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Angela Burt-Murray, 37
Editor in Chief
ESSENCE
Strong women have always loomed large in Ms. Burt-Murray's life, from her grandmother, who owned a hair salon, to her mother, a financial services executive. It's those role models--hardworking African-Americans determined to move themselves and their families forward--whom Ms. Burt-Murray has made it her mission to serve in the pages of Essence.
"I want to shore up our reader in a world where she can still be marginalized in certain ways," says the editor, who is as old as the magazine she grew up with.
Her own life could be a blueprint for success for any demographic group. After college she moved to New York and found a job as an editorial assistant at publisher Van Nostrand Reinhold while taking night courses in journalism at New York University and interning at a community newspaper, The Manhattan Spirit. "I just fell in love with this world," she says.
Over the next 12 years, she moved from independent Honey to Time Inc.'s Teen People. Her performance so impressed her Time Inc. bosses that they gave her the top job at Essence in November 2005. Newsstand sales jumped an impressive 7.8% in the first half of 2006, at a time when most magazines were losing readers. Ad revenues increased 4% to $93 million for the first 11 months of 2006, according to Publishers Information Bureau.
In between a 60-hour work week and raising two young boys, Ms. Burt-Murray also found time to co-author two critically acclaimed books and to outline her next novel. Somehow, she makes it all look easy.
"She's never flustered," says Michelle Ebanks, president of Essence Communications Inc.