Seth Bauer, "National Geographic's The Green Guide" editor: The Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 1

The first cool thing you need to know about National Geographic’s The Green Guide newsletter is that you can download an electronic edition of the latest issue for $2.50 right now or spend $3.50, and they’ll mail you one in about two weeks. I like it already.

The Green Guide is truly a magazine of the moment. Whether you believe in global warming, as Al Gore does, or believe it’s nothing more than liberal strategery, as the President does, the environment is a hot topic.

I can’t believe I just said that.

Joining me today is Seth Bauer, editorial director of The Green Guide and thegreenguide.com.

Launched in 1994 and acquired by National Geographic in 2007, The Green Guide is a bimonthly newsletter and comprehensive Web site for consumers interested in a green lifestyle.

Over the past 20 years, Bauer has served as editor-in-chief for publications such as Body & Soul and Walking magazines. He’s also the co-author of the 90 Day Fitness Walking Program and has been published in The New York Times, Outside, and American Health. He is also – and this is very interesting to me – an Olympic medal winner and a world champion in rowing.

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Bob Andelman/Mr. Media: Seth, tell me about the downloadable edition of The Green Guide versus the dead trees edition. Which is more widely read?

Bauer: Well, I have to admit the dead trees edition is more widely read, although honestly, the most widely read piece of The Green Guide is a completely free email newsletter that we send out once a week called The Green Guide To Go, and that’s where our biggest audience is, and a lot of people just go straight from there to our Web site. But we do have a traditional print version and its PDF counterpart.

Andelman: Now I have to admit, I’m a bit of a hypocrite here. I love the idea of downloadable books and magazines, but I haven’t read that many of them. It never seems a quite convenient format for where you are at the time, although I will also say that I did find one that seemed to fit perfectly. It was Blogger & Podcaster magazine, of all things. But which edition are you guys pushing? Which are you hoping to see grow the most?

Bauer: Oh, we’d love to see the electronic version grow. It’s a little bit of a trade-off in some areas, because our content is as practical as we can possibly make it, and so we literally like it when people bring The Green Guide with them grocery shopping, and we have the supplemental shopping list often, called Smart Shopper’s Guide, that we offer also for download. But yeah, sure, we’d love to see people save the paper, and over time, we are imagining that there will be easier and easier electronic forms of communication that will probably take care of the need for paper altogether.





Andelman: I guess people would be able to take it on their iPhone.

Bauer: They’re getting there. We have our first phone application available. It’s a fish shopper’s guide, so if you’re in the grocery store and you can’t remember which kind of fish are more sustainable than others, you can dial us up.

Andelman: Well, let’s go ahead and tell people. What would they dial up? Do you know offhand?

Bauer: You know, I will have to get that for you as we talk.

Andelman: Okay. Or we can post that later as a link. That’s not a problem.

Bauer: Yeah, why don’t we do that?

Andelman: Now, do you consider your position as editor of The Green Guide to be as much political as environmental soapbox?

Bauer: No, not any more, and that’s one of the nice things about it. As I see it, there have been sort of three fairly distinct generations of environmental activism, and the first is where it all began, which was really about conservation. At the turn of the century – in the Teddy Roosevelt era – as people realized exactly how much of the planet humans were starting to occupy, they realized they better keep some sections of it as pristine as possible. There was a long, 50-year environmental movement built, really, around the notion of conservation. And then in the ’60s and ’70s – you could call it the Rachel Carson era – people realized the level of industrial pollutants that there were in the environment and what it was doing to nature in every form. There began to be a political movement built around regulation, and testing, a very scientific movement. And then now, it’s what I would consider a third generation, and this is really about simply adopting smarter strategies for living, because people accept now the scientific argument, they accept that they need to do something, they accept that – at some levels of the Administration – the notion that global warming is an issue potentially for all humanity and that their small contributions are important to make a difference. And so they just want to know what to do, what are the simple steps they can take. That’s really where The Green Guide lives.




Andelman: My sense of what you said, then, is that you do not consider yourself as an activist editor, then, or do you?

Bauer: No. I would call it more action than activist.

Andelman: You mentioned the Administration and global warming, and I kind of wondered, are you more amused or annoyed by people who doubt the science of global warming?

Bauer: Well, you know, I think that any scientific inquiry is potentially very healthy. I have no issue with it whatsoever, but the fundamental notion of science is that you look evidence very squarely in the face and you accept the logical conclusion that is drawn from that evidence. And to me, the people who are in the total global warming denier camp are not looking the evidence very squarely in the face.

