Rutgers Alumna Named PEOPLE’s General Manager and Editor-in-Chief
Charlotte Triggs’ 20-year career with the publication started with an internship in college
Rutgers alumna Charlotte Triggs has rubbed elbows with A-list celebrities and supermodels, covered plastic surgery from every angle, and once interviewed designer Karl Lagerfeld in German.
After more than a 20-year career with PEOPLE, the 2005 Rutgers College graduate continues to put her dual undergraduate degrees in English and German and minors in Spanish and political science to good use for the national entertainment media outlet.
This January, she became the first person to be named both general manager and editor-in- chief at the publication in charge of overseeing all the brand's content across all its platforms.
“It's incredible to have seen PEOPLE's long history and now play a role in its exciting evolution,” said Triggs, 42, of Chester. “We're thrilled to pioneer a new era of content consumption and engagement, giving our audience a powerful voice in shaping the brand's next iteration.”
The New Jersey native launched her career with PEOPLE the summer before her senior year. She was placed in an internship at the magazine after she applied to the American Society of Magazine Editors.
“One of the magazines on the roster was Field and Stream, and I thought, ‘Oh, God, please don’t put me in Field and Stream,’ ” she said with a laugh. “Somehow I ended up at PEOPLE.”
This was back when print was still king, and ads, not clicks, brought in big bucks. Triggs worked as a fact checker in the former Time & Life building in midtown Manhattan, attended lavish parties at the 79th Street Boat Basin and hustled to make inroads with editors. She’d never taken a journalism class, but after reporting her first piece for PEOPLE – a where-are-they-now package on ’90s celebs – she was hooked.
“I gave it my all. They ran it in print, and I felt like, ‘Wow, look at this! It’s so much fun,” she said.
Triggs, who was a commuter student, parlayed that internship into a second paid one during her senior year, stacking all her classes into a couple days a week and working the rest at PEOPLE. After graduating, she started full-time at the magazine, first covering style and supermodels, then the plastic surgery beat, a role she never imagined for herself, but one she found fascinating.
“You’d be amazed how many plastic surgery stories you could write,” she said, noting her biggest get during that period was an interview with Michael Jackson’s plastic surgeon the week after the pop star’s death to get a rundown on all the work he’d ever had done and how it had contributed to his issues later in life. “It seems like it would be a ridiculous beat, but there were some really interesting stories.”
That ability to “go with the flow” and recognize opportunities as they arise stems in part from her time at Rutgers, she said.
“It was so humungous, I felt like I could do anything I wanted,” she said of her time in college. “There were so many offerings and classes, it taught me to be opportunistic.”
Triggs hopscotched around the magazine, jumping to the entertainment teams, then leading the busy TV team. In 2014, the brand combined TV’s digital and editorial departments under her direction. Triggs saw room for professional growth several years later when the head of PEOPLE Digital moved on.
“I was a little sassy and said something like, ‘I already run 40 percent of the site why don’t I just run the rest of it?”
Her advice to new graduates pursuing careers in the often-cut-throat media industry: If you’ve proven your worth, there is no shame in being direct about what you want at work.
“Not everyone wants to be a leader,” she said. “So, if you have someone willing to take on the risk and responsibility and corral it and align it to the business strategy, most people are very happy to have a clear direction and clear vision they can follow.”
And taking over the digital-only side of a newsroom pre-pandemic still came with plenty of risks, she said.
“The magazine paid all the bills back then. That’s where the most powerful editors were,” said Triggs. “Digital was the wild west.”
But the move paid off, teeing her up to become the executive editorial director in 2022 and, this year, the first at PEOPLE to hold the dual role in charge of all the brand’s content. After multiple positions straddling print and digital, Triggs said she is up for the challenge of delivering the right content to the right readers on the right platform.
“Subscribers are different from newsstand buyers. People who read off Facebook are different from people who consume PEOPLE on TikTok and from those clicking on the home page,” she said. “My approach is the more the merrier. You’ve got to serve everybody.”
Just as her broad academic interests have served her well during her two decades at PEOPLE, Triggs said the brand has successfully captivated national audiences for more than half a century with its unique blend of celebrity and lifestyle coverage.
“The thing that is special about PEOPLE is that we’re mixing up all kinds of stuff and somehow capturing the zeitgeist of what America is all about,” she said. “The brand is such a fun representation of people’s curiosities and culture.”
