On Oct. 11, Matt Malone, S.J., sat down with executive editor Ashley McKinless for a final interview to debate his years as editor and take questions from America’s staff. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
This month marked your tenth anniversary as editor in chief of America. So we’ll start at the top of that decade. Why are you leaving now?
The charge that I used to be given was to guide the organization through a metamorphosis where it will turn into a multiplatform media company, to grow the audience and to get us to a spot that was near or at breakeven. And we’ve achieved just about all of that. We’ve done what I got here to do, what I used to be asked to do.
Matt Malone, S.J., sat down with executive editor Ashley McKinless for a final interview to debate his ten years as editor.
I also think that turnovers are a great thing within the lifetime of any organization. Ignatius believed that. In case you’re too long in a job, you start to develop blind spots since you get impatient having to cope with the identical problems over and all over again. That just creates blind spots, and also you begin to mistake recent problems for old problems. I believe I should add something else that’s really essential. Several of my predecessors as editor in chief were fired. And even once they weren’t fired, circumstances created very difficult transitions. So that is the primary time since 1982 that America has had a transition that wasn’t a crisis. And I believed that was really, really essential for the organization.
Where were you while you came upon you were going to be the subsequent editor in chief, and what were your first reactions?
I used to be studying on the University of London and on the Catholic University of Louvain. The president of the Jesuit Conference called and said, “Do you desire to do that?” And my first response was, “Uh, not likely.” Since the truth of the matter was that I used to work for a spot in Massachusetts called MassINC, an independent think tank that published a magazine. I used to be the heir apparent to be the manager director and publisher of that magazine, but I left to go turn into a Jesuit. So in any case these 10 years of formation, to come back back and be doing the job that I might have been doing once I was 29 wasn’t that appealing to me. But that’s once I began to appreciate that I wasn’t being called to do that as some former incarnation of myself but as the present incarnation of myself.
What does reconciliation appear to be for a media company? I believed it needed to be about bringing people together who were rapidly coming apart.
I believe I could have said no. I believe I used to be given the liberty to say no. But when I had, there won’t have been an America to come back back to because we were in type of desperate straits. I believed I had whatever combination of skills was needed to do the job. And lastly, I believe it was in that first conversation, I asked Father Tom Smolich, “Can we own the constructing? Is the constructing within the name of the magazine?” And he said, “Yes.” I said, “Then this might work.” Because without the constructing, we never could have bought the time that we would have liked to rework the organization.
Are you able to paint an image of what the magazine looked like 10 years ago?
It was Father Thurston Davis’s magazine that I inherited. You may have the magazine before Thurston, after which you’ve gotten the magazine after Thurston. Thurston is the primary editor who really thought in a multiplatform way, despite the fact that he wouldn’t have articulated it that way; but he understood the ability of name and the way that brand could possibly be rolled out across multiple platforms. But 50 years later, we would have liked a magazine for the twenty first century. That was clear because the best way we were running Thurston’s magazine at that time was coming up against these market forces that were besetting every legacy magazine within the country.
What was your biggest fear at the moment?
That we’d run out of time. That so many pieces had to maneuver. We needed to proceed to publish the magazine. We had to begin reinventing the content. We had to vary the entire workflow. We needed to go from a workflow that was entirely on paper and digitize it. After which at the identical time, execute this industrial real estate transaction in Manhattan, get that done in time in order that we had the capital to speculate in staffing up and in improving the standard of the content, all within the hopes that there was an audience on the opposite end. Which I never doubted. I never doubted that. But what I feared most was that we might run out of time.
What I feared most was that we might run out of time.
So the constructing was needed, but not sufficient. Is that fair to say?
I believe there’s a certain form of commentary about these events, inasmuch as they’re commented on, that, “Well, gosh, we could have done that at our magazine, too, if we had owned a constructing in Manhattan.” Well, like I said, that was certainly one of my first questions: Can we own the constructing? We absolutely needed to have it. But you continue to needed a plan. And what I used to be really against doing was taking the $40 or 50 million that we might generate from the sale of the constructing and putting it into the magazine because it then existed because I didn’t think it was price that. I believed that the brand, the charism, the mission of America was price saving. But because it was instantiated in that weekly magazine in print, I didn’t think it was price saving. And we wouldn’t be good stewards of the resources from that sale if we had just put all that a reimbursement into operating.
In your programmatic document “Pursuing the Truth in Love,” you said that a very powerful challenge we face is existential. Essentially the most fundamental query is, who’re we? So did you realize who America was? Or was that a process you were attempting to work out along with the team?