Andelman: What do you believe? Do you believe that there is global warming as some people have described it?

Bauer: Yeah. I wouldn’t want to call it a matter of belief. I think that there is clear evidence that there is global warming, and I think there is very, very important evidence that a lot of it is human-caused, is caused by the way we are building our society and our culture and our energy use and that many of the decisions that brought us to this point were essentially made without any understanding, knowledge, suspicion of global warming, and if we had had that knowledge, we probably would have made different decisions, and we are still perfectly capable of doing so.

Andelman: So Seth, you believe in global warming. The next thing you are going to tell me is you believe in evolution, too.

Bauer: Oh, I’m not going down that road.

Andelman: Oh, God. Can someone who does not believe in global warming, can they nonetheless be a participant in a magazine like The Green Guide ?






Bauer: Oh, of course, because you know, you can break it down to say, here I am fighting global warming, or you can break it down to say, here I am saving money, taking better care of my family, taking better care of my home and my property. If you want to look at going green at its most sort of fundamental nature, that’s where you get to.

Andelman: I’m an old guy. I’ve got a family, I’ve got a house, and I like to think in terms that we recycle things. But I still have the sense that most people may have that the typical reader for this is a college student or someone wearing the Stevie Nicks flowing gowns or the long hair and the little round sunglasses. National Geographic, I assume, would not have spent the money on a magazine that was going to appeal that narrowly, but how do you make it broad?

Bauer: You know, I don’t think you have to force it any more, and that fits with this notion of environmentalism moving past the political, and it’s part of everybody’s consciousness now. You think about it. It’s a big step for National Geographic, even with the distinction between action and activism, it’s a big step for National Geographic to suggest action, that traditionally for 120 years or so National Geographic has been about inspiration and informing people and educating people, often about the environment, and it has always just kind of come to the brink of suggesting action and left that piece of it to other information sources and organizations. And now, it is universal enough a need and, frankly, apolitical enough that National Geographic is happy to be offering this kind of information.

Andelman: What resources, if any, does the magazine get from the Geographic. Geographic obviously has its own series of geographic magazines. This is a little different. Are there resources that you can draw on there?




Bauer: Yeah, we get resources every which way. From scientific… There are explorers and residents at National Geographic who are working right in this area, but more importantly from my perspective is it allows me as an editor to think absolutely globally. And my take is that different people learn and think and are spurred to action in different ways. Different kinds of information motivate them. Some people are more visual, some people are more aural; some people are more readers. Some people are magazine readers; some people are book readers. There are lots of ways that people like to get their information, and very often, they don’t cross boundaries. People who primarily get their information from TV primarily don’t get their information from reading, and so being part of an absolute multi-media giant like National Geographic lets The Green Guide think about getting its information out every which way. And to me, that’s what allows us to think that this is going to be big now, that there are a lot of people we are going to be able to reach in a lot of forms.


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©2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Seth Bauer, "National Geographic's The Green Guide" editor: The Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 2

(RETURN TO PART 1)

Bob Andelman: Will The Green Guide be promoted in National Geographic publications?

Seth Bauer: Sure will. Yep. That is on the drawing board. There’s a book in the works. We are working with a television group on some things. There are radio pieces in the works. We are really, and you know, we are housed within “digital media,” so we’re housed as a multi-media platform.

Andelman: Now, you came on since the acquisition, as I understand.

Bauer: That’s right. I’m brand new.




Andelman: How has the newsletter changed already, and how will it change in the coming, let’s say, twelve months?

Bauer: I have to answer that that is still in the works. We are looking at the best, broadest way to deliver our information in any platform, including print, and we are looking at a couple of options on the print side, but we haven’t made any decisions, yet.

Andelman: Let me ask you this: what kind of buttons can you push with your readers, and what buttons do you think you have to stay clear of or tread carefully upon?

Bauer: It kind of goes back to what I was saying earlier about staying practical and letting people see and understand all of the benefits that they get from being green, and they are personal benefits, they are financial benefits, they are altruistic rewards, they are being part of a community. The benefits come every which way, and those are the buttons that we push, staying on the practical end. I have a friend, Jeffrey Hollender, who is the founder of Seventh Generation, which makes non-toxic household products, primarily cleaning products, and Jeffrey tells a story of struggling for years to sell his products by saying, buy my household cleaners and save the planet, and the business did moderately well; it grew kind of slowly. And then six, eight years ago, they started saying, buy our household cleaners and save your family, and business took off.

