Jay Heinrichs, editor of the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine since 1986, said he does not presume to have any special perspective on the College.
"I'm aware of my ignorance," he said.
Even after nine years at the helm of the Alumni Magazine, "the coolest professional job at Dartmouth," Heinrichs said the College "is so complex and changing that I could never know it completely."
Since taking over the Alumni Magazine, Heinrichs, the first non-alumnus to edit the magazine, has turned the publication around.
Before he was hired, the magazine's budget was $400,000 and it ran an annual deficit of $60,000, according to Heinrichs. Today, the Alumni Magazine has an annual budget of $800,000 and a circulation of 47,000.
The magazine has only lost money once in Heinrich's nine years and last year made more than $55,000, he said.
But the magazine is not only successful financially.
The Alumni Magazine has twice won Newsweek's Magazine of the Year Award in 1991 and 1993, was awarded Magazine Week's Editorial Excellence Award in 1992, and has received a Gold Medal from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education for the past six years.
Stephen Madden, editor of Cornell's alumni magazine said in an interview with Folio Magazine that Dartmouth's alumni publication "the best alumni magazine in the country, period."
Running the magazine
There are five basic facets of producing the alumni magazine, according to Heinrichs -- money, planning, editing, writing and "schmoozing."
Heinrichs said he works with Managing Editor Lee Michaelides on financial issues.
Michaelides is "the money guy, but my responsibility entails overseeing marketing efforts -- the sales of advertising, inserts and other projects such as [the] World Wide Web," Heinrichs said.
"The money side's going really well. We're really a successful venture," he said.
The magazine raises all of its own money through ads and alumni support, he said. "So you could say the management has been pretty good," Heinrichs said.
Planning is also crucial to the success of the alumni magazine. "The ad-hoc basis [used by other magazines] hurts the quality," Heinrichs said.
Nine issues are published annually and planning for each issue usually begins two months in advance. "The small staff is efficient if we plan really well," he said.
The magazine has one full time editor, Karen Endicott, and a small staff of six people in Hanover. There are also other contributing editors "all over the place," he said.
Heinrichs said he invests a good deal of time editing the magazine, as well. "I act as the overseer of a story," Heinrichs said.
He will recruit a writer for a story and personally work with the story and its author, he said.
The magazine's efforts at recruiting writers has been "an embarrassment of riches," according to Heinrichs. Of the fifty or sixty alumni/ journalists who recently received letters inviting them to write for the magazine, only three people responded with disinterest.
"An exciting part of my job is working with a stable of really top people," Heinrichs says.
Writers from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The L.A. Times and Bon Appetit have contributed to past issues, Heinrichs said.
"I am a successful recruiter of reporters who are superior to me," he said.
The writers for the magazine are no longer exclusively Dartmouth alumni. "We deliberately bring in people who don't know a thing about Dartmouth sometimes to make things interesting," Heinrichs said.
One of the magazine's foremost policies is to encourage its staff to write free-lance for other magazines. "This is the best form of professional training," says Heinrichs.
Most of the magazine's story ideas come from its editors and staff and attempt to cover all facets of Dartmouth life.
For one story, the magazine sent a thirty year old man, incognito, on a freshman trip to get a unique insight on the story.
Heinrichs' favorite story thus far is "The Bomb in the Nation's Attic," by Jacques Steinberg '88, a reporter for the New York Times. The story, about the controversy over the Smithsonian Institution's display of the Enola Gay, "made the alumni the maddest and the former chairman of the board [Smithsonian Secretary I. Michael Heyman '51] furious" Heinrichs said.
An effort is made at "schmoozing" alums, as well, because "We're competing for their time. We need to seduce them into spending more time with Dartmouth," Heinrichs said.
"I think we're succeeding," he said.
There is an emphasis in the magazine on outdoor life at Dartmouth and the beauty of its surroundings. "Alumni appreciate this most," Heinrichs observed.
"Dartmouth is the kind of place you have to love like a brother or a sister," he said.
Heinrichs On and Off the Job
Heinrichs said he gets up at five o'clock every morning and works on free-lance writing for a couple of hours before work.
He has written one book on New Englanders throughout history, "The Yankee Guide To Simple Living" and he is currently working on "The City Dweller's Guide To Enjoying The Wilderness."
Prior to his appointment as the alumni magazine editor, Heinrichs was living in Washington, D.C., but had grown tired of it.
He said he worked as publication director for conservation magazines and later became the senior editor of the National Wildlife Magazine.
Heinrichs is a Philadelphia native and graduated from Middlebury College in 1977 with a degree in American Studies. He later dropped out of Johns Hopkins University's graduate studies program in English.
"Academia wasn't for me," he said.
Heinrichs' wife is a Hanover selectman. They have an 11-year-old daughter and a seven year old son and live in Etna.
