Photo by Liza Gordon
In its centennial year, Connecticut College is hosting a series of events called Great Beginnings: Conversations with Alumni. The series is meant to tout the successes and stories of Conn alumni by encouraging dialogue between them and current students, providing a glimpse of how a Connecticut College education can be applied to the post-graduate world. After summer break, the College continued the series on September 16 with Jay Lauf ’86, the Publisher and Vice President of The Atlantic. In an interview, Lauf discussed his experience at Connecticut College in the 1980s, getting his feet wet in the publishing industry, and reviving a 150-year-old magazine for the 21st century.
At Conn, Lauf was a double major in English and History with aspirations of becoming a writer. While discussing his time at Conn, he inevitably grew nostalgic, reveling in memories of writing his papers on a Smith Corona typewriter, late nights as a DJ at WCNI, working the keg in Morrison on a Tuesday night, and frequenting Cro Bar, a place students would invariably stop after long hours in the library. He recalled getting “down and dirty” at the El ‘N Gee Club and walking to Mr. G’s in the rare instances he would leave the serene bubble that is our campus. Lauf attended Conn during a time when dances in Cro were replaced by concerts by performers such as R.E.M., apartment-style living was not an option, and before kegs were as taboo as swine flu.
Despite these differences, Lauf’s time didn’t differ much from our experience as students today. “I always felt like there are 2000 of us here, with no police and no apparent rules but to just exist,” he recounted wistfully. “This is our giant kingdom here! I remember leaving my senior year and being like, ‘Oh my god, I’m not going to get that back ever again.’”
As Lauf predicted, when he graduated in 1986, reality set in; the world was no longer his giant kingdom. He moved to Washington, DC, where he worked as “the token Goy” at the Jewish Monthly, a non-profit where he wrote material on Israeli politics and Jewish culture. Despite these successes, out of financial necessity, he moved back home to Danbury, Connecticut.
Unlike today, when jobseekers have access to dozens of databases, job search websites, and other digital luxuries as seemingly rudimentary as email, Lauf physically mailed dozens of job applications with copies of short stories and by-lines of articles he had written in Danbury. It was much harder to get recognized, he noted, than today when “you’ve got so many outlets. You can just set up a Tumblr and maybe get noticed and get known.”
He answered an advertisement for a publisher’s assistant, with the attitude that he would try to get his foot in the door and take whatever writing assignments he could get. But the prospective employer, who is now his mentor, insisted that Lauf try out ad sales.
Lauf was hesitant about entering a career in advertising, an industry that always seemed “dirty” to him. He justified taking the job by limiting himself to six months to “get [his] feet on the ground.” But ultimately he never looked back, and he has never regretted it.
“I found out I was really good at it. It still kept you really close to the milieu of writing and publishing. You get to meet interesting people, and make a decent living on the business side of it. And over twenty-three years later, I just never went back. It has afforded me lots of really great opportunities.”
Although Connecticut College does not offer an advertising major, Lauf found that his experience in the liberal arts supplemented the lessons of his various mentors. The difficult part of working in ad sales, he said, is that “you’re selling something very ethereal and very hard to quantify and put a price tag on. I liken it to going into debate club every day.”
After working for five years as the publisher of Wired, Lauf became Publisher and Vice President of The Atlantic. Since its establishment in 1857, The Atlantic has been a well-regarded literary and cultural magazine, publishing commentary on abolition and other major contemporary issues in the 19th century in its early years, and continuing to contribute to public debate and cultural dialogue ever since. Founded by esteemed writers including Harriet Beecher Stowe and Ralph Waldo Emerson, the magazine has a rich history that continues to endure.
However, when Lauf first arrived at The Atlantic three and a half years ago, the magazine, despite that rich history, was risking appearing irrelevant and outdated. Lauf thought that The Atlantic had a 150-year-old caricature as well as a 150-year-old readership.
At the same time, it maintained a loyal fan base and “a really great brand.” In order to revive the magazine while preserving its integrity, the magazine’s leadership set up a New York base of operations for advertising. The advertising staff worked in a scrappy, temporary office designed for six people across from Grand Central Station with a team of fourteen.
Lauf described the thrill of that new venture and the promise of energizing an aging but still illustrious publication, recalling that “It galvanized everybody around a feeling of mission: we’re going to revive this brand . . . It felt like a camaraderie.”
As publisher, Lauf acts as a sort of counterpart to the editor-in-chief. “If the editor-in-chief’s job is to create the product and think about the readers and the reader experience, then my job is to keep it running so they can keep doing that job and do it well.” A crucial aspect of his job concerns the marketing brand of the magazine, in addition to making savvy business decisions about how The Atlantic wants to present itself, which takes the form of ad campaigns and the creation of partnerships. The result of these initiatives has been that in the time Lauf has worked at The Atlantic, leading a diligent team of advertisers, the magazine has turned a profit for the first time in its history. •