Andelman: It’s the marketing.

Bauer: It’s really where the message is. Let’s think about what your real reward is here. Yes, it’s important to do a little piece of saving the planet, but it’s also important to not have your pets lying outside in, I happen to know you’re a dog owner, not have your pets lying outside in chemical fertilizers, not having your children exposed to chlorine fumes or vinyl off-gassing or formaldehyde off-gassing. You know, if you stop and think about, ask yourself the question, do I really need to do this this way, many times the answer is no, that there’s a healthier way, and that’s really what The Green Guide talks about.

Andelman: Now you’re freaking me out a little bit, Seth, because the yard was just sprayed today, and the kids are out in the backyard in the chlorinated pool. Oh, God, 10 demerits for me from The Green Guide. Before you took this job, how green was your life, and how has your own life changed or will it change since you’ve taken the job?




Bauer: The honest answer is when I was the editor of Body & Soul magazine, I became very interested in these issues, and these were a small piece of what we wrote about there. I took the easy way, and I don’t regret it at all. All those little, small things that you hear about, that every newspaper that runs an article about going green talks about, changing your light bulbs to compact fluorescents, drying some of your laundry out on a rack rather than all in your dryer. All those little things, going organic with your lawn care, those are all of the things that I did My family, I have a wife and an only child, a high-school age son, and we started about four or five years ago, and it all just felt perfectly comfortable. We never felt like we were sacrificing. We never felt like we were making a major investment at the expense of something else. We were just improving the way we do things. We are in the process now of doing some construction on our kitchen, and we didn’t think twice about keeping as much of the existing structure as possible and essentially recycling existing parts of the house or using non-fiberglass-based insulation. All these things at any given time are relatively small decisions, and you add them together, and you have a green lifestyle.

Andelman: This must have been very helpful in the job interview.

Bauer: Yes. No doubt about that. I was well down this road when I went to talk to Wendy Gordon at The Green Guide .

Andelman: You said something else I thought was very interesting. You said that these are all little decisions as you go down the path. It actually sounds a lot like dieting, that you make a good decision every day or at every meal. That’s when you make the decision. As it comes along, you make the decision, well, am I going to eat well at this meal? Well, am I going to buy the right product for the house today? That kind of thing.

Bauer: That’s right. And the trick to being a success at it, like dieting, is not to dwell on what you’re giving up but to really understand and enjoy what you are choosing.

Andelman: What makes a good story for The Green Guide and at the same time, what doesn’t?

Bauer: Practical application makes a good story, things that people can really implement to understand and understand the positive impact of. It can be a huge range of things, from electronics to gardening to what happens at work to family choices to food choices. It’s really a combination of purchases, so your consumer behavior and practices, and any of that range can make for a great Green Guide story.




Andelman: So there’s more to it than rechargeable batteries, paper versus plastic, bottled water?

Bauer: No, that’s not it.

Andelman: Oh, okay, well, that’s what I thought. Those three and just write about them differently every month.

Bauer: Yeah.

Andelman: Must drive your writers crazy. I guess you probably would tell me that the topic of green is so vast as to be endless.

Bauer: Yeah, and actually, it’s more that like dieting, you think that dieting is a fairly obvious topic, and you discover that there are different things that work for different people and that there are different interests and fads and experiments and all kinds of things that come along. And then in the green world, there’s also a lot of new ideas on the drawing board at any given time and new products and new availability all the time nowadays.

Andelman: There was a couple weeks ahead of when we are doing this interview, there was the Live Earth concerts, and a lot of the talk there was about green and recycling and things, but it seemed like a good day of music. There was a lot of celebrity posing and speechmaking, but a day later, it seemed like it was business as usual. Did any of that have any impact on what you’re doing?






Bauer: Yes -- to the extent that a piece of any motivation to change or to try new things requires inspiration. Something like Live Earth is all about inspiration, and it’s not like the comments that the musicians make are going to change people’s lives, but they are going to change people’s awareness, and then the next time they see information on Mr. Media from The Green Guide, they are going to scratch their heads, and it’s going to be another piece of, “Oh yeah, I should be thinking about that. Oh yeah, I could do things a little differently.” So I don’t think that they want to imitate Bono necessarily, but I think that he brings an awareness or any of these musicians brings an awareness to people who, you know, just another little puzzle piece in their overall consciousness.

