Ask the Editor of The Chronicle Review

Thursday, June 12, at 12 noon, U.S. Eastern time

Liz McMillen became editor of The Chronicle Review in December 2007, after serving as deputy editor for two years. In 1998 she was the founding editor of the Chronicle Careers Web site, and she served as a reporter and senior editor for The Chronicle for 14 years before that. In 1997 she received a Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellowship at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

A transcript of the chat follows.

Goldie Blumenstyk (Moderator):
    Hello and welcome to the Brown Bag, where our guest today is my colleague Liz McMillen, who will answer your questions about The Chronicle Review.

As some of you may know, Liz worked for several years on the "news side" of The Chronicle before joining the predecessor to the Review, and she brings a wealth of experience and insight to her position as editor of our Magazine of Ideas.

I know she's keen to take your questions on the Who, What, and Why of the Review, so let's get to them.

Liz McMillen:
    Hey Goldie, thanks for moderating. I'm happy to be here and eager to hear from readers.

Question from Goldie Blumenstyk:
    So Liz, let's start with the obvious: What changes have been made in The Review over these past several months? Why?

Liz McMillen:
    The main change we have made is to make the Review a magazine of ideas and the home for our coverage of books and intellectual issues. We have moved staff-written pieces about scholars and research into the Review as well as Nina Ayoub's popular scholarly books list and Nota Bene feature. The upshot of that is that we have expanded our coverage of publishing and books at a a time when most newspapers have drastically cut their books pages.

At the same time, we moved articles about higher-education policy and the Point of View feature into a new Commentary section in the news section, where they seemed to fit better.

These changes occurred along with major reorganization of The Chronicle's news sections to make our coverage more "cross disciplinary," as editor Jeff Selingo puts it, and to make The Chronicle essential reading for higher education.

Last but not least, late last year we introduced a new group blog, Brainstorm, with contributions from nine scholars and administrators. The blog has just marked six months online, and we have some 500 postings on everything from food hypocrisy to Obama and the election to whether you can teach taste.

I guess you could say we've been busy.

Question from Cynthia O'Connor, independent scholar:
    Would the new format consider humorous essays about the academy?

Liz McMillen:
    Absolutely. We publish lots of serious-minded stuff, but we love getting a good humor piece, and I think they resonate with our audience. Those that we've done in the past -- by authors such as Jessica Burstein, Karla Jay, and Lawrence Douglas and Alexander George -- are among the most popular things we run. So yes, send us funny stuff.

Question from Isabella Oakley, independent scholar:
    How do you see your journal as different from other magazines that feature debates about ideas?

Liz McMillen:
    Good question. What we are trying to do is showcase some of the best thinking and writing on intellectual and scholarly issues, and to get inside some of the major academic debates going on right now, on their own terms. And we try to bring scholarly expertise to bear on current events and policy issues. As I look around at the magazine world, I don't see many places trying to do that -- they cover public policy or current events without that scholarly approach. And our authors are often the most knowledgeable people on the subjects.

So for example, we recently published a piece by David Hollinger, a historian at the U. of California at Berkeley, who has been writing about what he calls post-ethnicity for years before Obama. We got him to write a cover story in February analyzing the meaning of race in the current political climate.

Having said that, we also try to publish pieces that speak to a broader intellectually curious audience. We don't want to be parochial in that sense.

Question from Misha White, independent scholar:
    Will you ever have a comment section for articles?

Liz McMillen:
    Yes we will. As part of a general revamp of our Web site later this year, readers will be able to comment on every story we publish.

Question from Bernard Golden, independent scholar:
    Are all the higher-education related pieces published in your Commentary section, or do you sometimes publish pieces specifically on higher education in the Review?

Liz McMillen:
    Actually, we are interested in running "big picture" kinds of pieces in the Review about higher education that deal with issues perhaps more philosophically than you might find in the Commentary section. For example, one of most popular articles so far this year was a piece by Mark Edmundson describing the changes in students he's seen over the years, and how this generation has a "spectacular" hunger for life and experience and speed, and that these qualities make them especially vulnerable. We thought this article really captured the zeitgeist among students today, and from the response he (and the Review) have gotten, I'd say he was right.

