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Renaissance Mag

When Ted Genoways became the editor of The Virginia Quarterly Review in June 2003, the nationally recognized poet brought big changes to the eighty-one-year-old magazine, which has published such luminaries as H.L. Mencken and Robert Frost. While continuing to publish the poetry and fiction that are its hallmark, Genoways redesigned VQR’s somewhat stodgy format and placed an emphasis on deep, long-form reporting — always executed with a literary flair — on topics of lasting import, from the AIDS epidemic in Africa to the teaching of intelligent design. The changes have paid dividends. In mid-March, the magazine was nominated for six National Magazine Awards in four categories, second only to The Atlantic Monthly. CJR’s Dan Miner spoke with Genoways in March.

When you were hired, what vision did you have for the magazine?

It’s really two parts. I wanted simultaneously to honor the mission and tradition of the journal, which had always been to wed the literary and the current-events sides of our identity, but also to see how much we could push the essays in the direction of not only being well wrought, but topical — to give them some urgency and some immediacy. The vision was to take something that seems as archaic as a quarterly publication and try to make it relevant in a media environment where the news cycle is twenty-four hours.

How does your background as a poet influence the way VQR approaches reported stories?

I think of Whitman’s stance of saying, in Song of Myself, “I was there.” Having people there who are actually witnessing and reporting on the situation, not having it in some way filtered by another news agency or through government reports, but to actually have someone on the ground who is a talented writer and a sensitive thinker — I think that has been tremendously valuable.

You’re drawing a parallel between journalists and poets in terms of how important the tactile experience is.

Absolutely. With daily newspaper, Internet, and TV reporting, everything is so condensed. The emphasis is so much on the deadline that a lot of nuance often isn’t able to enter into the piece. By giving our writers a longer deadline, more space, and, when we can, sending them to these places so they can gather details and experience the feel of the place for themselves, I think it adds something that creates not just a literary sense of what’s going on, but something that actually contributes to the discussion.

Was part of your mission to make VQR more accessible?

It’s always been my feeling that serious work does not have to take itself seriously. And, to me, that’s the tone that we’re always looking for — work that is serious about its subject but isn’t self-important, not inaccessible, or imposing, but work that really has some passion and enthusiasm to it. I want to earn your attention through the energy of the prose, the quality of the insights, and then we can support that with the design to really reflect the vibrancy of the work itself.

Language Corner: Starting Well

A question from Robyn Packard, based in Toronto as marketing editor for the international business law firm Torys LLP:

“How do you feel about using ‘As well’ at the beginning of a sentence?”

Not well. That phrase, in that place, doesn’t violate any rule of grammar or usage. But it’s unnatural and seems terribly affected — pinky-in-the-air stuff, or some writing teacher’s half-baked idea of originality. Much the same could be said of “too” at the start of a sentence, where it crops up occasionally.

With perfectly idiomatic words and phrases like “in addition,” “besides,” “furthermore,” “moreover,” “also,” and good old reliable “and” available to us, we don’t need to hold up a sign to let everybody know we’re cute.

— Evan Jenkins
A lot more about writing is in Language Corner at CJR’s Web site, www.cjr.org, under “Journalism Tools.”

Hard Numbers

$929,000: Estimated cost of an eight-page New York Times ad from the government of Sudan, touting the country’s “peaceful, prosperous, and democratic future.”

45: Minimum number of op-eds in which the Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has denounced the genocide in Sudan carried out by government-sponsored militias.

$1.62 billion: Amount the Bush administration spent on p.r. contracts between October 2002 and March 2005.

68: Percent of that amount spent by the Pentagon.

1: Yemeni editor who faces the death penalty for publishing cartoons that depict the prophet Muhammad.

2: U.S. bookstore chains that refused to carry a magazine that published the cartoons.

1.4: Average percentage circulation decrease among the top three newsmagazines (Newsweek, Time, U.S. News & World Report) last year.

40: Percentage by which The Week, which aggregates content, saw its circulation rise.

8: Number of government agencies that allow almost any of their employees to stamp a document “sensitive but unclassified,” which can shield it from release under the FOIA.

28: Minimum number of policies that federal agencies have for protecting sensitive but unclassified information, none of which include provisions for monitoring the process.

Sources: NY Daily News, GAO, Bloomberg, SF Chronicle, Project for Excellence in Journalism, National Security Archive, CJR research

To read the articles in the May/June 2006 issue, click here.

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