Truth: We still can’t get over how amazing Caitlyn Jenner looks on the cover of Vanity Fair.
Not only did it make a big splash on the interwebs as one of the biggest piece of news this year, not only did take a lot of courage for the previously-known-as-Bruce-Jenner star to come out and step into the limelight, the magazine also took serious precautions to protect the story.
Which begs the question, how did Vanity Fair protect their “Call me Caitlyn” story from getting out before they could publish it in a world now famed for “leaks”?
Let’s just say that it wasn’t easy – it even required using a computer with no Internet. But more on that later!
From the top: Were the “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” peeps on it this all along? According to Mashable, Vanity Fair had been in negotiations with Bruce Jenner’s camp since January. This means that the reality TV stars, not just Vanity Fair and Bruce Jenner alone, probably had a big part to play in planning and executing the exclusive.
Don’t forget that in March, Kim K briefly “broke her silence” and addressed Bruce Jenner’s sex change rumours, but without really saying anything concrete. She said to ET:
I guess I’ll just kinda let everyone be curious and, you know, I just feel like that’s really his journey to talk about. I think Bruce should tell his story his way. I think everyone goes through things in life, and I think that story and what Bruce is going through, I think he’ll share whenever the time is right. I think Bruce is very happy, the happiest I’ve ever seen him. He’s, you know, our Dad..so we support him no matter what. When the time is right, he’ll talk about whatever he wants to talk about. It’s his story to talk about and not really mine.
New York Times writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner also noted in an article, “Bruce has no privacy; none of them do. That’s the deal they made with one another. When they’re silent on Bruce, they aren’t protecting him from the judgments of a cruel world; they are protecting Bruce’s exclusive That’s the deal they made with one another.”
Hence, throughout the entire planning period, none of the Kardashians leaked Bruce’s transformation, leaving ample room for guesses and anticipation.
Even during the process of preparing for the story, the team at Vanity Fair took extra precautions and security measures to ensure that not a single leak would smudge their big reveal – Bruce Jenner’s official self-identification as Caitlyn Jenner.
Here’s how it was done:
- For super maximum security, the Vanity Fair cover was shot on location at Jenner’s home in Malibu, California, as seen in the video above.
- During the “Call me Caitlyn” photoshoot, the Vanity Fair editorial staff hired security and forced attendees at the photo shoot to turn over their phones. No prizes for guessing why.
- The story and pictures was then processed on a single computer. Not only that, that one computer was never connected to the Internet.
- After which, the “Call me Caitlyn” piece was put on a thumb drive and deleted from the computer. This happened every night until the “big reveal” was done.
- At the end of it all, the story was hand-delivered to the printer.
And you know what happened next – Vanity Fair then unveiled its powerful, cultural story which introduced Caitlyn Jenner to the world for the first time.
Intense? Yes. But kudos to the Vanity Fair team for taking journalism to a whole new level.
Heads up, Caitlyn Jenner is also on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. As, well, Caitlyn Jenner, of course 🙂
Sources: Mashable, The Verge, TIME, NY Times / Featured image from The Wrap.
