writers eventually followed her lead.

GROWING UP & GETTING STARTED

Medina grew up in a Jewish neighborhood called Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. “We were not Jewish, but it’s a popular neighborhood for people who work at the universities and the hospitals,” she explains. “My parents were both doctors. My mom was also a professor at University of Pittsburgh. She taught at the medical school. My parents were immigrants. They came to Pittsburgh in ’65. They didn’t come together from the Philippines, but they met over the course of working in hospitals.”

She inherited her mother’s work ethic. “I always knew my mom was a superstar doctor,” Medina reflects. “She probably slept like two hours a night. She didn’t technically raise me because both my parents were doctors, but she was home when she could be. She felt that guilt about being a working mom. I was always the kid waiting on the outside of school for her mom to show up who would be two hours late, but it was because my mom was saving lives. She would get so upset when I would yell at her because I had no idea back then. Now everyone I know who is a working mom understands that.”

As a result of her parents’ busy work schedules, Medina, an only child, learned to be independent. “I was not really a latchkey kid,” she says, “but I kind of was because when I outgrew a babysitter and my parents were still at work, I was home alone. But it was fine. I like being in my head and reading. I was never upset about it. … My parents could tell that they got a kid who was self-sufficient and a rule follower, so I wasn’t ever going to be a troublemaker or a rebel. That’s why they were hands-off. They were like, ‘She wants to go to college. She’s not pregnant. I guess we can just leave her alone.’”

Magazines kept Medina company. She most looked forward to the arrival of Vogue each month. “Because my mom was a doctor, she would get all the free subscriptions,” she explains. “She didn’t have an office where she would put them, so I grew up reading it. I knew all the bylines by the time I was eight.”

Her aspirations became clear – even if the path to getting there wasn’t. “Everyone in my family is pretty much a nurse or a doctor,” says Medina, who wound up attending Northwestern University’s prestigious Medill School of Journalism in Evanston, Illinois.

She then took on an unpaid internship at the now defunct Mirabella Magazine, which was created by and named for former Vogue editor-in-chief Grace Mirabella. From there, Medina landed a two-month job at TV Guide just as it went online.

All the while, Medina hoped to work for Vogue.

VOGUE-ING

“Back in the day, you had to mail your resume to Condé Nast [which owns Vogue] and they needed at least six weeks to get back to you,” she explains. “The only way you could check is you would call them – if you could get someone on the line. Because they were slammed with people who wanted to work there – as they are now. I’d been calling, calling, calling.”

Her persistence eventually paid off. “I happened to call Condé Nast and I was so annoyed because it was probably the fourth or fifth time I’d sent my resume,” she remembers. “I was like, ‘Ugh. I mailed in my resume ‘X’ months ago and I’ve not heard from you guys. I’m just calling to follow up. You need to get back to me,’” she says, exasperated. “They were like, ‘Actually, can you fax it over?’”

She laughs. “They were probably like, ‘Who is this uppity girl?’ I faxed it over, which you were not allowed to do back in the day. You had to mail it and wait for them to call you.”

Medina was miraculously called in to interview with then managing editor Laurie Jones – who notoriously had hired a then up-and-coming Anna Wintour while Jones was managing New York Magazine.

“To weed out the randoms, Laurie would ask, ‘Do you even read Vogue?’” Medina explains. “Because 99 percent of the girls did not – even when they would apply for jobs in the features department. I was like, ‘Yes, I do and Julia Reed is one of my favorite writers.’”

Medina nailed the interview and was able to quit her day job. “I’d been living on my friend’s futon in her living room with two other girls,” Medina reflects. “I was a folder at Banana Republic, which was basically so I could buy sweaters and clothes – not to mention to be able to put food in my mouth.”

Medina worked her way up to Features Associate over the course of three years. She then made the move to Los Angeles.

THE CROSS-COUNTRY MOVE

“As soon as I came out here, I interviewed with every west coast editor in the Condé [Nast] building at 6300 Wilshire,” Medina remembers. “[All these years later,] it’s still the Condé building. It’s just a lot less floors. It was seven floors; now it’s like one floor. They were all satellite offices with one big west coast editor and an assistant. I was ready to take an assistant job even though I was already an associate at Vogue because I wanted to stay.”

