"No," Iannotti said, laughing. "You have to be dor1'Y l i ke me. Are you kidding? I came from the suburbs. If you have good ideas and you can write, it doesn't matter how cool you are. If it did, I wouldn't have made it. We had VH l . That was my ..
source for everything." Iannotti's route from the suburbs (Barrington, R.I.) to Esquire was a circuitous one. Before graduation from Colby she did an internship at the P7�ovidence Jounzal. Her mentor there routed her to journalism school at Syracuse University. Master's degree in hand, she contacted alumni in New York, including one at Selfmagazine. "She said, 'I don't need anybody but my boyfriend needs an assistant at Esqui1·e,"' I annotti said. She started as an editorial assistant in 1 998 and was recently pro moted to assistant editor. "I probably could be higher up at another magazine," she said. " But I'm proud of what we do. I want to be someplace where I can be proud of tl1e product. I'm on tl1e slow elevator up, I guess." Or maybe not so slow. I a�motti has a studio aparonent (about the size of a Colby double) on tl1e Upper West Side. She freelances for various magazines and recently had a piece in Sports Illustratedfor· Women. At 2 5 , she's working on not being too much of "a softie" when writers don't make deadline. In fact, after the interview and tour of tl1e Esquire offices-lots of cubicles, lots of people working-lannotti was hoping there would be a message waiting from a writer whose computer had eaten his story just as he was about to catch a o·ain to Boston. "He was going to write it longhand and fax it to me when he gets there," I annotti said skeptically. But she still took the time to walk her visitor to the foyer, where celebrities stare from framed Esquire covers: Nicole Kidman, Mr. Rogers, David Letterma11, Helen Hw1t, Denzel Washington, icholas Cage. Does she meet the celebs? ot really. lam10tti said most of them are photographed elsewhere, though Bill Murray strolls through the offices regularly to visit Esquin editor David Granger. "I met [Murray] at a party once," lanJ10tti said. "I said, 'Hi, how are you? ' He said, ' Fine. How are you? ' He was perfectly pleasant."
" no mode ls, either. " S o does everybody get to meet celebrities a t magazines? " ot generally," said Alyssa Giacobbe '98, an associate features editor at Elle who, in August, was about to make tl1e jump to Hm�pe1··'s Bnzam: "Not through tl1e office. There's no models, either. Which is always the next question." Giacobbe worked at Elle for the managing editor, Jennifer Barr, before Barr moved to Hmpe1·'s as deputy editor. It was Barr who helped Giacobbe get an internship at Elle after her junior year. Weeks before graduation, Giacobbe was offered a job with the magazine's features editor. She graduated May 2 4 and started work j une 1 in Manhattan, just up Broadway from Times Square. By this june she was living alone in the East Village but was about to move in witl1 friends on the Lower East Side. Giacobbe, who is from Rhode Island, isn't into the club scene and eats out most of the time. One of tl1e perks is that her cubicle has a view of the Statue of Liberty. Another is that working at Elle, with invitations to screenings and pren'l ieres, she doesn't have to pay to go to the movies. But most of tl1e time Giacobbe works. "I have pages of my own," she said. "We have a section called ' Firsts.' It's a lot of small pieces. A lot of arts and entertainment, pop culture-type stuff. And I work a lot on that. I have a couple colwnns that I 'm in charge of editiJ1g. And usually each month I 'll take an entire page that will be just mine to see through the whole process. For August, I did page four." That page included a "trend" on the vacation spot Bikini Island and short pieces on food and politics. For the j w1e issue Giacobbe wrote a small piece on the "Sound ofl\l lusic Siug-a-lo11g," the audience participation version of the movie, which was coming to ew York. " I 'm really excited for it." For liberal arts graduates who spend four years writing 3 ,000-word papers,
magazine unbound That Kath leen Bolick '95 can write HTML is helpfu l . That she reads and appreciates contemporary poetry is essen� tia l . That noth ing Bol ick writes or edits at The A tlantic Monthly is printed on paper is a sign of our changing times. Bolick is one of four e d itors of The A tlantic Unbound, the on-l i n e version of The A tlan tic Monthly. Her s pe c i a l ty i s poetry. " J u st the fact that I h a d these l iterary a n d poetic i nterests m e a n t I cou l d k i n d of craft a position that I wante d , " Bolick s a i d . " The rea d i ng that made me fa m i l i a r with t h e contem porary l iterary l a n d s c a p e , that rea l ly wa s u sefu l . And nobody e l se wa s i nterested in work i n g with the poets, especial ly." Not that they aren't interesting. Bolick has interviewed re-. nowned writers-Edna O ' Brien, Nadine Gordimer, M a ry Gor don and Annie Proulx ' 5 7 , to name just a few. She went to poet Donald H a l l 's home and taped him reading his work. The day we spoke she was about to interview poet Phi lip Levine a n d h a d recently spoken a t length with Joseph Epstei n . " He was great," she said. "A lot of fu n . The • _.. A. u-. --�-' funny thing about these interviews Atlantic Unbound is [that] the more C••rtHr'1'J rentfea ,1 famous a person a r....owo•""'• is, the less i nter � �-0.. · ---1*---.t·PQoe st i n g they c a n =��o...· tend to be because they've got �:�:.'::'� kind of a schtick ..,._.,_ go i ng o n . W h e n e=.=:.-:-, you have these ==::.:-.:=.-. �... m i d-fa mou s people, they tend to be more i nterested i n the publ icity I guess." And the on-l i n e Atlan tic does put poets in the p u b l i c e y e . The Atlantic Unbound (www.theatla ntic . comj u nbound) gets 1.8 m i l l i on page v i ews per month , a n d that n u m b e r i s r i s i n g stea d i ly, Bol ick says . The i ntent i s t o provide d i ffer ent content from the print vers i o n of the magaz i n e-d iffer ent col u m n s , stories about d igital c u l tu re . " We're tryi ng to a pp e a l to a younger a u d i e nce , or a more tech-savvy a u d i ence," B o l i c k s a i d . Readers/l isteners o f A tlantic Unbound c a n , v i a audio l i nks, hear poets read their works p u b l i shed i n the print magazine (Peter Harris, poet and professor of Engl ish at Colby, is now on the site). An offering called " Soundings" has an essay about a poem, and then four poets read the work. Last month Lloyd Schwa rtz wrote an essay about a poem by E l izabeth Bishop. Schwartz, U . S . Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, G a i l Mazur and M a r k Stran d read t h e poem a l o u d . With previous experience l im ited t o a n internship at a book review journal a n d wa iti ng ta bles, Bolick broke into maga zines as assistant to a n Atlantic vice president and learned on the job; soon she was " putting out the content:· Every six weeks or so she would take a two- or th ree-week break from the Web pages to bone up on a poet or novelist to prepare for an interview. Last summer, Bolick opted for a bigger break. She left her ful l-time job at The Atlantic to enter the cultural reporting and criticism program at New York U n iversity. She planned to con tinue at The Atlantic as a contributing writer and editor for Atlantic Unbound, which for Bolick can hardly be called work. Asked what she does for fun on her own time, she said , " I read a lot."
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COLBY · F A L L 2000
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