More than the sum of its weirdnesses: Dartmouth Alumni Magazine's management team has redefined the scope of alumni magazines

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, March 15, 1995 by Diane Cyr

In the back of his Computer workstation, next to a five-year-old's drawing and beneath a shelf of toppled-over books, in a room that distinctly lacks any influence of The Big Green, Lee Michaelides, Dartmouth Alumni Magazine's managing editor, has tacked up a single piece of school sentiment.

It's a photo taken from last summer's editorial conference. In it, editor Jay Heinrichs and former "photo editor" Jon Gilbert Fox ("Well," says Heinrichs, "we didn't actually pay him") flank Michaelides in a canoe in the middle of Squam Lake, New Hampshire. The occasion marks one of several semi-regularly scheduled expeditions--such as the annual "Schmooze by the Lake"--that Heinrichs organizes each year for mutual brain-picking and paddle-wielding among various writers and editors.

Such events perhaps explain the magazine's regular editorial forays into the quirky and diverse. In the past year or so, its writers have foraged for J.D. Salinger's whereabouts, outlined the ups and downs of filmmaker Watter Wanger ('15), and celebrated the grand failings of John Ledyard, class of 1776, an explorer renowned for "spectacularly bad luck on a global scale."

Yet the magazine has become far more than the sum of its weirdnesses. "It's the best alumni magazine in the country, period," says Stephen Madden, editor of Cornell Magazine. "There are four or five alumni mags that go beyond what people traditionally think of as being the content of an alumni magazine. Jay has just sort of redefined the category. "

In the process, Heinrichs and Michaelides have created a model for university alumni magazines: Take the best of a common intellectual and physical experience that crosses generations and present it in a fun, surprising and provocative way to those who shared that experience. With a leaner staff and fatter revenues--to say nothing of high renewal rates, healthy reader feedback and a happy administration and faculty--Dartmouth Alumni Magazine has found a winning formula. Its success is affirmed by the publishing awards, almost tedious in number, that line the office stairwell in the magazine's small, Colonial-homey office building in Hanover, New Hampshire.

The title regularly features contributors from Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, Life, Yankee and other publications, as well as nationally known illustrators and artists. Everything is showcased on glossy stock, illustrated in full color, and produced with complete electronic ease.

Some contrast from the mid-eighties, when Dartmouth Alumni Magazine was a bloated, dull and underfunded affair, with covers distinguished chiefly by whether the campus trees in the photo were in full leaf or bare. Then, eight full-time staffers, working with local freelancers, produced a black-and-white compendium of stressed-out essays "Shaping Public Policy: The Washington Internship Program"). The local ad count was low; the total budget, $400,000; the deficit, $60,000.

Half the staff, double the budget

Since his tenure began eight years ago, Heinrichs, a former senior editor at National Wildlife Magazine, and Michaelides--who runs the magazine's business end--have halved the full-time staff and doubled the budget for the nine-times-a-year title, in addition to finding top-drawer writers and designers. Moreover, with his non-Dartmouth background (Middlebury, '77) and consumer experience, Heinrichs has accomplished that which few alumni titles can: tipping over the college's sacred cows, and getting the readers to, as he puts it, "relax. "

That can be tough for a magazine that tacks between the college and the outside world. True, Dartmouth College owns the magazine and provides the non-profit title with its office and accounting systems, and Heinrichs formally reports to the college's director of alumni affairs. But editorially and financially, the magazine is on its own. Apparently, Heinrichs has been one of the first at Dartmouth to take advantage of the freedom. While past editors tended toward an administration bias, Heinrichs introduced a "loosening of attitude," says Jere Daniell, a Dartmouth professor of history.

Granted, some of Heinrichs' approaches--like having Bon Appetit editor William Garry ('66) review the cafeteria food--are not exactly the stuff of other alumni titles. Nor should they be. Yale, for instance, prefers a scholarly, research-oriented approach; Cornell revels in science coverage. "Editorial always reflects the readership," says Ed Antos, sales director of the Ivy League Magazine Network. But Dartmouth, populated almost entirely by undergraduates, has permission to keep a kind of pigtail-dipping sensibility among its more serious features. "It tends to be very down to earth and to get people to laugh at themselves," says Antos.

As editor, Heinrichs' major task has been to get other writers to play along. His first move in the takeover was to slash the magazine's full-time staff, allocating more of the budget for freelancers. Next began a writer search. Heinrichs had a work-study student search through Dartmouth's database, digging up clips of any published alumni. After finding the 50 best, Heinrichs sent an invitation to contribute--and only four turned him down. "It was an embarrassment of riches," he says. In truth, though, Heinrichs made it tough to say no. Knowing the title couldn't afford to pay much, he found other carrots to dangle: free flights to Hanover from New York (thanks to an ad-trade deal); stays at the plush Hanover Inn (more ad trades); canoe expeditions in Dartmouth-owned wilderness. "He's not just an editor," says a wry Bruce Anderson, editor of Stanford Magazine. "He's an entrepreneur."