Best of CASE District I Award
 

Institution: Yale University

Title of entry: Yale Alumni Magazine

About this entry: The bimonthly Yale Alumni Magazine works to keep its readers’ attachment to and understanding of their university alive and thriving. Every two months, we deliver a compact, full-color package of Yale to the mailboxes of 130,000 alumni. Its 72 pages (plus 40 pages of class notes) contain a smorgasbord of writing and images.
The content has to be diverse, because the readers are diverse. We cater to an audience aged 20 to 99, living all over the country (and in other countries), who have a myriad of backgrounds, professions, and interests. Our audience is also interested in the university itself: its history, how it’s run, how it’s performing, what the students, staff, and faculty are doing. We make a conscious effort to tell the whole story; we don’t avoid controversy.

We pay attention to variety and personality. The big stories are important, but so are the smaller, more intimate ones. We often include essayistic vignettes of events and people—to give readers a sense of being here, on the ground, on the campus. The alumni may be very far away. But we want them to remember that they are still, and always, part of Yale.

Note to judges: besides the rest of our editorial content, each magazine contains 40 pages of alumni notes, written by class secretaries and edited by a staff editor. Only alumni of Yale College receive an edition with those 40 pages. We haven submitted here the veresion of the magazine without those pages.