Andelman: Do celebrities have any place in The Green Guide ?

Bauer: We have had some… Actually, a celebrity was the founder of The Green Guide. The Green Guide was founded under the auspices of the Natural Resources Defense Council, by Wendy Gordon, who is still our General Manager, and Meryl Streep.

Andelman: Really?

Bauer: Yep. And Meryl Streep was involved in the NRDC, and she was interested, and she and Wendy, I think, both became moms around the same and started talking about raising children in a less toxic environment and turned that idea into a newsletter that became The Green Guide .

Andelman: I did not know that. That’s very interesting. And will there be coverage of, will you go to Dave Matthews’ home and write about how he composts or things like that?




Bauer: Only if he does it really practically. I mean, it’s the same, our fundamental method stays the same, which is, we want information that people can employ themselves, and if they think that at Dave Matthews’ house or Oprah’s house or whatever, there are 20 staff people helping to manage the composting and therefore it’s something that he can do but they can’t, there’s no point in our presenting it that way. On the other hand, if we think more people are going to read The Green Guide because it has Dave Matthews’ name in it somewhere, yeah, we may well invite Dave to be a guest editor. And what we do with our guest editors is we ask them a little bit about their own practices, and then we ask them what really their pet issues are, and then we go ahead and do our own independent stories about those pet issues.

Andelman: How will you grow this publication and bring it out of the margins? I mean, the name alone, I hate to go back to this, but it does sound a little like something found on the freebie rack at the neighborhood health food store.

Bauer: Right. Well, thanks to attaching the name National Geographic to it, we have a lot more gravitas than we had a few months ago, and we also have many, many more avenues for marketing and exposure. So we see lots of ways to grow it, from print versions at retail, you may see a newsstand version of The Green Guide in magazine form at some point, to really expanded marketing efforts on the Web. And that is already happening and is really in many ways our primary focus.

Andelman: How important is advertising?

Bauer: Advertising is always important in some form. There is at National Geographic very careful separation of church and state, and so my mandate is to understand that advertising is important and then not to think about it any further than that.

Andelman: Well, the reason I asked is I imagine that that’s one thing that Geographic does not necessarily bring to the table is that it doesn’t have that consumer advertising that like Body & Soul probably had or Walking. It’s a different type of thing, so I wondered if they would be helpful for that or how much you rely on advertising revenues, I guess, versus subscription revenue.

Bauer: Well, The Green Guide as a newsletter has primarily been funded by subscriptions, but as we grow and change in some other avenues, advertising will certainly come into play.

Andelman: And what’s next? I mean, will there be social networking through your Web site? That would seem like a logical progression.

Bauer: You know, our very next steps are to do some blogging. We have some really interesting people lined up to be bloggers for The Green Guide and in three categories. One is sort of big thinkers, and we’ve talked about names you would talk to, people with names you would recognize about blogging on the site. They would talk about really putting what’s happening in the green world into some bigger economic or global perspective. And then we have our own staff which has started blogging, and the staff is really reacting to the news of the day, so when something comes out in the news about new regulations for organic food standards or new products coming out on the market or an energy company making a commitment to using a certain amount of wind power, we’re in a position to put that in perspective for our readers. And then the third group of bloggers are people you could think of as modern diarists, people who are like you. You might have the fertilizer out on the lawn and the kids out in the chlorinated pool, but you’re thinking about taking a couple of steps toward going green. And we have several very good, very funny, very engaging writers lined up to tell us about their experiences and what’s working and what’s not working and what their neighbors are saying and what their mom says and how their kids react and sort of what it’s like as they move in what we would hope to be a positive direction.

Andelman: Finally, Seth, you won an Olympic medal for rowing.

Bauer: It’s true.

Andelman: What year was that, and then what I really want to know is, is there a day that goes by that you don’t think about that experience?

Bauer: The year was 1988. The Olympics were in Seoul, South Korea, that year, and probably there is no day that goes by. It’s partly because I am still so attached to my teammates from the Olympics, I don’t think there’s a day that goes by where I don’t get email from one of them, so it has to be top of mind. But it was a pretty amazing experience and especially for me. I was a coxswain on the rowing team, and coxswains, if you know anything about rowing, are basically the little people who steer the boat and give the commands, and so I’m 5’ 6”, and I raced at 50 kilos, which was 110 pounds, which I could not do any more, and my teammates are all 6’ 5” and above and 220 and pretty much the finest athletes in the world, so it made for a great team experience.

© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Carey Winfrey, "Smithsonian Magazine" editor: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 2

(Return to Part 1)

ANDELMAN: Speaking of that, you bring a very strong international journalism background to the job. How have your own experiences, whether as a Marine, or covering the mass suicides at Jonestown, Jim Jones, and you also did the ouster of Uganda dictator, Idi Amin. Do those affect Smithsonian stories because you’ve had that overseas experience?

WINFREY: Well, I think that any good magazine is ultimately a reflection of its editor’s interests as they are shaped and pushed and pulled by the staff’s interest, by the editor’s understanding of what the readers are interested in, so of course, when Dick Stolley edited Life magazine, he was accused of running stories about twins, of which he was one, and rabies -- he had been bitten by a dog as a young man -- in every issue. It wasn’t true by a long shot, but there were a lot of twins and a lot rabies stories in his issues.






I think one of the things that I have done with the magazine, is that I’ve emphasized photography. Not only do we try to have great photography, but we do a lot of stories about photographers, not only in “Indelible Images,” but we’ve done features on Alfred Stieglitz and people like that.

So as far as the foreign goes, you mentioned some of the high points or low points of my checkered career. I’m one of those people who knows very little about a lot of things. My interest and knowledge are very, very thin, but because of a vocational as well as an otherwise short attention span, I’ve been subjected to a lot of different places and people and ideas, none of which I ever got very deeply into, but I do know a very little bit about a lot of things, so I think the magazine reflects that. That’s why it’s such a perfect magazine for me, I think, because I am just a little bit interested in a wide variety of things and an expert about almost none of them.

ANDELMAN: It’s a pleasure to meet another member of the mile-wide, inch-deep club.

WINFREY: Exactly.

ANDELMAN: I think that serves journalists well, though, if you’re able to talk about a variety of things. I mean, that’s kind of what we do is we go out and we learn about different things on every assignment, so it seems to serve us well.

WINFREY: Exactly. What journalism does is allow those of us who not only are a mile wide and an inch deep in their interests but who love to learn new things the opportunity to do that. David Halberstam, who, as you know, died recently and was a mentor to a lot of us and a very generous journalist, always talked about what a privilege it was to spend a lifetime learning new things, and I think a lot of us share that view.





ANDELMAN: Before joining Smithsonian, you were an editor at People magazine. If you would, could you compare and contrast the cultures and the coverage of the two?

WINFREY: I’ve talked a little bit about People, which is a place that rescued me from academia. After editing American Health for about six years, I was offered the magazine director’s job at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, from which I had graduated 30 years earlier. I went up there for a year and discovered that I really was not constitutionally suited for teaching, that it required a kind of extroverted performance personality that I didn’t really have. I found that people who had less, I thought, journalism jobs and had done much less interesting journalism in their careers were much better teachers of it than I was. So after a couple of semesters, the editor of People came to me and asked if I would come up and be one of her deputies. I had worked at People one summer just as a fill-in after I left American Health and before I started at Columbia, and so I went up there. I went back to hands-on magazine work, and the amazing thing about People at that time, and I suspect still to this day, is the quality of the people doing it. The journalism was absolutely first rate. The ability of the magazine to respond very, very quickly. We would sometimes close a cover story in a matter of hours. Phil Hartman was killed by his wife in a murder-suicide, as I recall, on a Tuesday, and Margaux Hemingway was another, as it happened, suicide on a Tuesday, and by Tuesday night, we had 2,500 very well-reported, very well-documented words on those both tragic events.

So the quality of the people at People was a huge benefit, and the way the magazine could spring into action in a very short amount of time was very professional. We used to joke among ourselves that we were kind of like the Manhattan Project brought to bear on a comic book, and there was a lot of truth in that. The people there were very, very talented. The subject matter -- after a while -- I thought if I edited one more story about Julia Roberts I was going to have to jump out the window myself.





ANDELMAN: That’s a great place to end that line. How do you think Smithsonian magazine will look back upon and write about the Iraq war in 10 years?

WINFREY: Well, you know, we have written about the Iraq war on many occasions. (Train horn blows in background.) That’s my toy train I have in my office…. No. I am right next to the railroad tracks here in L’Enfant Plaza in Washington, D. C.

We have written about the Iraq war quite a lot, and many of the things that we have written have held up quite well. We started about three or four years ago before we ever went into Iraq, before we invaded Iraq, with a piece about the British failed experiment in nation-building in Iraq, which had more people in this town read it might have saved a few lives.