Question from Christine Dugan, Dickinson College:
    Liz,

Thanks for doing this. I would like to know from a proposal standpoint what sorts/topics of essays you are looking for in each section? What issues have stirred the most reader interest? What would you like to see us give more (or less) attention to? Some of the questions listed above.

Liz McMillen:
    Issues that stir the most reader interest? Religion, religion, religion. One of our most popular pieces ever was an essay we ran two years ago entitled "Jesus Is Not A Republican." Also the politics of the Middle East as they play out in academic/intellectual debates. Issues of race are very big, as are debates about the curriculum and where the liberal arts are headed. Personal essays that deal with the difficulties of being a professor as higher education changes. Evolution and the politics of science are obviously very important now as well. Labor relations in the academy and how disciplines are changing are others of high interest that we try to address. Part of that is sometimes wrapped up in the question, what is happening to the humanities.

Question from Patrick Mattimore, Freelance Journalist:
    I am interested in getting published in the Chronicle but because it's so difficult I need to submit my pieces to multiple publications. If the Chronicle had a policy of notifying authors within 24 hours if their piece was being accepted or rejected, then it would be possible to give the Chronicle an exclusive. Is that possible? And more specifically, is the Chronicle interested in pieces about the AP program and college admissions?

Liz McMillen:
    We do try to respond to authors as quickly as possible. A 24-hour turnaround can be difficult on deadline days, but if you let us know when you a submit an article that you need a response as soon as possible, we can generally accommodate that. We far prefer doing that to discovering that an author has submitted an article to multiple publications. I once had an article go through editing and slated for publication two days later when the author told me he was withdrawing the piece because another magazine was taking it. Not a way to make friends among editors.

As to pieces on admissions and the AP program -- these are perennial subjects of interest to our audience, so the answer is yes. The best thing would be to look at our special issues devoted to admissions -- we published our most recent one in May -- to see what we've done in the recent past and to send us a proposal for what you'd like to do.

Question from Emily Toth, Louisiana State University:
    Hello, Liz! I'm interested in how The Review chooses or will choose books to review. If you welcome reviews by readers--say, a compendium review of several books on a specific subject--do we query you? Emily

Liz McMillen:
    Hi Emily! We do welcome reviews by readers, and yes, you should definitely query us. What we especially are interested in are pieces that step back and discuss the broader issues raised by several books (and is not a strict book review essay per se). We ran a piece in January by Christopher Phelps who reviewed several books on Martin Luther King Jr., and who talked about the new directions King scholarship is taking and the new understandings scholars have of him (these authors were especially interested in his more radical economic and social philosophies). That was a model review essay for us.

Question from Vige Barrie, Hamilton College:
    How were the bloggers chosen for Brainstorm?

Liz McMillen:
    They are our smartest authors, of course.

Actually we started out with people who had expressed interest and who seemed comfortable with the blogging form and the technology. Our plans are to introduce new voices on a regular basis, and we are always looking for interesting/unusual candidates for the blog. A good candidate is someone who can relate the academic world and its issues to broader events, and a sense of humor really helps. And someone who enjoys mixing it up with some of our feistier commenters.

Question from Erin Snow, independent publisher:
    How do you decide what books to review? Are there specific criteria or themes you look for? Will the new Review have a larger review section than before?

Liz McMillen:
    We make that decision after looking at lots and lots of book catalogs, talking to scholars, and getting a sense for what the important books are likely to be -- and by important, it's not just big books from trade presses, of course, but oftentimes specialized books from university presses that we think may be important, or a young scholar's first book, or a book that really grapples with an important cultural issue. It really helps if the book is well-written.

Question from Alan Contreras, State of Oregon:
    Has the Review ever considered making itself available via newsstand sales, or is that impractical or, even worse, passe?

