The Phillipian taught Smith about the value of journalism, but also about the thrill of working on a news team, of hitting deadlines, of getting the paper out every week just under the wire.
No one is in this room, however, no matter how impressive it is. No, all the employees are stuffed in an adjacent room: the cafeteria. Huddled over lunch tables, the young journalists talk loudly, sharing ideas, laughing, typing away on laptops, slurping down takeout food. They are casually dressed and preposterously good looking. The office feels more like a young Silicon Valley startup than a D.C. news bureau. The beautiful foyer, with its plush seating and big views, is something of the past, a time when news was made on dark nights over a glass of Scotch. To view the future of American journalism, one has to head to the cafeteria, where the young newsmakers are spilling Chinese food on laptop keyboards. It is in the grand, deserted foyer that I meet Justin Smith ’87, the man who helped rescue Atlantic Media and brought a classic American magazine, the Atlantic, back from its deathbed. Smith is 42 but looks 30, with blond hair that flows back behind his ears. He wears fitted corduroy pants and a purple striped button-down shirt. Even he seems to realize how bizarre this room is, and quickly shuttles us back to his personal office on the opposite end of the floor. Over Smith’s desk a flat-screen TV displays a live feed of the Atlantic Wire, the online news aggregator and blogging site that represents just one of the many new parts of Atlantic Media’s portfolio.
His Time at Andover Justin Smith was raised in Paris, the son of two expats, his father American and his mother English. He attended French schools until he hit the eighth grade, when his father decided the boy needed to go to New England to achieve a proper education (Smith’s father, brother, and sister all attended Hotchkiss). After two years at Fessenden School, Smith enrolled at Andover as a 10th-grader, excited to be at a larger school. He moved into Fuess House and made the soccer team. “Sports were always a big thing for me at Andover—soccer, tennis, paddle tennis in the winter,” Smith said. “I tried out for ice hockey at first, but Paris didn’t exactly prepare me to play with the hockey team here.”
He also discovered another passion: journalism. Smith became a sportswriter at the Phillipian. “Because I was on a team,” he said, “I had to use a pseudonym, of course. So I wrote as Samuel Phillips.” The Phillipian taught Smith about the value of journalism, but also about the thrill of working on a news team, of hitting deadlines, of getting the paper out every week just under the wire. “Some of my favorite memories are driving down to Harvard late on Thursday nights,” he said, referring to the time when the Phillipian was printed at Harvard University. “We’d get extensions past sign-in and drive down to Cambridge to oversee the printing of the paper. There was something about that, watching the fresh papers coming off the press, knowing that we created this thing. It was special.” Another major influence on Smith was PA’s foreign languages program. “At first, I thought I’d just take French because I was fluent, but everyone frowned on that idea,” he said, smiling. “So I decided to try Chinese. Pretty soon I was obsessed with learning the language.” Smith dove into his Mandarin studies, then jumped at the opportunity to pursue Andover’s summer exchange program in Harbin, a remote city in northeast China. “The exchange program was amazing,” Smith said, “because Harbin is not a city like Beijing, where a lot of people speak English. You tell people you lived in Harbin, and they can’t believe it. They look at you, like, ‘You lived there?’” With his Mandarin improving rapidly and an ever-growing interest in government (he served as cluster president of West Quad South), Smith decided to enroll at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, with a goal of becoming a diplomat. He was on his way to Washington, D.C.
College and Beyond After four years at Georgetown, Smith found himself a job at the State Department. He was young, energetic, and had one of the highest security clearances in Washington. He also felt unfulfilled. Andover | Winter 2013
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