The pop star’s reported shaping of the September cover hints at the shifting relationship between the media and their subjects—and between creators of color and traditional gatekeepers.

By Spencer Kornhauber @ TheAtlantic.com,/Culture Section, July 31

Control, meet control: The legendarily exacting editor Anna Wintour has handed the legendarily exacting singer Beyoncé some rule over the legendarily influential Vogue. In an unprecedented arrangement, reported by HuffPost, the cover and some inside photos of the forthcoming September issue have been orchestrated and selected by the subject rather than the editors. Beyoncé will not break her years-long avoidance of traditional interviews with journalists, but she will write her own “long-form” captions. This will be for Vogue’s largest and most scrutinized annual edition—possibly the final September issue of Wintour’s 30-year tenure before she retires.

The arrangement has been hyped as novel, but it comes as the culmination of a long trend: the waning dominance of old-media institutions in relation to new-media stars. As has been much observed, celebrity magazines lost power when famous people became able to easily conduct their own image making, unfiltered, on social media. A similar story has unfolded across sectors of society (does a president need to submit to an Oval Office interview when they have Twitter?), and America’s most obsessed-over public figures can now demand enormous concessions in the rare instances when they grant access to publications. [....]