Mother Jones Names Editors-in-Chief

About: Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery to lead magazine and website

For Release:
August 16, 2006
Contact:
Richard Reynolds, Mother Jones
415/321-1740
reynolds@motherjones.com

Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery have been named the editors-in-chief of Mother Jones, a national political and investigative magazine based in San Francisco. "Clara and Monika are responsible for much of the finest work that has appeared in Mother Jones in recent years, and I am very pleased that they have accepted one of the most exciting and demanding jobs in journalism," said Publisher Jay Harris.

Bauerlein, 41, and Jeffery, 38, join a small club of women who have been editors of "thought leader" magazines, a category that includes publications from The New Yorker and Vanity Fair to The New Republic and the Weekly Standard. "There are a lot of great women working at all these magazines, but there's been a real paucity of female leadership at the very top," says Bauerlein. "In fact, only four women* have ever been editors-in-chief," adds Jeffery, "and that's counting Tina Brown twice. Monika and I joke that with one fell swoop, we've bumped the total up by half."

Jeffery was previously the magazine's deputy editor, a position she's held since 2002. Bauerlein came to Mother Jones in 2000 and was most recently the magazine's investigative editor. The two women have collaborated on many of the magazine's biggest projects—including "Climate of Denial," a package on ExxonMobil's funding of climate-change skeptics, which was nominated for a 2006 National Magazine Award—and served together as interim editors for several issues in 2005. "We're excited to make this partnership a permanent one," says Jeffery. "Our interests can be different, but they're almost always complementary," adds Bauerlein. "We do tend to finish each other's sentences."

Both women have spent their entire professional lives working on investigative reportage and long-form narrative features. Bauerlein, born in Germany, first came to America on a Fulbright scholarship in 1987, then spent several years covering politics and national affairs as both a writer and editor at City Pages, the alternative weekly in Minneapolis/St. Paul. In that role, Bauerlein actually edited Jeffery's first investigative piece. Since arriving at Mother Jones, Bauerlein has helped bolster the magazine's investigations into the war on terror, civil liberties, and corporate misconduct; expanded its Washington presence; and established the new I-team.

Jeffery, too, worked at an alternative weekly, Washington City Paper, where she wrote and edited political, investigative, and narrative features and was a columnist, before becoming an editor at Harper's magazine. While at Harper's she edited six articles that were finalists for National Magazine Awards, including Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed," and several included in the "Best American" series. In addition to editing some of Mother Jones' best-known articles including, in 2006, Julia Whitty's "Last Days of the Ocean" and Charles Bowden's "Exodus," a visceral account of illegal immigration—she has spearheaded new approaches to presenting information, including "Chronicle of a War Foretold," a print/web timeline of the causes and consequences of the Iraq war (forthcoming in the September/October issue).

"There's never been a more critical time for the kind of journalism that Mother Jones practices," says Bauerlein. "Our focus on reporting and fact-checking rather than opinion-slinging can serve as an antidote to deception."

"Not only that," adds Jeffery, "we need to bridge the generation gap between the boomers and the hipsters. We're both old enough to remember being plopped in front of the television to watch Nixon resign, but young enough not to believe that all political issues and alliances were codified by the mid-1970s." Among the new editors' first priorities will be to make the bimonthly magazine faster-moving and more urgent, in part by overhauling its online operation.

"We live in turbulent times, for both politics and the news media," observes Harris. "Monika and Clara will help Mother Jones take full advantage of the tools of new media as we expand our reporting and deepen our political footprint."

* The four women to have served as editor-in-chief of a thought leader magazine are Katrina vanden Heuvel (The Nation), Tina Brown (Vanity Fair and The New Yorker), and Deirdre English (Mother Jones). Related publications led by women, though not considered part of the thought leader category, include Salon.com (Joan Walsh) and, until Editor Barbara Epstein’s death this year, The New York Review of Books.

Now in its 30th year of publication, Mother Jones has won four National Magazine Awards, including the 2002 award for General Excellence. Published in San Francisco by the nonprofit Foundation for National Progress, Mother Jones produces revelatory journalism that seeks to inform and inspire a more just and democratic world.