Deez Interviews: Meet The Atlantic magazine editor dishing out editorial meeting etiquette and her favorite indie quarterly
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The interviewee: Amy Weiss-Meyer (follower her @AmyWeissMeyer!)
The gig: Senior associate editor at The Atlantic
The hustle:
It all depends on the day. Sometimes it's mostly reading: reading the news for story ideas, other websites and magazines to see what they're doing and who's doing it, galleys of upcoming books for potential reviews or excerpts, and drafts of pieces I or other editors are working on (and, always — probably too much — reading Twitter to see what other journalists are talking about). Other days I'm working through edits on the phone with an author, discussing how to reshape a piece with colleagues, or negotiating with copy-editors and fact-checkers about what needs to change in a piece and why.
Every other week, we have an enterprise meeting, which I love. In these meetings, representatives from all parts of the editorial team — section editors for the website, magazine editors, video and podcast producers, developers, art directors, social media editors—come together to bring each other up to speed and plan for our most ambitious cross-platform projects. I almost always wish it could go on longer. And then about once a month, we have long ideas meetings, where senior magazine editors (and a few less-senior editors like me) pitch and debate potential stories for print. (These meetings are great, too, but tiring and longer; I usually am relieved when they're over.)
I'm also responsible for editing The Atlantic's letters to the editor sections (both in print and online), so most days involve reading letters from our readers. There are two editorial fellows (shout-out to the Atlantic Media fellowship program!) who help monitor the inbox — by the time I see them, the letters been sorted by topic, with the completely nonsensical ones weeded out.
At this point, my job is to decide which letters are smart and interesting enough to publish. We're always looking for letters that will advance the conversation an author has started; not just people who say "I loved this article" or "I hated this article," but instead those who say "I liked how this article pointed out X, but in my experience Y is also a big factor, and here's why it shouldn't have left that out." Or (to paraphrase) "I was in jail with the subject of your magazine's recent feature story, and I'm 100% sure he's innocent." That was a cool one.
These days, the line between a magazine's digital and print presence is blurring. What do you look for specifically as an editor for The Atlantic’s print magazine?
One of my favorite things about working on a print magazine is that it's a medium where the way words and art are laid out on a page really matters. When you work on a print magazine, even if you do the majority of your work in front of a computer screen, you're always aware that you're working on something physical, something people will ultimately hold, and flip through — and hopefully stop flipping when they get to the page your thing is on.
Of course all kinds of limitations come with that awareness (since I'm not actually a designer, most of the limitations I have to worry about involve word count, but I do frequently find myself bargaining with designers on how small they're willing to make an image or how tightly we can kern the text so I can fit more words in).
But it also creates all kinds of possibilities: spreads, full bleed photos or art, typeface play (yes, this is technically possible online, too, but it's just different on an actual page), etc., etc. It's really fun to work alongside talented designers and photographers and illustrators who can make the most of these possibilities. It also means that, as an editor, when I work on a print story, I know it's going to look good, so it better actually be good too.
Ideally, the stories that appear in print are among the strongest, most compelling stories we publish as a publication, period — that's why we put resources into amplifying them and elevating them through design. And because The Atlantic is a monthly, they are the stories we get to devote the most time to.
A good magazine story really marinates: Before even being assigned, its premise is rigorously researched and debated. Then, the author gets months if not years to report it, and the editor gets weeks if not months to edit it, after which point copy-editors and fact-checkers have days if not weeks to squeeze every repetition or inconsistency or inaccuracy or error out of it. Then multiple people proof it to within an inch of its life — do we really need this comma? Aren't these two paragraphs still saying basically the same thing? Then it gets proofed again. After it "ships,"* though, there's no going back, so it better be basically perfect. Online, you can always fix a typo.
*ships = goes to the printer
With stints at Vanity Fair, the New Republic, and three years at The Atlantic magazine under your belt, you know your way around high-level editorial meetings. What advice do you have when it comes to being at these big meetings and making your voice heard?