She continues, “I remember meeting with this one woman who was the west coast editor of Glamour. She was looking for an assistant. She was like, ‘You already have a byline in Vogue? Are you sure you want to be an assistant here? You’re going to be ordering my lunch and steaming clothes.’ I’d already done quite a bit. I had a byline and I’d edited pages at Vogue. She basically disqualified me and there was nothing else open.”

Medina kept an open mind. “A lot was happening [within the west coast media landscape] when I happened to land in L.A.,” she explains. “There were a lot of things in transition with InStyle and WWD.”

She’d been told a potential full-time job might open with WWD, but needed a paycheck in the meantime.

“I found myself a full-time perma-lance gig with Teen Magazine,” she remembers. “Back then, we had paper teen magazines like Seventeen, Teen, and All About You, which was the tween version of Teen. I found an associate editor job, which was a step up for me in salary. I did that for a few months. That’s where I started to cover entertainment.”

Shortly after, a former colleague at Vogue introduced her to someone at E! Online, which was a newer entity at the time. “It’s a brave new world,” Medina recalls thinking as she accepted the job. “When they launched ‘Fashion Police,’ I was the first writer for that [column]. Before live streaming [existed], they would cover premieres live. Do you remember [gossip columnist] Ted Casablanca? He would do them, but I was stationed in the stands [for him] and I was hardwired to a laptop that was going live. I learned how to code and do HTML. I loved digital, but I came from magazines, so I wanted to go back.”

Medina became the fashion editor for the now defunct Movieline magazine. “This was the time in my career, in my twenties, where everything was trading up,” she says. “I was like, ‘Wait, I can now have fashion editor in my title at a print magazine?’ Movieline was that perfect melding of fashion and entertainment because the fashion shoots I was doing were with celebrities, not models. It was my dream job.”

While working at Teen, E! Online, and Movieline, Medina had continued freelancing on the side for WWD – with the hope that a more permanent position might eventually pop up. “One of my first assignments was interviewing Quincy Jones at his house [in Bel Air] because he was just starting Vibe magazine,” she says. “They must have thought I had more experience than I did. I was like, ‘I’m ready. I’m a trained journalist. I can do this.’ We were in Quincy’s backyard. WWD is lean and mean. They expect you to get [the interview] done in 20 minutes—just the photographer and the reporter, but it was really fun.”

Through her freelance work, Medina found herself everywhere from interviewing celebrities on the red carpet to speaking with fashion showroom owners. Eventually, a position as WWD’s West Coast Eye Editor was created and Medina rose in the ranks – ultimately becoming the Bureau Chief. Medina spent eighteen years with the company – even as it transitioned from Condé Nast’s focus on print to a more digitally native version through Penske Media Corporation, who purchased the property in 2014.

Looking back, Medina says she had no idea she’d be with one outlet for so many years, but it doesn’t surprise her either. “I was like, ‘I guess should just settle in because where else am I going to go? Unless I go back to New York?’” she explains. “As a career-oriented person, for me to be anything other than a bureau chief, I would have to go back to New York. I liked being in charge of my own little bureau, but I knew at a young age, I had no desire to be Anna [Wintour].”

THE TRANSITION

Eventually, Medina decided she needed a change. “There was something innate in me that knew I wasn’t always going to be working at WWD,” she says. “If you work somewhere for eighteen years, people are going to make a safe assumption that you want to be a lifer. After fifteen years, I knew it was time. I just didn’t know when and where that was going to happen.”

In late 2018, the longtime editor left WWD to launch Marcy Medina Consulting. “Because I’d made friends with so many CEOs and COOs [through work], I had CEO friends who knew people who ran companies—that’s how I got introduced to it,” Medina says. “I didn’t know if I would like it or not until I did it. A lot of former journalists who have done it said, ‘You’re going to love it because you’re the client. You say when. You say how much. You don’t like it? You can leave. No one takes it personally.’”

She adds, “I understood [their business] more than most people because I reported on it for so long, but I’d never seen the inner workings because when you do a company profile and you’re a WWD editor, they’re prepped. They’re not going to show you the backend and the factory where all the people are sweating. They’re there to talk about baseline numbers, big picture, future thoughts, opinions on certain controversial issues. Whatever. You don’t know how the fuck it works—or they don’t want you to know, probably. [Consulting] was my first time getting to see what was under the hood.”

