As purpose editor and deputy website editor at Glamour UK, Lucy Morgan is combining editorial strategy with advocacy as the title leans into digital publishing and purpose-led journalism.
Lucy Morgan, 30, from Yorkshire, is the purpose editor and deputy website editor at Glamour UK.
She took on the dual role at Glamour UK in 2022, but her first brush with the magazine world came years earlier when a beauty editor at Cosmopolitan was looking for a pink-haired model for a shoot. Despite living in Yorkshire and being naturally blonde, Morgan saw a chance to get her foot in the door.
“The beauty editor at the time shared that she was looking for someone to take part in a shoot,” she says. “But the person needed to have pink hair. So I dyed my hair pink.”
Only a short while before this glimpse into the world of magazines, Morgan had “never really considered journalism” as a career. But then she realised that working in women’s media provided the perfect landscape for her passion for feminist activism to thrive. Now, advocating for women’s empowerment stories is part of her day-to-day.
Leading Glamour UK’s empowerment content
Morgan’s life at Glamour began with her role as a freelance contributor in May 2021. She worked day shifts, gaining experience writing about anything from wellness to entertainment. But it was writing pieces closer to her heart – everything from maternity leave to rape cases in the news – that solidified women’s rights as her specialist topic. That’s when, in 2022, she took on the role of purpose editor and deputy website editor.
“[Becoming purpose editor] was quite serendipitous because Glamour was evolving to be more outwardly focused on women’s empowerment and wanted to devote more resources into that,” she says.
As purpose editor, she spends her time organising ‘purpose’ moments – the content that situates Glamour as a brand that cares about women and women’s rights – as well as writing empowerment content and advising the rest of the team on their projects.
Meanwhile, her responsibilities as deputy website editor largely involve supporting the website director, from filling in when a freelance contributor can’t work to sub-editing and reviewing the website’s home page content.
This dual role reflects a broader trend among publishers looking to blend editorial direction with brand purpose, as audience trust becomes a more valuable currency than reach alone.
She described the role as a “dream” – but it isn’t an easy job.
“It’s hard to be advocating in this area and trying to, especially as a journalist, do these stories justice,” she says. “You want to create something meaningful that [women] can look back on and feel proud, and that Glamour can feel proud of as well.”
Meeting audiences where they are
Why Glamour? For Morgan, it’s the publication’s ability to be constantly changing and elevating. When Glamour invested in a purpose editor as part of Condé Nast’s move to create “more of a women-led space”, she was tasked with creating a campaign that could be taken to parliament.
“It just feels as though Glamour can innovate with the times, and the fact that they’ve put resource into a campaign really shows that,” she says.
Together with charities Rape Crisis and Refuge, she coordinated Glamour’s Consent Survey, which surveyed 4,000 women on their attitudes towards sexual consent. The survey highlighted digital consent as a particular area of concern, with results showing that 91% of respondents thought that deepfake technology was a threat to women’s safety.
From there, a coalition of journalists, experts, charities and survivors formed to campaign for the government to introduce a comprehensive image-based abuse law.
While the campaign highlights the damaging impact of the digital world, Glamour concluded that online spaces are where they can best meet their core audience and therefore ended print production of the UK-based magazine in 2019.
“We’ve said goodbye to print,” says Morgan. “I think with us being digital-only, we have got more resource and freedom to go after the things we really care about.
“Everyone loves print except the people who buy it. Ultimately, we want our stories to be read by as many women as possible, and women are on their phones. So that’s where we meet them.”
There isn’t a conventional way into journalism anymore
While Morgan’s career at Glamour began when she was a freelance contributor, her entry into the industry happened earlier. The pink-haired Cosmopolitan photoshoot lit the spark, and afterwards, she was keenly motivated to pursue a career in journalism.
“I always describe [my career path] as unconventional, but I’m not sure there really is a conventional way into journalism anymore,” she says.
With her mark clearly made in the minds of the Hearst employees at the beauty photoshoot, Morgan landed a four-week paid internship at Cosmopolitan’s London office in January 2020. Inside this “magic world of magazines”, she felt a sense of belonging. But then the Covid-19 pandemic halted everything, so she moved back to Yorkshire and continued building her freelance writing career from home.
When ‘normality’ resumed, Morgan moved back to London. She worked as a nanny during the day while writing in borrowed moments. It was during this unknown period that she achieved her proudest career moment to date, her first commission – a piece about the damaging consequences platforming dangerous men as entertainment can have on the men in our real lives.
“I got commissioned while I was at work and they said, ‘Well, can you file first thing tomorrow?’” she said. “I thought, yeah, that’s fine. I’ve got eight hours of nannying to do, then I’ll get home and write my first-ever commission.”
Journalism outside London
“There’s still a lot of things I want to do here [at Glamour],” Morgan says. While dedicated to developing in her role as purpose editor and deputy website editor, one key priority remains to make more progress with the image-based abuse law campaign.
And though thankful for a job that she loves, she also recognises that it’s difficult to prioritise her personal life. She says, “[I’m] looking for a whole life rather than just being completely obsessed with my career, which is hard because once you are doing a job you love, you just do it all the time.”
In terms of the ever-changing landscape of the wider journalism industry, she predicts that the next five years will see hybrid working flexibility make a comeback once return-to-office mandates slowly U-turn.
“There really [are] so limited opportunities for people that aren’t from London,” she says. “I’d love to be able to write and do my job from somewhere less expensive and perhaps more beautiful than London.”
AI creativity is “incomparable” to the real thing
When asked about AI’s growing role in content creation, Morgan raised concerns about what she sees as a creative trade-off. She explained that the static, unemotional nature of “content that’s been created by a robot” isn’t the content that audiences want to consume.
“The best stories are written by mad people who’ve had mad lives and have mad perspectives,” she says.
While she acknowledges the pressure on publishers to adopt AI – “no one wants to be seen bucking the trend” – she believes much of the industry’s current enthusiasm is reactive. “I see the industry shifting toward relying on [AI-generated] content, but I do see it bouncing back.”
Morgan likens the current hype cycle to the rise of e-readers: convenient but lacking the human quality many still crave.
“Reading a beautifully written article with a unique perspective and carefully placed expert sources from somewhere you might not imagine – it’s just completely incomparable.”