In the 2000s every female romcom lead was a journo. In 2024 there’s nothing romantic about that

Charting journalism’s demise through leading ladies’ professions

Andie Anderson at work (lol) in How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days

It’s been a grim start to the year for the journalism industry. In January alone, 980 journalists were laid off across the UK, US and Canada, and last Friday Vice announced it was closing its website operation. It’s estimated that hundreds of staff there, as well as at the Vice-owned Refinery29 (my erstwhile employer), were let go this week. I hope my brilliant former colleagues that have been affected are able to move on to things that fulfil and inspire them. But there is not much to be excited about in our industry. It is facing more redundancies, stagnant wages, the spectre of AI, and dwindling freelance rates. It is both depressing and seriously concerning. Earlier this month The New Yorker even went so far as to publish a piece titled ‘Is The Media Prepared For An Extinction-Level Event?’ 

On Twitter this week some journalists, unsurprisingly, needed to let off a little steam. Anger at the state of things was rightfully directed towards incompetent executives and overpaid bosses. But, with typical gallows humour, there was something else that (mainly millennial) journalists had beef with: the noughties romantic comedies that sold them a lie about journalism. 

With tongues firmly in cheeks, female journo Twitter commiserated by comparing their own current lives with that of the women they grew up watching in the noughties which portrayed their chosen career to be one of long-researched assignments, town cars, healthy salaries and enviable wardrobes. I’d be lying if I said that Kate Hudson gossiping on a rooftop at work in How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days, which came out when I was at university, wasn’t something of an incentive for me to get into the industry. 

The inaccuracies of the noughties romcom female journo have been well documented before. Hudson’s Andie Anderson gets an entire month to do a single article, rather than the reality of juggling multiple stories a week (the less said about how she plans to bring peace to Tajikistan in her Cosmo-like mag, the better). Jennifer Garner’s Jenna Rink in 13 Going On 30 shows total disregard for budgets, her bosses, and, indeed, her readership (there’s also her luxury Fifth Avenue pad where she lives alone). And The Devil Wears Prada’s Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) just wouldn’t have gotten a foot in the door in the first place. Perhaps more shocking than these women’s careers was the overwhelming whiteness of the leads in these type of romcoms, although shout out to XXL’s editor-in-chief Sid (Sanaa Lathan) in Brown Sugar. 

But they all pale in comparison to the OG of the unattainable journalist’s life: Carrie Bradshaw. The success of Sex and the City, which first aired in 1998, was presumably why there was a boom in romcom journo leads in the decade that followed. Carrie larked about the hot spots of NYC in Manolos before going back to her beautiful Manhattan apartment on a salary of someone who writes a weekly column. In today’s money she’d likely be on no more than £400 a week. And while journalism wasn’t quite the hellscape it is today, the reality of the industry in the noughties was way off these Hollywood portrayals.

I started writing for The Independent in 2008, having originally arrived as one of the editor’s assistants and being told in no uncertain terms that the role wouldn’t lead to an editorial job. I somehow managed to convince them otherwise. The office was more like the one Andy Sachs finishes in at the end of The Devil Wears Prada, even if I would have probably preferred to have been at somewhere more like Runway. But I was grateful to be there; I was paid peanuts and churned out multiple pieces a week. When I worked my way up and finally became Editor-in-Chief at Refinery29 UK I got the bus to work and had a desk in the corner of the office, rather than a corner office. That’s not to say that I didn’t have a great time, but was it like the movies? Please.

Me at my desk when I was EIC of Refinery29 UK. Yes, I’m wearing Birks.

After the financial crash of 2008, the media’s pivot to digital, and the start of mass layoffs in the industry (I survived my first round of redundancies at The Independent around 2010), you’ll find that something interesting happened to the romcom female lead: hardly any were journalists anymore. If Hollywood had been selling a fantasy journalist’s life, it was around this time that perhaps they decided the realities of the media industry made it a fantasy too far. What was glamorous about overworked young women fighting for dwindling jobs and living paycheque to paycheque?

So which aspirational and creative profession took the place of the female journo? While I couldn’t possibly fit all romcoms since 2008 into one neat bracket, the biggest pivot seems to have been towards what I will dub ‘kitchen cuties’, women who work with food, often using it to seduce the object of their affection, whether it’s Ali Wong as a celebrity chef and restaurateur in my favourite romcom of the last decade, Always Be My Maybe, or Zoey Dutch as a bakery owner in Something From Tiffany’s, or Meryl Streep as a pastry chef and (again) bakery owner in It’s Complicated (special mentions for Bridesmaids, Julie and Julia, Little Italy and The Princess Switch). It’s also worth pointing out that the romcom, as some of these titles suggest, has more or less been reduced to forgettable streaming fare over the last decade, so much so that even Kate Hudson publicly decried its demise on The View at the beginning of this year.

Cooking up some romance: Randall Park and Ali Wong in Always Be My Maybe

Of course, being a journalist provides a great narrative vehicle for all sorts of romantic hijinks (interviewing someone for a story makes a great, if unrealistic, meet cute) so Hollywood wasn’t completely ready to give up on them. But screenwriters have adapted accordingly and distanced themselves from the glossy mag gals of yore, preferring to make the new guard music journalists (Someone Great) or digital sports site assistants (Set It Up) or work at men’s magazines (Trainwreck). It’s probably no coincidence that when Carrie returned to our screens in And Just Like That… she had given up her column and was now a host on a podcast. 

Two weeks ago Netflix released a pretty average new romcom called Players starring Gina Rodriguez and Damon Wayans Jr. as colleagues at a New York newspaper. Rodriguez’s character, a sports reporter, lives in a tiny studio apartment, complains about being broke, and spends most of the film wondering if she’s going to get “shitcanned” by her employer. Finally, a leading lady that journalists can relate to.

What I’ve been enjoying this week…

How good does Monica Lewinsky look in Reformation’s new workwear campaign? The most famous intern of all time continues her comeback by becoming the face of the brand and encouraging people to use their voice and vote. You love to see it.

What I’ve not been enjoying this week…

A number of people kindly recommended nicotine lozenges as a useful way to stop vaping after I wrote about my terrible habit. I gave them a go only to discover they make me feel totally nauseous. Send help, ffs, etc.

I suppose now is as good a time as any to ask you to please consider becoming a paid subscriber if you are enjoying the newsletter and would like to support its future and growth. I have tried to keep as much free as possible while I launched this project but I am planning to put more behind the paywall over the next few weeks, in a bid to make it sustainable. I know not everyone can (or would want to!) become a paid subscriber. Whatever you decide, as always, thank you for reading! Gillian