Matthew Stoss came to Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, U.S., in 2022 with 10 years of experience as a “newspaper guy.” While working at the Harrisonburg Daily News-Record early in his career, he came back from an assignment and his editor, a mentor, asked him what color the interviewee’s eyes were. 

Stoss couldn’t recall. But he made note of the question, which he knew spoke volumes about the kind of attention to detail needed in a good reporter’s arsenal. He kept that note tucked away for more than a decade—checking for the color of every interviewee’s eyes—even though he never used that tidbit in a story...

… until two years ago when he was on assignment as Associate Editor of VCU Magazine. Writing a day-in-the-life profile of alumnus Buz Grossberg, a barbecue pitmaster and owner of Richmond’s landmark Buz and Ned’s Real Barbecue, he took note of the details—Buz’s clothes, the air quality that day, the ingredients in the rub, the “sugar-fat-smeared” knobs on the pit, the size of the hickory logs behind the restaurant, and yes, the color of his subject’s eyes:

After a salutatory honk of his GMC, Buz introduces himself. He’s wearing suspenders, jeans and a beard cropped like a putting green, and his physique suggests he delivered ice in 1904. He’s a Taurus, 70 years old and, my heavens, are his blue eyes enchanting, although my favorite thing about his face is his nose.

Stoss won a silver Circle of Excellence Award in profile writing for that article. It was one of five 2024 COE awards for VCU Magazine. Managing Editor James Irwin received a gold award in the same profile-writing category. The magazine was awarded silver in the “Publishing Improvement” category, along with a gold award in the “Alumni/General Interest (Printed Twice a Year)” category. The latter propelled the magazine to its fifth award—the coveted Robert Sibley Magazine of the Year Award. (All gold winners in the various “Alumni/General Interest” categories are automatically considered for the top prize.)  

We talked with members of the tight-knit magazine team about their magazine and their awards haul, especially the Sibley top honor. They summed up their feelings with words like “gratitude,” “validation,” “excited,” and “unexpected.”

Irwin was the first to find out. On the day of the awards announcement, he pulled up CASE’s website to check the results. 

“I did a double take. ‘That looks like us.’ ‘Oh wait, that is us!’ I kept refreshing the page,” he recalls. “I was working from home, and I called upstairs to my wife who was also working from home. ‘Can you check this page out to make sure you are seeing what I’m seeing?’” 

When he was sure it was real, Irwin began calling the team. The greatest surprise was the Sibley Award. 

“It wasn’t even on our radar,” says Irwin. “To say that we were excited would be an understatement and to say that we were shocked would be even more of an understatement, especially when we looked at the finalists. We were in the company of some of the best alumni magazines, ones we have long admired.”

Unlike the other finalists, VCU Magazine does not have a long history of publication excellence. It might just be the first new magazine to win the Sibley award. At the time it won, the magazine had only been published three times. 

The Birth of a Flagship Publication

VCU Magazine was five years in the making. 

In 2018, VCU had two legacy publications with overlapping content—Shafer Court Connections, mailed to graduates of the undergraduate campus, and Scarab, mailed to graduates of the health sciences schools. In addition to these two traditional alumni publications, Impact was mailed to donors. The three publications reached 85,000 households.

“We had just finished a major campaign, and we were looking at sunsetting the donor magazine,” explains Mitchell Moore, the magazine’s Art Director and Senior Director of Creative Content for VCU’s Office of Development and Alumni Relations. “Before teeing up a new campaign, we thought, ‘Can we accomplish more effective communication through one university flagship magazine?’”

That question began a discovery process through which members of the Development and Alumni Relations team began working with a consultant from 508 Creative in early 2019. She conducted leadership interviews and focus groups with internal and external stakeholders, ultimately presenting a plan to move to one VCU magazine.

“As a large, public, urban research institution, we needed a singular magazine, and we needed to get it into the hands of more people,” says Moore. “We would also need a dedicated staff and a defined editorial and artistic philosophy.”

Moore was a member of the team tasked with overseeing the “rebuild,” along with the DAR’s Assistant Vice President for Strategic Marketing and Engagement, the heads of alumni and donor communications, and a web developer. 

The COVID-19 pandemic paused the plans to consolidate the three publications’ budgets and hire staff. But in January 2022, the plan to launch VCU Magazine was back on track when Irwin, who was six years in as News Editor in the university’s public affairs office, was named full-time Managing Editor. He manages the budget, assigns articles, writes, edits— “basically every step from concept up to and through printing,” he says. “And then I get a dolly out and deliver copies around campus.” 

Stoss, with both newspaper and higher education publication experience, was hired full time four months later. Now Senior Editor, his job is primarily editorial or in his words: “the poet, dreamer, lead-writer guy.”

The staff is rounded out by Development and Alumni Relations communications staff who also support the magazine. In addition to Moore as Art Director, there is Photo Editor Jud Froelich, Contributing Writer Catherine Brown, Copy Editor Judy Arginteanu, and Production Manager Travis Wolfrey. Occasionally, they also work with freelancers.