The reply to that uncertainty, that form of questioning was: a brand, or what theologians call a charism. What’s the essential identity of this group? Interestingly enough, this got here to me once I was having lunch with some ladies from Glamour Magazine. They were at this Yale publishing course I attended. I asked them: “Well, what is that this brand thing? What’s the brand of Glamour Magazine?” And so they said to me, “The brand of Glamour is: We’re what you’re talking about when the fellows aren’t around.” After which this light bulb went off.
What does America do? We lead the conversation about faith and culture.
The word magazine doesn’t appear in that. So I started to think that as we went through a metamorphosis, as we went multiplatform, the thing that may hold all of it together is that this notion of name. And if we could articulate this and produce it into the culture of the organization, in order that it became just second nature to us, that may be our guiding light.
In order that was all of that work we did on brand, attending to that place where let’s imagine, America is your smart Catholic tackle faith and culture. What does America do? We lead the conversation about faith and culture. We empower you to do the identical. How can we do it? We do it by producing content that’s relevant, unique, accessible and impactful. Why can we do it? To advertise the evangelization of america, the religion formation of American Catholics and the progress of civil society. In numerous ways, the work of the last decade has been about operationalizing what I just said.
One other major a part of “Pursuing the Truth in Love” was you expressing your concerns about polarization within the country and the church. Are you able to articulate what your concerns were back then and grade how we’re doing now?
I believe we as a company are doing rather well. We are able to at all times be higher, but I believe we’ve by and huge implemented what I articulated there when it comes to what we were going to be. We’re going to be a spot that was unafraid of getting a diversity of voices, that was unafraid of ideas that were different from our own. From my standpoint, what was most vital in all of that brand work was the rediscovery of America as a ministry. And like all ministries, it participates within the one ministry of Jesus Christ, which is reconciliation.
What was most vital in all of that brand work was the rediscovery of America as a ministry.
What does reconciliation appear to be for a media company? I believed it needed to be about bringing people together who were rapidly coming apart. We needed to bear witness to a unique way of being. I believed that our form of mindlessly mimicking the patterns of division and polarization throughout the church that we were seeing in secular society was extremely dangerous, that we were debasing the church’s intrinsic identity by doing that.
I remember after we published an article by Arthur Brooks, and it was like the top of the world for a few of our longtime readers. What do you say to individuals who have loved America for a very long time and feel threatened by this move—that something’s being taken away from them?
A part of the explanation why I went back to the practice of the editor in chief writing the Of Many Things column every week was because I desired to narrate for our readers and for the audience what was happening. And I didn’t need to get too far ahead of them. So there was plenty of narration work that occurred before we published Arthur Brooks. And what I discovered was a transition amongst our readers from “Why is that this person in America?” to “I actually don’t like this person’s ideas.” But the primary objection has just about passed by the wayside.
The proof of the pudding is within the eating, too. We now have dramatically increased the scale of our audience while pursuing this strategy. And I believe that there are only a few individuals who have read America for the last 20 or 30 years who would really like to return. I even have a fundamental trust within the readers of America. I at all times believed that they were well educated, they were faithful Catholics, and so they knew the Jesuits. And certainly one of the things that they expect from the Jesuits, the Jesuits and our lay colleagues, is that we are going to say something different, that they expect something just like the classroom of competing ideas that they experienced once they were students.
In the previous few years, we’ve covered some really difficult stories within the church. I’m curious: On a more personal level, what has that done to your personal faith and relationship with Jesus?
How has this affected me? This will likely seem odd due to what we lived through together—covering things just like the Pennsylvania report and Ted McCarrick and these other awful, awful stories, these traumas we actually lived through together—but my faith is stronger after 10 years on this job. One other way of putting it’s, once I became editor in chief, I used to be much more anxious concerning the church than I used to be concerning the country. Now the reverse is true. A part of that’s that the survival of the church is safeguarded by the guarantees of the Lord himself, which the republic doesn’t enjoy. He didn’t make them to the republic; he made them to the church.
But I even have also visited the church in every a part of this country. And I find that I’ve been far more edified than disedified by those encounters, the religion of Catholics, the work that goes on every single day. Throughout us, persons are encountering Christ for the primary time. They’re being baptized, they’re being married, they’re being buried, they’re being fed, they’re being housed. Persons are accompanying them. Persons are holding their hand once they die or once they’re sick or when someone they loved has gone. All of that is occurring throughout us on a regular basis, across the clock. That’s the work of the church. And I’ve been in a really privileged position on this job to see that up close, and it really inspires me. It really consoles me.