And then Andrew Cockburn wrote a terrific piece about the Shiites very early after the invasion in which he talked a lot about Sistani and about Muqtada al-Sadr, what key players they were. Many of the elements and the divisions and the problems that have come to pass were laid out in that piece that we did three or four years ago. And then we did a piece on the Kurds and their role as kind of power brokers. I don’t think you have to wait too many years. I’m very proud of the work that we’ve done on Iraq, about five pieces in all, and Andrew Coburn is off to Egypt for us very soon to do a piece on Sunnis. I think our work on Iraq would stand up as being a telling set of brakes on some of our policy initiatives.

ANDELMAN: Do you have to work to keep politics out of the magazine? I know there is a separation there, but as you mentioned before, the paychecks come from the Smithsonian. There’s a perception, I don’t know how real, but the perception is that the Smithsonian is tied to the federal government. Is there a problem of politics ever touching the magazine?

WINFREY: There is a problem of partisan politics. We have to be very careful not to be seen to be taking partisan positions, by which I mean Democrat versus Republican. We can talk about politics, although we don’t talk about contemporary politics. I mean, we would not do a piece, a profile, for example, on Barack Obama or Sam Brownback. Because you’re right. The Smithsonian Institution gets most of its budget from the U.S. Congress. In fact, we supplement that budget. We make money for the Smithsonian Institution. We get no federal money whatsoever for the running of the magazine. We contribute money to the Institution. Just the opposite. So we are independent, but there is that perception, and there are enough people out there doing partisan politics that we don’t have to. I don’t really think, like sports, that that’s what our readers come to us for.





ANDELMAN: How long do you think the magazine will have to wait before it looks back -- it’s hard to say, we’re a year before it ends -- but before it looks back at the Bush administration the way it has Nixon or Ford or Clinton, the first Bush? What’s a reasonable amount of time?

WINFREY: Well, probably a generation. I mean, I think it’ll take a generation for history to render a fully developed verdict on the Bush administration.

ANDELMAN: A final question, Carey, and thank you for your patience today. Do you think that the print edition of Smithsonian magazine has a limited future, and are you making plans for an eventual transition away from print?

WINFREY: Well, let me just speak very briefly about magazines in general. I think that magazines will survive as print entities, and I think that there will be a kind of Darwinian fallout. I think the fittest will survive. I think other magazines will migrate to the Web, and we’re certainly investing in and looking at the Web. But I do think that the tactile pleasure of carrying a magazine and reading a magazine and turning the pages will continue for as far as the eye can see. Will there be as many print magazines? Probably not. Will magazines stay the way they are? Probably not, in the same way that television vastly changed radio and any new medium changes the one from which it grew. But I think magazines will be alive, and I think that Smithsonian stands a better chance than most of being one of those survivors, because it does provide real rich, thoughtful material to those of us who believe that a day in which you don’t learn something new is a wasted day. So I have high hopes for our magazine, even as I recognize the many challenges to print and even as I welcome the efforts that we are putting into our Web counterpart. That’s Smithsonian.com, by the way.

© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Carey Winfrey, "Smithsonian Magazine" editor: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 1

Blender. Newsweek. TV Guide. Forbes. Playboy. Mac World. Entertainment Weekly. Wizard. Business 2.0. Esquire.

These are the magazines I read as soon as they arrive in the mail each week or each month. They are frothy, entertaining reads, and I look forward to each new issue.

And then there’s Smithsonian magazine. I can’t remember when or why we started subscribing to Smithsonian. It costs more than most of the others, and it demands more of my time and attention than they do. But for several years now, whenever I give it my time, it pays me back several times over in richly detailed stories about worlds and topics I never dreamed I’d be interested in, let alone become fascinated with.

My wife and daughter have followed me into the pages of Smithsonian, and we probably talk about stories we’ve read there more often than anything else in the house. That’s why I jumped at the chance to interview Carey Winfrey, editor of Smithsonian magazine.

A lieutenant in the U. S. Marine Corps in the 1960s, Winfrey has since collected a series of damned impressive journalism credentials, including writing for Time magazine, winning an Emmy Award at PBS in 1974, reporting for The New York Times, and landing a job as editor-in-chief of Cuisine. He founded Memories magazine and spent six years as editor-in-chief of American Health. Before landing at Smithsonian in 2001, he spent several years as an assistant managing editor at People magazine.


ANDELMAN: Carey, welcome to Mr. Media.