Liz McMillen:
    Hi Alan. Nice to see you here. We have talked about this possibility, and no, newsstands sales of the magazine are not passe, at least not yet! But a more likely scenario for the time being would be to offer an online subscription to the Review. That option is something our circulation department has been working on, and it may be a reality later this year.

Question from Karen Winkler, The Chronicle Review:
    Liz: Potential authors often ask us whether we publish book reviews. Can you discuss the formats we have for reviews?

Liz McMillen:
    We tend not to publish straight reviews of single books. We think that we can provide a window into trends in scholarship through what we call "review essays" - essays that take several recent books on a similar topic, and stand back and ask what they tell us about a certain debate, area of scholarly interest, and the like. The opinion of the author of the essay, not just on the books, but on the general issue discussed, is important.

We also publish columns on single books, in which the author both discusses the book, and his or her own ideas about the topic. So both of the genres are a little different from typical reviews, which our readers tend to see elsewhere.

Question from Goldie Blumenstyk:
    For the benefit of people who might want to write for The Review, can you give folks some idea of what they shouldn't propose? Are there certain kinds of topics that aren't suitable?

Liz McMillen:
    Amazingly, we get a lot of proposals about secondary education and sometimes even children's issues. Those are not right for us, obviously, unless they somehow deal with pipeline issues affecting colleges and universities. We get very detailed reports of ongoing research, and those won't work unless they are cast in a broader context. Reviews of books that have been out for a long time. An account of what you did on your Fulbright (we get probably a dozen of those a year). But on the whole, we are willing to look at just about anything if you can relate the topic to some area of scholarship or research or intellectual interest. We look for writers who can convey scholarly concept to a broad audience -- the kind of piece you might find in The New Yorker or the Atlantic.

Question from Erika, urban public university:
    Hello, Liz. Could you give some advice for freelancers who'd like to break in? Thanks.

Liz McMillen:
    It's advice you've probably heard before, but the best thing is to sit down with several issues of the Review and get a feel for what we've done recently and how we've done it. It's not a good use of your time to spend hours crafting a proposal for something we wrote about two weeks ago. Unlike a lot of places, Review editors read every single proposal and manuscript that comes to us, and we take many more unpublished new authors than you might think. Certainly more than other national publications. So spend some time writing a good pitch letter spelling out what you want to write about why. Then you might consult our submissions guidelines for more specific suggestions: http://chronicle.com/help/submissions.htm

I should also say that the Careers section (http://chronicle.com/jobs/), edited by Denise Magner, publishes numerous pieces every week about the job market and professional issues affecting faculty members and administrators. Depending on what you want to write, this is a great showcase for good writing, and lots of people read these articles. Good luck and I hope we hear from you.

Question from Emily Toth, Louisiana State University:
    I'll jump in again and ask you to imagine subjects you'd like covered in the Review, but which haven't been covered yet, or sufficiently. Obviously the Presidential election's implications will be covered a lot, and you've mentioned religion and the Middle East. But I wonder if there are subjects that haven't been touched but should be. And if so, what?

Liz McMillen:
    I'd really like to find more good writers on science -- it's just hard to find someone who can combine scholarly expertise with a journalistic form. There are many many disciplines out there in the big world -- philosophy, linguistics, classics, foreign languages, area studies when the region is not in the news -- are just a few that we'd like to do more on. We tend to get pieces when there is a public controversy about a particular discipline. We'd like pieces that actually cover trends in disciplines.

Goldie Blumenstyk (Moderator):
    Well, I think that about wraps it up. We appreciate your questions, and your interest in The Review.

Liz: Any last words?

Liz McMillen:
    Thanks for everyone who submitted questions -- I really enjoy hearing from readers. If you want to continue the conversation, or if you have other questions or complaints, you can email me at liz.mcmillen@chronicle.com. And for all those hoping to appear in the Review's pages, please email your idea or article to opinion@chronicle.com