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

Labels: Carey Winfrey, National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine

  ¶ 11:56 AM