Carey: Thank you, Bob, and why don’t we quit right now? I don’t think I can improve on your introduction.

ANDELMAN: Well, do you want to ’fess up here that you’re résumé is padded, and most of the stuff I mentioned is made up?

WINFREY: Inflated. I wouldn’t….

ANDELMAN: Inflated, inflated. All right.

WINFREY: No, it’s all too true, alas.

ANDELMAN: And, I have to point out, I left a lot of stuff out, because there is only so much time.

WINFREY: Just as well.

ANDELMAN: Carey, first question: the game is softball. On the field are teams composed of editorial staffers from Smithsonian magazine and National Geographic magazine. Who wins, what’s the final score?

WINFREY: National Geographic wins 47-6, because they rotate a different team in every inning, and so they’re fresh in every inning. They have about ten times as many people putting out that magazine as we do.





ANDELMAN: For people who have maybe only read a little of each or haven’t seen either one in a while, what’s the difference between the two?

WINFREY: I would leave that to the individual reader, but I must say that I like the person who said that we’re the thinking man’s or thinking woman’s or thinking person’s National Geographic.

One big difference, I think, is that we do more with the arts and history than they do. They have better paper and fabulous photography that comes from letting their photographers go out in the field for many, many weeks longer than our photographers go out into the field. I think our text pieces tend to be a little more tightly edited, maybe a little more information-bent. But they’re a great magazine. They just won a National Magazine Award, very deservedly so. It’s a tremendous product. They’ve been doing it for a long time, and they do it very, very well indeed. We enjoy competing with them with a much smaller group. We have to be quicker on our feet, quicker off the dime, a little bit more willing to jump on things. Because we are not as big as they are, we can turn stories around a lot quicker. We’re a little funkier, I think, a little less…

ANDELMAN: Stiff?

WINFREY: I’m sorry?

ANDELMAN: A little less stiff?

WINFREY: Yeah, maybe. A little more agile, perhaps.

ANDELMAN: What’s the relationship between Smithsonian magazine and the Smithsonian Institution?

WINFREY: Well, we -- as staffers -- are Trust employees. We are not federal employees. We work for the Smithsonian Institution. They sign our paychecks, and we have about five or six pages in the magazine devoted to Institutional goings-on. We try to make them as interesting and journalistically sound as the rest of the stuff in the magazine, but there is kind of an Institution magazine within the magazine. Beyond that, we are interested in the same things that the Institution is interested in. We are of the Institution but not about the Institution, with the exception of those five or six pages, so we reflect the Institution’s interest in history, science, natural history, the arts.

ANDELMAN: So stories in Smithsonian magazine do not necessarily originate with things happening at the Institution?

WINFREY: Absolutely not, except for this one section which we call “Around the Mall.” All the rest of the magazine, the other 70 pages or so, are what our editors find of interest in those general subject areas. We try to be kind of an extension of the Institution. You know, when the magazine was founded 36 years ago, the then-secretary, C. Dillon Ripley, said the magazine should be about those things that the Institution is interested in, and founding editor Ed Thompson said, or “ought to be interested in,” and in that “or ought to be interested in” we have quite a large area to roam.





ANDELMAN: When story ideas come to you, what qualifies as something suitable for Smithsonian magazine?

WINFREY: Well, again, within those broad categories, but what qualifies is those stories that we think our readers would be interested in, those stories that engage us, those stories that sound like they’d be worth pursuing. For a long time, the magazine really prided itself on doing stories that you wouldn’t see anywhere else, and I think that’s a noble aspiration and a worthy aspiration. But I think we can do stories more thoughtfully and in greater depth and with our own reporting so that we can do stories that other people might be doing also, we just try to do them differently, more thoroughly, if you will. So it’s a matter of balancing stories that are both timeless with those that are a little bit more timely.

ANDELMAN: In preparing to talk to you, I was looking back over some issues, and I’m always struck by the coverage of things beyond the United States, but I noticed that two of the more recent stories that I really liked were the story on Mt. Rushmore, where you guys went behind the scenes, basically, if we can describe it that way at Mt. Rushmore, and then the story of the pardon, Gerald Ford’s decision to pardon Richard Nixon. They just captured the history of these things just a little bit differently.

