How Does Joanna Coles Do It?

She worked her way to the top of a media empire, stars in a reality show, and Sarah Jessica Parker designed a pair of shoes for her. How do you become a New York powerhouse? Watching TV at double speed for a start

- Will Pavia

Joanna Coles strides along at her desk on the 43rd floor of the Hearst Tower. It’s a treadmill desk, hard against the glass wall of the tower. Far beneath her feet, cars slide along West 57th Street, cyclists swing beneath the bare trees of Central Park and the occasional barge ploughs up the Hudson River.

Joanna, 54, is wearing shiny silver trousers, a black sleeveless turtleneck and, over it, a white sleeveless coat that plays out behind her like a cape as she walks the treadmill. She’s wearing high heels. Her hair is short and platinum blonde, and sprays rakishly, when she runs a hand through it. She looks a bit like Tilda Swinton.

As she pounds along in her heels, boom, boom, boom, on the treadmill, she taps out emails on her phone and sucks on a lemon throat sweet and hums slowly to herself: high notes, then low.

You don’t honestly wear high heels on the treadmill, do you? She looks up. ‘I frequently wear high heels on it. I’m so used to it now,’ she says. Her heels are lined up like soldiers beneath a coat rack by the treadmill. Sarah Jessica Parker designed a pair for her, named ‘the Joanna’.

Joanna Coles once did my job. She was literally the New York correspondent for The Times. Now she is head of content for Hearst, overseeing 300 magazines and producing television shows and cutting deals with celebrities and tech titans. She is one of the most powerful people in a power-hungry industry. Looking at her now, I feel the kind of vertigo that afflicts you when you stare up a mountain and spot a climber on a ledge. You know you started with the same crampons, but somehow you are rambling along in the valley, and she is at the top with an ice pick in her teeth.