While she enjoys the process, she admits it has been an adjustment of sorts. “You have to do exactly what they want; so if you don’t agree, you’re there to do what they need,” she says. “It’s not your opinion. It depends on what the project is. Obviously, if you’re trying to give word to someone’s brand voice, you can’t say, ‘I think it should be this.’ They may want you to help them refine that, but sometimes they just need you to write the bio, catalog, brochure, the copy for the website, whatever the content is—because they already know who they are.”

She declines to share her current client list. “I can’t get too specific, but I made a specific choice to not do product and to not do fashion,” she says. “I wanted to expand my mind and learn something new.”

However, she says leaving WWD wasn’t an easy decision. “It was such a big part of my life,” Medina says. “I worked with people who’d had a baby and their kid graduated from high school all in the time that I was working at WWD. It’s an entire lifetime for a lot of human beings. Or it’s an entire lifetime of having a child and watching them become an adult. I’ve always wanted to be a journalist and an editor. I was living my dream. They weren’t my family, but I loved working at a place where I was part of an institution.”

She also had to get used to working for herself sans the camaraderie that comes with having a staff. “It was hard to reframe that,” she says. “It was a mental adjustment and a big change.” Over time, she’s glad she decided to strike out on her own. “I feel so much happier,” Medina says. “I feel lucky that the overarching theme was that I’m exactly where I need to be. Everything happened for a reason and I made the right choices. And when things weren’t my choice, I went with it and made the most out of every situation.”

WHAT’S NEXT

“I’ve already slowed down a huge amount,” Medina says. “I’ve structured it where sometimes I work an hour a day.”

She says she now has a better work-life balance, which allows her to dedicate time to her love of plants, interior design, and antiquing.

"I didn't have the time when I was working as an editor," she admits. "I love my house and I love every room in it. ... When I first moved in, I didn’t have enough hours in the day to spend [time] here. I’ve wanted this for so long—to [have the free time to] look at paint swatches and have plants."

She recalls recently telling a younger friend, who is in the earlier stages of his career, “There will be a time when it’s not all about work. When you get to a certain stage in your life, you want time to do other things.” She says her friend was shocked by the sentiment, but maintains it’s a lesson gradually learned.

“I knew I wanted that when I was at Women’s Wear,” Medina adds. “I just didn’t know what year it would happen. It’s not sustainable to work twenty-hour days. I did far longer than most people could. Everything that I have now comes from my experience there and my experiences before that. I paid my dues. I’m not just kicking back and cruising. I worked my ass off for twenty something years.”

How She Lives…

“It’s important for me to live with things that bring me joy and that are beautiful,” Medina says of the Los Angeles home she moved into in 2016. “Things that are superficially beautiful but also that feed my soul. I feel like I’ve created that with my place.”

A LOVE OF INTERIORS

“When I first moved to California, I was like, 'I want shabby chic just like Rachel Ashwell,' because that's what people had in California,” Medina says, explaining her taste shifted once she fell in love with estate sales. “One of the very first friends I made out here was Ariana [Lambert] Smeraldo. At the time, she was the west coast VIP girl for Bottega Veneta. We met through work. She was like, 'We should grab lunch,' and she became one of my close friends. She lived in this legendary apartment building on Hollywood Boulevard. She, Bryan Rabin, Tracee Ellis Ross—everybody in that apartment was somebody, including this friend of hers, Courtney Small, who is an interior designer. Courtney's apartment was life changing for me.”

AN EVOLVING AESTHETIC

“I knew I had fashion taste, but I did not know what interiors and taste was until I met [Ariana and Courtney],” she says. “They were the most influential people. Ariana owns Lily Lodge, a flower shop on Robertson, where I get most of my flowers and a lot of my bases are from. Tom Ford is one of her regular clients. Ariana and Courtney are my two biggest design influences. If you went into either of their homes, you'd see, ‘You're the original version and Marcy is just trying.'” Medina says she also fell in love with flea market shopping thanks to a friend from college. “We don't tell anyone where our secret places are,” she says. “Just like you don't tell people where you get some of your dresses.”

