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.


© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All Rights Reserved.

Labels: Carey Winfrey, National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine

  ¶ 11:28 AM