There is definitely editorial meeting etiquette, and (in my limited experience) it's different at each publication, and sometimes even among different groups at the same publication (print vs. online, for example), so it pays to watch and learn before you jump in and participate.
You want to be taken seriously when you do speak up, so it's always a good idea to match your tone and approach to the meeting norms, whatever they may be. When you are ready to enter the fray, always come prepared — do research on the topics you'll be talking about, have answers to questions you think other editors will ask, be sure you know why something will work before you make a big push for it. Just like in any other meeting setting, don't undermine yourself or your ideas.
As a young person, you will see things differently from your older colleagues, and that's good! But it's also fine to admit that you need help shaping something or want others to help brainstorm. And don't take it personally if something you bring up doesn't go over as well as you expect it to — but do learn from it.
Here's the thing: Even if you have the greatest story ideas in the world (spoiler alert: you probably don't), it's never a bad idea to devote considerable energy to just observing. The benefits of this strategy are greater than just not embarrassing yourself. Even when you're used to these meetings and how they run, even when you're comfortable participating fully, keep studying them; I try think of my own ideas and contributions not as the end goal, but as the price of admission to a really great journalism seminar where I get to be a sponge for the wisdom, the institutional memory, and the well-honed skills of my more senior colleagues.
Which of The Atlantic's recent features has been your favorite to work on, and why?
Soon after I transitioned into my current editing role, I got to work on Sophie Gilbert's Marti Noxon profile, and anyone who follows me on Instagram knows that I was super proud of how it came out. I didn't assign the piece, but when I read the first draft it was immediately clear that this was one of those pieces that was meant to be, a piece that had all the right ingredients. The character, the scenes, the story, and the cultural moment just felt right. In general, The Atlantic is strong on cultural criticism, but we don't do nearly enough reported cultural features for my taste, so I was especially happy to get to help bring one of those into the world.
But I definitely would have loved this piece whether or not I worked on it, because it's about so many things I'm interested in — pop culture, novels, women, women's anger, what it takes to succeed as a woman in a male-dominated field, TV shows that are shot in New York — and ties all those things together in a thoughtful, illuminating way. And Sophie, who has been my editor in the past, was wonderful to work with as a writer, and had infinite patience for my newbie editor fumbles.
Last but not least, one of our designers, Paul Spella, gave it an awesome, Barbara Kruger-inspired layout, and I came up with the headline "THE REVOLUTION WILL BE TELEVISED" (get it?), which, if I do say so myself, looked pretty good on the page.
Also, I just edited this excerpt from Jeanne Marie Laskas's new book and I'm very excited about it!
You originally started at The Atlantic as a fact checker — a job that’s become increasingly deprioritized in the journalism world. Talk to us about that.
Time is a luxury that most outlets don't have — as soon as something is done, the incentive is to publish it. And even if they do have time, few publications have the resources to hire people whose job it is to spend that time on fact-checking.
I don't foresee a lot of publications that never fact-checked starting to fact-check (ahem, Goop), but I do have faith that places like The Atlantic and The New Yorker will stay strong in their commitment to the practice, precisely because it's become abundantly clear how endangered facts are these days.
And I'm cautiously optimistic that the subscriber and membership-based models that seem to be taking off these days are (a) a reflection of public hunger for high-integrity journalism (b) a recognition that that journalism is expensive and (c) a means to fund more fact-checking.
Finally, tell us about an indie magazine that you love to read and why!
I'm really excited about the work being done by Scalawag, a new-ish quarterly magazine based in Durham, N.C, that covers the American South. Having grown up as someone obsessed with magazines in an era where all anyone could talk about was how magazines are dying, I love seeing people around my age have the guts to give birth to a brand new print mag, and work tirelessly to define its voice and its role — particularly when its focus is on issues and stories that tend to be underreported in the national press/legacy publications.
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Thassit for now. Have a good weekend, Deezers!
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