THE BOOKS

“I could go over every book because they all have meaning, but I won't,” she says with a laugh. “A lot of my favorite coffee table books are literally from the Vogue offices. Billy Norwich, who is a great editor and now author, was downsizing his apartment in New York and also [his] offices. He had all these coffee table books and he was like, 'Do you want these?' I was a grateful recipient of all these amazing books. I've never been one to just have decor pieces, but every single book here has a personal connection for me in the house. I only keep books that mean something.”

THE HERMES SCARVES

“When Hermes did their big men’s experience, they rented out a series of buildings at the edge of the Arts District by the bridge for a runway show outside,” she explains. “The gift at the end was a cotton scarf. A lot of people decided to frame it because we weren’t going to wear the scarves.” She adds, “Yellow was my mom’s favorite color, which is why you’ll see it throughout the house and now it’s one of my favorite colors, too.”

THE NOSTALGIC PIECE

“If you're wondering why I still have a CD player it's because back in the Condé Nast heyday you got to pick a gift for every anniversary and I got this at the ten year,” she explains. “That was what I needed or wanted at the time. I'm sure they don't do that anymore.”

THE ART WORLD

“I have a lot of the LACMA books for the openings that I’ve covered,” she says. “Michael Govan and Katherine Ross are two of my favorite people. We're not super close friends, but I love talking about art with him. I was an art history minor at Northwestern, so I did study art history in college. I appreciate it. Being from Pittsburgh, I grew up with the Carnegie Mellon Museum and all these great cultural institutions. That's a big part of who I am.”

THE DETAILS

“I love ballet,” she says, referencing a Karinska book about the Oscar-winning costumer who worked with the New York City Ballet. “I never became a dancer, but my best friend was and I loved it.”

SEA SHELLS

“My parents retired down in Florida, so I have a lot of shells,” she says, sharing that some of the shells on display are from a flower arrangement she repurposed. “The shells are from some fancy floral arrangement that I got. You know, one of those really over-the-top ones. It was a tree trunk with five million shells, so I kept those.”

THE SCULPTURE

She points to a piece by Kristan Marvell, which was gifted to her by the artist, a family friend. “He's known for his iron work and his sculptures that he then casts in heavy iron,” she explains. “It's one of my favorite things ever.”

PLANT PERSON 

“Listen, for single people without kids, your plants are like your pets,” she says. “So I've invested a lot of emotion into all of my plants. I told myself when I moved in here five years ago I could get a big expensive [plant]. The fiddle-leafs get expensive. I was like, ‘I'm going to get one from Mickey Hargitay Plants in West Hollywood.’ It's a nice mom and pop store. I told myself I could get a new one if I could keep one going for at least a year and that's why I have four in here. And now I'm running out of room.’” She adds, “This past year I've really gotten into listening to them. [I’ve learned] if you drop leaves it must mean you don't like the light or you're getting too much water. That’s what they say. Trees need to get established. Certain plants take years to get established and others take a matter of weeks with good water. And now that I've learned more about plants and killed a few, I've observed my own plants. I get how it happens.”

PLANTING

Medina discusses plants with as much enthusiasm as interiors or fashion. “I did Armstrong for landscaping, but I go to Mickey [Hargitay] for specific plants,” she says. “Otherwise, I go to Home Depot because they have a generous return policy. … My mom was a champion gardener. I don't know how she found the time. She had so many hobbies outside of being a doctor. She had more hobbies than most housewives have. I don't know how she did it. I was like, 'I never inherited her love of plants.' I appreciated it and wished I had, but I was always good at flower arrangements because as an editor you get so many. I got good at rearranging them. I did that in the kitchen at PMC all the time.”

THE ACCESSIBLE TRAY

“This is Missoni for Target from the re-issue,” she says, referencing a tray. “My friend went crazy at Target and was like, ‘I got you this extra tray.’ She mailed it from the east coast. It was like a $20 tray.” The piece is paired with a Tom Dixon piece, estate sale pottery, and ceramics from Heath. “I’m obsessed with Heath Ceramics,” she says. “The New York boyfriend randomly gifted me a set of Heath dinnerware when we were still living in New York from a cool store in Chelsea. … He got me all different colors, but one of the colors – purple – was a special edition and they never made it again. So I cherish that bowl because it’s the only one. It was special from 1990.”

