Five Minutes With: Katrina vanden Heuvel
By Ben Adler and Dana Goldstein
Monday October 23, 2006
Whether battling right-wingers on television programs or advancing essential causes on her blog, Nation editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel has long been an unapologetically aggressive progressive voice. She got her start in journalism as a Nation intern, and today is one of the few women to have reached the top in the world of opinion journalism. An outspoken antiwar and feminist advocate, vanden Heuvel’s success in increasing The Nation’s circulation proves that unabashed liberalism can sell.
 Your circulation has almost doubled since Bush took office. Don’t you have a saying, “Bad times for the country are good times for The Nation?”
Our circulation has increased by about 70 percent in the last six years. That saying is from [former Nation editor and publisher] Victor Navasky, a man I admire greatly. But I hope someday that what will be good for the nation will be good for The Nation. That is what I am working towards.
Well then, to what else, other than the Bush administration, do you attribute your circulation increase?
Let me try to come at that in two-and-a-half ways. I think that we grew partly because of the horrifying political, economic, cultural moment that we’re in. But I also think we grew because we were poised to take on the moment when so many in the media were intimidated and fearful and cowed. In a sense, that’s because it’s sort of in The Nation’s genes. These are really bad times, but we’ve gone through bad times before, and The Nation has been around for 141 years, so this was when the core animating principles of the magazine came into play. We were founded as a fiercely independent publication— there’s the defense of the Constitution, defense of democracy, rule of law, civil rights, economic justice. So I think that standing for those, in good times and bad times, has served us well. So that’s one thing.
And I think we’ve also done a very good job in attracting a new and younger audience through the website. The lack of distribution at news stands has stymied our growth in the past. And in these last five, six years, we’ve been receiving 25,000 to 30,000 subscriptions a year, at the highest point, over the website, which is pretty phenomenal as a business model and allows us to reach people all over the country and, in some cases, overseas. Without the website, they wouldn’t know us.
We want to ask you about some of those younger people who read The Nation. The magazine has been very active in wondering over the past few years why there isn’t a bigger student anti-war movement. And one thing we find at Campus Progress is that when we ask students what projects they want us to help them with on their campuses, they very rarely mention any sort of anti-war activism. As someone who has been active in watching the student left for a long time, why do you think that is, and what would an effective student anti-war movement look like today?
I have to say that we’ve done some campus tours and The Nation has tried to visit campuses in this last year-and-a-half. I found that the energy is in living wage initiatives, the environmental movement, on human rights issues. I think part of it is that the war’s so removed for so many young people on many college campuses, because those are the kids who are studying. And this war has been devised, has been framed, as a war that shouldn’t demand sacrifice of many. So, there’s a class phenomenon in the fact that you haven’t seen a campus anti-war movement.
I think it’s also a generation which is, to some extent, a kind of post-9/11 generation. They may be more open to the fear-mongering and less open to understanding that there are alternative ways of thinking about the world and foreign and security policy, that being for peace and justice is an important part of building a secure America.
And I think, you know, all politics is local. So many young people just feel they want to work in their communities. When we were at the University of Chicago, [there were] so many working with janitors to increase the living wage because they felt a responsibility to their community.
I think there are students engaged in the boarder peace-justice, anti-war movement, but it’s not a campus movement.
Here at Campus Progress, we are trying to empower a new generation of progressive pundits. But the opinion writers our age and older are three-quarters male. How does The Nation manage be such a prominent exception to that rule? How have you managed to achieve better gender diversity than other publications? And why do you think that’s not the case in other opinion journals, on op-ed pages, and in the blogosphere?
It’s true. You may know that Mother Jones now has two women as editors, but it’s very rare.
Down here in Washington, no one does.
That’s right. I understand that. It is a measure of the kind of testosterone-driven, horserace politics that I think even thought journals, thought magazines, engage in. And men tend to be the leading pundits, the leading editors, and the leading writers at magazines I will not name, some of which I admire.
But I do think it’s crucial [to bring more women into the fold]. And how have we done it? Part of it is through the internship program, where we always have a great gender diversity balance. And I have worked hard in these last ten years to bring in more women as columnists. Katha Pollitt, of course, has been here for a while, but also Naomi Klein for example, a wonderful polemicist and reporter under 40, or Patricia Williams. All the senior editors here, with one exception, are women.
Do you think if there was gender parity in Congress and in government in general, that more women would get interested in writing about politics?
I think you’re right and you’re wrong. I think that the national landscape is not terrific. We know the percentages. We know that other countries do far better in terms of women being represented at the national level. As someone who has followed Emily’s List, who’s worked with Progressive Majority, I know some terrific women coming through the pipeline. What’s exciting is that I do think there are a lot more women coming into electoral politics. I think there’s more progress there than in the journalistic community, which is something to think about. That interests me as a good thing to write about and explore.
I have to say, when I’ve gone to campuses I’ve been really impressed—and I don’t mean to sound paternalistic—or materialistic—about the range of women in various meetings, and how they speak up, how engaged they are, and how they’re leaders of various groups. So I think there has been a lot of progress, but at the same time so much more to do.
Check out The Nation’s collaboration with Campus Progress at StudentNation.
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How can you interest women to enter the world of journalism when so many newspapers and magazines are losing their readership?
— Grace Stentz - Oct 26, 04:40 PM - #If Vanden Heuvel was serious about waking up The Nation to the war, her magazine could try covering the peace movement which it has not. As for the meet ups on campus, I’ve skipped one with The Nation because I knew the war wasn’t an issue they cared to tackle. If I were a chef, I might have gone, they did devote a whole issue to food after all.
— Kyle - Nov 16, 02:59 PM - #