One of my favorite things to do every year is talk to the winner of the Sibley Magazine of the Year.

This year, I was thrilled to talk to Maria Henson, who is editor of the knockout Wake Forest Magazine, a three-times a year publication for alumni.

Henson, a 1982 Wake Forest alum, has been at the magazine since 2010. And while the Sibley is a big deal for any alumni magazine editor, Henson had already earned some prettttttttty serious hardware before nabbing this year’s prize. In 1992, before she’d joined Wake Forest’s team, she won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of editorials about battered women that she wrote for the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader. (You can watch a Moth-style talk that she did at Harvard about those editorials here.) Thirteen years later, she listed a second Pulitzer on her resume for her work editing a series of editorials in The Sacramento Bee by Tom Philp about the Hetch Hetchy Valley.

And even her return to Wake Forest is a tale in itself — she routed herself through Botswana (!!!!) before returning to Winston-Salem for her current job. You can read more about that here.

In the interview that follows, Henson shares some great advice, magazines you should consider picking up for inspiration, and the goals worth aspiring to for your own magazine.

Once you’re finished, check out the links at the end for other Sibley-related interviews.

Tell me about your team.
We have a team of four people.

I’m the associate vice president and editor at large. I edit the magazine and I teach one journalism class a year. My managing editor is Carol Hanner, who came out of newspapers. Kerry King, who’s worked here 30 years, is also a graduate. Michael Breedlove joined us last fall as class notes editor and deputy editor. He helps oversee our budget and handles our freelancers’ contracts and invoices.

Outside of our office, we have a freelance designer, Julie Helsabeck, who’s fantastic. She’s worked with us since late 2010, including on the redesign. The University’s talented creative director Hayes Henderson also collaborates with us.

When you arrived, you had lots of newspaper experience but no specific alumni magazine experience. How did you make that transition?
I did what a reporter does when I got here: I reported on the magazine. I went back for 10 years and looked at magazines really closely. I started to interview people.

[Denison University and Dog Ear Consultants’] Maureen Harmon was so helpful. I asked editors how they did it, how they thought about changing up their magazines.

I was looking at examples I liked, but I also went out to bookstores to look at general interest magazines. That’s where the learning came from for me. I didn’t walk in with any preconceived notion, other than that I loved stories, and it felt like we had a wonderful vehicle in front of us to tell really inspiring stories.

Can you give an example?
I love to walk through bookstores to see if anything sparks an idea. And one book I loved was The History of New York in 101 Objects. I thought, “We could do that for Wake Forest. What objects would we pick? That’ll be great fun.” (Here’s that story.) And I find things on Twitter that spark ideas, like “Letters of Note.”

What magazines inspire you?
Garden & Gun had a lot to do with my thinking when we were doing the redesign, starting in 2011. (Check out issue archives here.) I like Fast Company and Orion. I also look through Wired, Esquire, and National Geographic.

I’m always looking at how they’re putting their stories together. How are they visually thinking about chunks of information? Before our budget year ended in June this year, I went over to Barnes & Noble, and bought a handful of magazines for all of us to look through.

Our table outside my office is filled with magazines from other colleges and universities.

What advice would you give to other editors who want to create award-worthy magazines?
Be in tune with your designer. The art piece is so critical, because people are looking for an excuse not to read your piece. Don’t make it hard on them to read it!

Another thing: pay for the photography, pay for the illustration. You will be rewarded for it, and people will keep the magazine around.

Do you give specific direction to photographers and other artists?
One thing I often say is “Look for small details.” It’s not just a headshot. What are those small details that could be spot images throughout the story? I give them final stories or at least rough drafts to help them shape their vision.

But mostly I say to people, “I trust you to get what you think is the right story, with the right visual. I want some options. I want to make sure I have some horizontal and vertical.” And that’s about it.

What do you think a good magazine should do? What has yours done that you’re proud of?
When I came here, I had spent 27 years in newspapers, but I had always looked forward to seeing my alumni magazine and seeing what people were doing at my university.

But in my newspaper job, my phone was ringing off the hook. I had newspapers stacked on my desk, books I wanted to read, magazines for my job, editorial board policy papers from politicians. It was too easy just to skim and throw the magazine away.

What I wanted was a magazine that would make people say, “I don’t want to throw it away. There’s another piece in there that I want to read.”
__________
Want to read more about Sibley winners and judges? Check out interviews from previous winners and a judge.

2018 winner Dan Morrell for HBS Alumni Bulletin
2017 winner Renée Olsen for TCNJ Magazine
2016 winner Heidi Singer for UofTMed.
2015 winner Dale Keiger for Johns Hopkins Magazine
Sibley judge Jeff Lott

I’ve heard from many of you that you’ll be taking your magazine digital for one or more issues.

While it definitely saves money on printing and mailing costs, it will also likely require some dramatic shifts in your editorial priorities.

• You can no longer literally “push” the publication into your readers’ hands
• A move online typically means putting class notes, the most popular section of your magazine, behind a reader-repelling password-protected wall

Even more than that, putting a magazine online means you lose a ton of control over the experience you give your reader.

When you send a print magazine, you decide the size of the publication, the feel of the paper stock, the design of that beautiful opening spread of a feature package.

But with a digital magazine, you don’t know if your reader is on their smartphone, tablet, laptop, or desktop. They may be connecting to it from an email blast, a social media post, or directly from a website. Are they seeing the same thing you and your team dreamed up together?

Maybe, maybe not!

So now what?

Focus on what you can control

If you can’t know with 100 percent certainty what a reader is seeing or where they are seeing it, what should you prioritize to make sure you’re giving your magazine and your stories the best chance to make a big impact?

Two words: Your headlines.

Your headlines are by far the most important place to spend your time when it comes to your editorial content.

They’re the first thing your reader will see, and they’re what they’ll use to decide whether the story you and your team have spent weeks or months working on into is worth their attention.

This probably makes intuitive sense, but we often don’t act this way.

Headlines are almost always the last thing we add to a story. We spend 60 seconds coming up with a yawner like “Scene Stealer” or “Mentorship Matters” and call it a day. (No judgment here! I’ve done it too.)

But do you think that sort of humdrum headline is really going to persuade your smart (college-educated) reader to dive in?

Probably not.

A headline is your first, best chance to hook a reader. Don’t waste it.

The Ogilvy Rule for better headlines

I’m not the only person who thinks most of us need to spend more time on our headlines.

David Ogilvy, known as “the father of advertising,” believed so strongly in the importance of headlines that he had a formula for developing them. Take the time you spend developing the body copy and divide it half, and that is the amount of time you should be spending on your headline. Here’s how that might play out.

• Spend 2 hours on your story? Spend an hour on your headline.
• Take 4 hours on a story? Spend 2 on your headline.

Perplexingly, this is often known as Ogilvy’s “50-50 rule,” though simple math shows that the actual ratio is 67-33. MATH IS HARD, AMIRIGHT?

Okay, let’s step back for a second here: it is probably unrealistic to think that you can commit hours to the process of headline generation, despite its relatively importance to the success of your publication.

But you should at least be aiming in that direction. Instead of thinking of headline creation as something to dash off before you zip a story off to design, spend real time thinking of some options. Work with your colleagues to build on your ideas. Sleep on it. Spend 20 minutes on your headline development, not two.

The payoff can be enormous. Research shows that good headlines can attract anywhere between 5 and 10x more readers than crummy ones.

With a digital magazine, good headlines are a particularly valuable currency. Make the most of them.