Sam Baker never wanted to be a spokesperson for menopause. But with advertisers and magazines avoiding the issues midlife women experience, she wrote a ‘menopause memoir’, started a podcast for women over forty, and launched a newsletter. Sam struck gold. Women want to be heard and understood, she tells Adri Kotze.
One day, after many years editing women’s magazines – we’re talking big hitters like Cosmo and Red – Sam Baker sat back, looked around and thought, “WTF?”.
“I mean, seriously. Where had all the older women gone? (And by older, I don’t mean ‘older’, I just mean not 30,)” Sam writes in the introduction to her Substack newsletter, The Shift.
Having muttered countless similar WTFs myself in the last decade and a half, Sam’s words resonate. Her weekly podcast – also called The Shift – spawned the newsletter and an active community and has been downloaded millions of times since she started it in 2020. (When I told an editor friend in South Africa I was going to interview Sam, she had a full-on fan freak-out.)
It helps that Sam is a natural broadcaster and accomplished journalist and writer, with five novels under the belt as well as the non-fiction “menopause memoir” that started it all, The Shift: How I (lost and) found myself after 40 – and you can too. She is frank, funny, clever, relatable and wonderfully grown-up.
“Honest to God it was as if the fat fairies had come during the night and coated me with an extra layer of insulation,” she described midlife weight gain in the book.
She also found a captive audience.
As Sam describes it, The Shift “goes straight to the heart of what makes women in their forties and beyond tick and talk”.
They tune in to Sam’s podcast, where she talks to women like Isabel Allende, Bobbi Brown, Marian Keyes, Patricia Cornwall, Dr Jen Gunter, Nicola Sturgeon and Barbara Kingsolver. Topics range from finance to ageism, careers, sex, and health. A discussion with ITV’s international editor, Lindsey Hilsum, on menopause in a warzone is a personal favourite.
On Substack, Sam’s newsletter is a mix of confessional introspection, advice, analysis, fun, recommendations, inspiration, and just the right amount of outrage. It’s uplifting but not cheesy, doesn’t preach and never underestimates women.
The Shift, in other words, is a far cry from women’s magazines’ standard fare.
The new magazines
Bizarrely, given many women over forty are hitting career heights and women over fifty have the spending power, marketers and advertisers ignore them. They are not traditional women’s magazines’ target market. (In the United States, 40 million women over fifty represent over $15 trillion dollars in purchasing power and are the healthiest, wealthiest, and most active generation in history.)
Sam describes her magazine experience with remarkable restraint.
“I edited a magazine that was aimed at women in their thirties and forties, and yet we were, how do I put it, discouraged from talking about menopause because the advertisers wouldn’t like it. So, they were advertising in a magazine aimed at those women, but they didn’t want anything that drew their attention to the fact that their audience was that age,” she says.
“I used to feel stymied by the magazine environment. I was very, very proud of the magazines I edited, but it was always an uphill battle to break out of fashion and beauty and relationships. And I didn’t know a single woman whose life didn’t break out of those barriers, whose life wasn’t about finance, politics, health, emotional labour. Finance is a huge one. For decades, women didn’t talk about money and were not talked to about money. They are massively disadvantaged by that now.”
While the future of magazines has been debated to within an inch of a threadbare un-glossy page – partly due to those very advertisers fleeing print – independent creator-led media is growing, if not flourishing. In many ways, podcasts and newsletters are the new magazines.
New tricks for old media hands
The industry has changed “unfathomably” since she was an editor (roughly from 1995 to 2012), Sam says.
“You could already see the change at the point that I left. It’s unrecognisable.
“Just the jobs I did throughout my career, just in magazines, don’t exist anymore.”
Sam’s career path was anything but traditional.
She studied politics at university, but “also learned to type” and went into journalism “not through journalism, but through typing”.
“I was a temp on a women’s weekly magazine in the UK and I went into journalism that way. That route is obviously closed. It’s a long time since people have had secretaries and it’s been a career path.”