WINFREY: Well, thank you. Yes. We were very pleased with the way both of those stories turned out. The Mt. Rushmore was written by one of our favorite cultural travel writers, Tony Perrottet, who has great sources in the West in the National Parks Department and has a great love of the outdoors, has done very interesting things for us on Yellowstone as well as Mt. Rushmore. He really gets behind the scenes, as you pointed out. And the pardon story was actually a book excerpt that we bought. For two years, we had a two-year option, and we bought it right after President Ford went into the hospital the first time, and while we were not at all, of course, rooting for his demise, we were prepared for it, and I think we had that story all edited, ready to go, and we dropped it into an issue about three or four days before the issue was due at the printer’s, so it allowed us to be a lot more timely than with our long lead time we are usually able to be.

ANDELMAN: Right. I mean, you are not going to turn to Smithsonian the way you would U. S. News and World Report for something that happened a week ago. That’s not really its style or its function.

WINFREY: No, but this book on the Ford Presidency and on Ford’s life was kind of a perfect Smithsonian story in that it allowed us to look at an historical event through the perspective and with the hindsight of 30 years and to try to understand it in a way that was not possible at the time. So that made it a perfectly valid story, and his death provided an excellent peg.

ANDELMAN: While I’m pointing out things that I really like about the magazine, the other thing that I always read and always study is the “Indelible Images” section. The latest one was this William Eggleston photo of the two women on the couch, and there was a great story behind it. And the other one I pulled out that I liked, I guess, was from May. This was after the church bombing, and there is a picture of an African-American family in the 1960s waiting to see if a daughter had survived this bombing. I mean, it’s just a tremendous approach to take these classic photos and then add a story to them, plus you have the ability to publish the photos so large that the detail is really visible.

WINFREY: Yes. It is a reader favorite, that department, and it is certainly a favorite of mine. I actually started doing that at Memories, and it was one of the very few things that when I came to Smithsonian I brought with me, if you will, because I liked it so much. First of all, I am very interested in photography in an amateur sort of way, but these classic, iconic, as you say, photographs very often have great stories behind them or have great stories since they were taken. It’s fun, sometimes, to tell what happened to the people in the photograph after the photograph was taken, whether it was a day later, a month, or 10, 20 years later. So updating them is a lot of fun, too. Glad you like that department. It’s certainly one of my favorites, if not my favorite.

ANDELMAN: What kinds of story ideas do not make it into the Smithsonian? I mean, what kinds of ideas when you hear do you reject out of hand? What is not a good fit?

WINFREY: Well, you know, the editor’s job is to say no, and we get something like 4,000 queries a year, so there are so many stories that don’t work. It’s almost hard to know where to start, but of course, we don’t do celebrities. Our readers have told us again and again that they don’t come to us for sports, although sometimes we’ll do an historical sports figure. We did a piece on probably the best-known baseball player to have died in WWI. We don’t do partisan politics, we don’t do current events, and we don’t do stories that don’t feel to us like Smithsonian stories. At some point, an editor’s taste figures in, and he or she may not be able to tell you what appeals to him or her about a particular story, and that’s part of the fun of being an editor is sometimes you can indulge your intuition without even quite being able to articulate it.





ANDELMAN: What kind of balance are you looking to strike in the editorial mix? I mean, not every story that you run is pregnant with that history and heaviness.

WINFREY: That’s right. Balance and mix are really what I am thinking about most of my waking hours. First of all, we are a dual audience, male and female. We have to balance stories that are of interest primarily to men, which tend to be history and science, and stories that are primarily of interest to women, which tend to be the arts. That’s not a hard and fast rule, but the arts and natural history. We have to balance young versus old, because we have young readers as well as older readers. We have to balance, as you say, the heavy and the light, the long and the short, and I think the mix is probably the most important ingredient, and I’m juggling stories all the time. I’m working now on the July issue, and I haven’t decided everything that’s in it yet. We’ll continue probably to juggle that mix right up until the end of this month. This is May, we close July at the end of May, so juggling the mix is what I do most of the time.

You also mentioned domestic versus foreign stories. That’s an important part of the juggling, also. We have a big board here, and as the stories get laid out, we put them up on the board. Sometimes, when you put them up, you find that, oh, you’ve got too much this, too much that. I remember the classic example of two or three years ago. We put all the stories up on the board, and we discovered that three of them had a strong New Zealand component. Unfortunately, it was too late to do anything about it, so I wrote an editor’s letter sort of making fun of us for all of our New Zealand stories in the same issue.

ANDELMAN: Did every issue come with a kiwi?

WINFREY: Yeah, it should have. That’s an important part of it, trying to get the mix right.

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