INHERITED ART

“This is a Filipino piece that my parents had in the house for a long time that they brought over,” she says, referencing a piece of art featuring birds. “I grew up going there to visit. It’s made out of shells, which is a big thing for me because of my Filipino heritage.”

THE FAMILY PAINTINGS

Medina’s paternal grandfather was an artist. “He did portraits and landscapes,” she says, referencing a collection of artwork inherited from her family.

THE SKETCH

Footwear designer Giuseppe Zanotti gifted Medina with a sketch, which hangs in her bedroom. “It’s a watercolor of roses and it has Giuseppe Zanotti upside down,” she says. “It was when I went to interview him and J-Lo at her house in Calabasas. He still makes sketches all the time, so he made me one. He travels with his own special cardboard for sketches. He grabbed one because to him, they’re just notecards.”

HER OFFICE

Prior to owning a home, Medina says she practically lived at her various offices. “For 14 years, I lived 1.5 miles – a five-minute drive – from work,” she explains. “I loved it because I would go at a weird hour after an event. It was like my second home. That’s why I invested so much in the furniture and the paintings in there because I was always in there. I always felt so at home there. Because I lived in an apartment, I didn’t have a dedicated office space.” Upon moving into her home, she worked with California Closets to convert one room into an office. “Now I get to look out at my garden,” she says.

THE GIFT

Artist Nichollette Kominos, a family friend, gifted Medina with a piece for her birthday, which they celebrate together each year. “She does a lot of things with parchment and thread and tape,” she says of Kominos’s work. “It’s very psychological and intellectual. She studied art psychology. It’s a different kind of art. That’s one of her very signature [aesthetics]. She does things in sculpture form and different kinds of mediums.”

JASON TROTTER

Pieces by artist and friend Jason Trotter hang in her office. “He makes decorative objects and focuses on color and shape,” she says. “Jason used to be [publicist] Robin Baum’s assistant years ago. He transitioned into being an artist within the last few years.”

THE PHOTOGRAPH

A Tierney Gearon also hangs in her office. “She a fine art photographer who has shot for W a lot,” she explains “I got this at one of Ariana’s mom’s auctions. She did a big art auction to benefit Huckleberry Fund [a non-profit that aids at-risk youth] and asked all of her artist friends to donate. She did it at the [Lois Lambert Gallery], which is at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica. This was one of the pieces.”

THE AUCTION ITEMS

“Because Ariana [Smeraldo]’s mom [Lois Lambert] owns an art gallery, that’s where I got a lot of my art,” Medina says, sharing she also owns signed pieces by Ralph Gibson and Christopher Bucklow. “The photographs are all by people that I've gotten at auctions.”

THE PRINTS

“These two prints are from a trip to Japan,” she says. “We went to Kyoto and got those at a vintage print house.”

THE PORTRAIT

She points to a piece by Cori Maass. “Do you remember that denim line—Baldwin?” Medina asks. “When they opened up their store on Melrose Place, they did an event and they hired Cori to do people’s portraits.”

THE MAGAZINE CLIPS

“These are clips I put up when I first built this office in 2018,” she says, referencing images of Emma Stone and Thandie Newton from InStyle. “It’s not an inspiration board because I’m not a designer, so I don’t need to change it out every year.”

THE NEW HOBBY

“Makeup is a recent interest of mine, which came about when I made the lifestyle change in 2019 to work smarter, not harder, and create more free/personal time in my life,” she explains. “I finally started watching YouTube after years of just glancing at articles about beauty influencers when I worked at WWD. I never used to wear much makeup and I definitely did not know how to apply it, so it's been fun learning and incorporating it into my daily routine. The same goes for yoga. I've always been one of those runners who never stretch, and I didn't have the patience or the desire to practice yoga. Now, I finally get it. Both are things I never had/made time for in my life until now, and I'm so glad that's changed.”

THE DRESS

“The crochet stuff is a big thing in the Philippines,” she explains. “I don't know that they wear a lot of it, but they make a lot of it that gets exported elsewhere. So my mother had all these pieces that I'm sure she wore in the seventies whenever it was groovy to do so. So I inherited all of these pieces.” She added, “I also have a lot of vintage ones that I buy that aren't from the Philippines. I have a whole crochet section. Just like I have a whole striped shirt section. I have a Levi's shelf, a striped shirt shelf, and a crochet shelf—those are my main categories.”