But Sam is not downbeat about all the changes.
“People are finding their own way to make media. They are creating their own career path. They are finding their way through content creation, through social media, through Substack, making podcasts, through YouTube.
“There are lots of different avenues, and actually, young people are much better, much more au fait with those techniques than us old hands, who have to teach ourselves to start again.”
In the “old media”, Sam says, magazine editors used to be figureheads. Their point of view would drive the vision for the magazine.
“A good editor would allow the people under them to develop their own point of view as well. As creator media started to get a foothold with blogging, which would have been about twenty years ago now, the big companies got afraid of that. They were frightened by the power that young staff could have,” she says.
“So, for instance, when I was editing Red, I had a couple of young women on my team who had very influential blogs. And I was told in no uncertain terms that that was not okay. So, they left because they had to choose between their jobs in old media and new media and they chose the new path. And ironically, I then ended up following them on that path. As did many others.”
The menopause gold rush
When she wrote the book about menopause and the period of upheaval she experienced professionally and personally in her forties (and nobody was talking about it at the time), she started a podcast primarily to promote the book.
“I saw very quickly, almost within one episode, how popular the podcast was and what the need was. The need was what used to drive magazines back in the day. So I immediately pivoted to that. The podcast thrived and grew slowly, organically. Then I launched the Substack within the last year to build on that and to turn it into a business – to take the podcast and turn it into a bigger platform, a community, a newsletter – all the different ways that you now engage what used to be a magazine audience.”
Sam says the business model works for her because it allows her to keep control of her narrative and because Substack works so well with a podcast. Reader revenue offsets the podcasts, which is predominantly advertiser revenue. Rather astonishingly, advertising is still driven by young bookers and planners who don’t see the value of her audience, especially as it is a discrete, engaged audience “as opposed to telephone numbers”.
“It’s a conversation I still have every single day. It drives me up the wall.”
This is despite a menopause gold rush that started a year or two after Sam wrote her book. Suddenly, everything “exploded” and menopause became rather de rigeur.
“Currently we’re awash in pink packets of tea that have menopause written all over them and they’re charging us an extra pound or euro for the same product,” she says, but notes that it’s merely a passing fashion, like many other diversity conversations.
“I never wanted to be a spokesperson for menopause. I was very straightforward about that. It’s just one of many things in women’s lives we weren’t talking about.
“The podcast is to talk about what it’s like to be a woman over 40, over 50, over 80. Let’s talk about your achievements. Let’s talk about the difficulties. In that context we’ll maybe talk about menopause and maybe we won’t. To me, that’s what’s important going forward because advertisers will come and go.”
That is what magazines used to do when they thrived, Sam says. When they stopped doing it, they stopped thriving.
“Women want to feel not alone. They want to feel heard. They want to be a part of a community, a gang. They want to feel understood. Pink tea isn’t going to do that.”
Making our own media
She was influenced by millennial women in the workplace when she realised she was still the one making the tea and taking minutes even though she was the CEO, Sam says.
“I just thought, hang on, when those women coming up behind me reach this point, they are not going to put up with this shit. So why are we? I think there are lots of other women in my generation who feel the same.
“And you know, we’re now making our own media that we want to consume rather than media driven by advertising.”
Sam didn’t have a big production when she started the podcast and taught herself to use GarageBand and Headliner, a promotion tool.
She is not a digital native, she stresses, suggesting other journalists could do the same.
“There are many people making a career, making as much money as they did in the past, making more money than they would have if they tried to make a career now in traditional media.
“So, I think there’s a lot to feel positive about.”
While she hesitates to give advice because it is “just someone’s opinion”, Sam says it is important not to expect overnight success. Yet people are thriving on modest platforms.
Engage your audience, she says, and look for something that doesn’t exist.
“When I wrote The Shift, and when I started the podcast, I was looking for something that I wished had existed but never had. Chances are someone else is wishing it existed too.”
Watch highlights of our interview with Sam Baker here:
