Entrepreneurship

At Northeastern University Magazine, I devised and created one of the industry’s more lucrative advertising efforts, not only defraying publishing costs in tight financial times but enabling new investment to attract some of the country’s best writers, photographers, and illustrators. Quick research showed that the great majority of Northeastern’s more than 200,000 alums resided in Metro Boston, with household incomes on par with readers of the leading, glossy city magazine. I hired a tenacious (and gracious!) ad rep and soon we had ample national, regional, and local ads in our pages. We also had the means to publish the likes of renowned alumni writers Marguerite DelGiudice, David Heilbroner, and Herb Hadad; illustrator Mark Steele; and photojournalist Mark Peterson. Becoming more visible and deepening engagement with its readers, the magazine played an important role as Northeastern made its crucial turn toward becoming a top-tier global institution.

At Cornell Magazine, I designed and built a profitable in-house custom publishing operation for campus clients reversing five consecutive year-end (inherited) deficits with a surplus replenishing 70 percent of the cumulative loss. Hired with a mandate to, among other things, strengthen our finances, I posed two questions to the team early on in my tenure: 1) Are we working at capacity? And 2) What do we excel at? The response: we produce superb magazines and we have room to increase our productivity. With Cornell’s renowned School of Hotel Administration celebrating its 75th anniversary, I pitched the dean: Let us produce a marketing piece for you showing the life and accomplishments of the school and its people, and in return, allow us to solicit ads from your graduates who own hotels and restaurants around the world. We’ll bind the section into the magazine and also give you boxes of stand-alones. It was a success: a 32-page special section with six substantive stories (plus a timeline) and 53 ads. We went on to produce a similar piece for the Johnson School of Management as they were unveiling their new strategic direction: 32 pages, nine stories, 41 ads. We did smaller inserts for the bookstore and were in discussions, just before I left the university, with Cornell Rowing to celebrate a milestone anniversary.

At fiscally strapped Hampshire College, I figured out a way to publish a biannual print magazine on an average $300 per issue for text and visuals—capturing the soul of the institution in a way the magazine hadn’t done before and immediately increasing visibility and reader engagement. We didn’t have the resources to create a magazine, so I decided we would curate one with Hampshire content that we found … everywhere. From journalist Jeff Sharlet’s 17-piece tweet storm about crossing an international border to this student’s notice posted to the college intranet: “LOST: Large black and red scooter with big wheels and duct tape on the handlebars. Responds to Newton’s third law. It is very much a part of me. I miss it dearly. Thank you very much.” We recorded panel discussions featuring faculty, students, and visiting profs on any number of topics and edited them into deep thought pieces. We asked Hampshire writers and musicians and painters and neuroscientists to write us no more than 300 words on a project they were wrestling with at that moment so we could get a glimpse into their creative process, which to a person they did gratis. The result, as one alum said to us: "I feel like there’s a Hampshire conversation happening on every page.” This was some of the more stirring and meaningful magazine work of my career.