They work to produce the twice yearly, 68-page magazine that reaches 120,000 homes, which they describe as a “general interest magazine that takes a journalistic approach to tell well-reported and stylishly written and designed stories about the university community, while encouraging critical thinking and engagement among its readers.”

One of the Sibley judges described it as “quite the dream publication!”

‘Think Outside the University’

Creating a well-defined editorial philosophy was an important starting point, says Irwin.

“Universities are centers of scholarship, critical thinking, learning, and debate. Their flagship magazines should reflect that,” he says.

As a magazine published two times per year, an underlying tenet of the team’s philosophy is quality over quantity.

“VCU has a very good news website that we consider the AP [Associated Press] Bureau of the university. It publishes about 650 articles a year. We don’t need to be that kind of publication,” says Irwin, adding, “Every time the magazine comes out, we want it to be an event; every issue can be like an opening night.” 

In reimagining VCU’s flagship magazine, Stoss says, “we had to think outside the university.”

They did that by finding local stories that also have larger national appeal.

“A large percentage of our alumni stay in the Richmond metro area. So, the ties to Richmond, our state capital, remain strong,” explains Irwin. “In a lot of ways, we can be a local magazine. At the same time, we’ve got this ability to write national stories, to filter the world through VCU.” 

“There is always a connection to VCU, but anyone could pick it up and read it and enjoy it while sitting in their dentist’s office,” adds Stoss. 

The cover story of the fall 2022 premiere issue exemplifies this idea of a Richmond story with national appeal that is built on its ties to VCU.  

“Out of the Past,” written by Stoss, begins with alumna Sesha Joi Moon, who, with her sister Enjoli, founded the nonprofit JXN Project “to explore the lost grandeur of Richmond’s Jackson Ward neighborhood.”

Stylized “JXN” by the sisters Moon and once home to banking magnate Maggie Walker and dancin’ movie star Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Jackson Ward is Richmond’s premier historically Black neighborhood and one of America’s most vital, lucrative and fabulous Black enclaves not named Harlem.

The once thriving neighborhood was all but destroyed in the 1950s when dissected by Interstate 95. In the feature, we get to know the sisters, and we learn the history of Jackson Ward, all in the context of the racial protests in the summer of 2020 and the growing movement to tell the authentic story of Black history. To do that, the feature article includes commentary from prominent historians representing the Library of Virginia, the Black History Museum, and the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society.

“To add heft to a story, one thing we are not afraid to do is bring in outside experts to complement VCU sources,” notes Irwin.  

The narrative in “Out of the Past” is complemented by compelling environmental portraits of the sisters. Moore says the design and photography philosophy is simple: “We support the editorial by shining a light on it. Our job is not to be the star, but to make readers want to turn the page.” 

Credit: VCU

The cover story for the fall 2023 issue (one of the two issues submitted with the COE entry), “Massey’s New Era” by Irwin, further illustrates the quest to “think outside the university.”

Massey Cancer Center at VCU, a National Cancer Institute-designated center for 40 years, was about to be named a comprehensive NCI center.

“There was an expectation this was going to be a feature. We could have been looking at a traditional alumni magazine accolade story,” says Irwin. “But that wouldn’t have been in keeping with the editorial philosophy we had laid out for this new magazine.

“We huddled together, going through all of the information. How do we turn this into something that can hold a cover and eight to 10 pages? We leaned further into the story. What would our readers want to know? Beyond the new distinction, this became a Cancer Moonshot story. The future of cancer research happens at places like Massey. The accolade—the comprehensive designation—became part of the larger story.” 

And what about those philanthropy stories that once filled the pages of the donor magazine, Impact?

Quality over quantity also applies to philanthropy stories, says Irwin. “We try to take one or two really good stories with philanthropy at the heart of them and write them exceptionally well with good interviews, good thesis, good quotes, good art. That will go a lot farther than eight or nine stories that sound like the same story because they all announce donations. There are other avenues, more timely avenues, for gift announcements.” 
 

On a Final Note

When asked for a parting tip for those aspiring to be named the next magazine of the year, Irwin offers this:

“Make a magazine you want to read. Think like a reader. Get into the mindset of someone 20 years out from graduation. They have two kids in middle school, a full-time job. They are busy. You are competing for their attention. Lean into what universities are. They are places of curiosity.”

Irwin says he’s happy to lend inspiration to colleagues in his shoes—because that’s just how he finds inspiration in his own job.

“Look to the alumni magazines you admire,” he advises. “And beyond those, look at your favorite newsstand publications like Esquire, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic.”

Speaking about editorial excellence, Stoss refers back to his editor and early mentor, Chris Simmons, at the Harrisonburg Daily News-Record, who told his small-market reporters: “Just because you don’t work for the Washington Post doesn’t mean you can’t write like you work for the Washington Post.”