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	Villanova Magazine - Winter 2004 Edition
Homepage Back Summer 2003 Archives	Villanova Magazine - Winter 2004 Edition
Homepage Back Summer 2003 Archives		A Journey in Journalism Holly Stratts From newspaper proofreader to editor of The New York Times Magazine, Gerald Marzorati ’75 A&S has traveled the distance. It may be only a 30-minute drive from his hometown to Manhattan, but Gerald Marzorati didn’t have his sights set on the Big Apple experience while growing up in the working class town of Haledon, N.J. But by the time he graduated from Villanova, New York City was the only place he wanted to be. That decision was preceded by four years with the choice of which institution of higher learning would best fit his interests. “In the high school I attended very few people went away to college,” said Marzorati. Only four out of 200 graduates packed their bags, said goodbye to anxious families and went off to school. “I was looking at colleges in the spring of 1970 and it was a wild and in some ways to my parents, a terrifying time to send a kid off to college. I was looking at colleges the whole time the Kent State situation was going down. Villanova was a very conservative place but it was a place that had structure and it was Catholic. We didn’t have RAs, we had priests. Mass was not mandatory but people were kind of expected to go. All these things contributed to my parents’ comfort level.” “I went off to college not knowing what I was going to do with my life. I had a very vague idea that I was going to be a lawyer because that’s what my guidance counselor thought would be good for me. My father assumed that if you were going to go to college you should be a doctor or a lawyer and I knew I was not going to be a doctor. I get squeamish putting on a band aid. I had a freshman English composition teacher named June Lytel [Murphy] who was a very influential person for me. We really connected and it was one of those things that happens when you have a teacher who means a lot to you. She cared a lot about novels and plays and journalism and I sort of gravitated to her and eventually to English.” He joined the fledgling Honors Program beginning his sophomore year and enjoyed the small seminar sessions rather than traditional classroom settings. In 1968, studies for women, previously restricted to the Nursing program, was expanded to include all academic areas. “In my years at Villanova the most exciting political thing happening without question was this nascent women’s movement. What was exciting to experience was this ‘canary in a coal mine’ generation of young women who were really going to have a lot more sense of freedom and possibility in shaping their own lives. I remember most clearly on Saturday nights before we went out, we would gather at someone’s house and watch the ‘Mary Tyler Moore Show.’ The show was an amazing popular culture vehicle beginning to talk about these issues in a kind of gentle comic, not angry, not militant way.” After graduation, Marzorati headed to New York City for a variety of reasons. With no real clear career path in mind he enrolled in a master’s program at NYU. “I really wanted to be in an urban situation and to be around people who in one way or another were caught up in the excitement of what was the then fading ‘60s; all the excitement that was going on in the arts and culture and those sorts of things. During my first year in grad school I picked up a copy of this alternative newspaper called the SoHo News. SoHo then was just beginning to be an exciting neighborhood in Manhattan devoted to arts and fashion and music and I loved this paper. I presented myself to the publisher and said I would do anything just to be around this paper. I got a job as a proofreader working at night for $100 a week. I eventually dropped out of grad school and made some money on the side running a writing workshop for city union retirees. I really didn’t have a plan but I knew what I didn’t want to do. I didn’t want to end up in a big corporation slogging my way up the ladder. I wanted to be some place exciting, that felt alive, that felt young. It was those kinds of feelings that got me to the door of journalism.” The journey has taken him from his stint as a proofreader to senior editor at the newspaper to deputy editor at Harper’s magazine to editor, non-fiction, at The New Yorker magazine prior to joining The Times in September1994 as articles editor. He was named editorial director of The New York Times Magazine in April 1998 and has been a full partner in the editing and managing of The Times Magazine. Marzorati has also ventured outside of the editing arena. He wrote a book, A Painter of Darkness: Leon Golub and Our Times, Viking/Penguin Press, 1990, which earned him a PEN American award for a first book of non-fiction. He also occasionally wrote articles about popular music for The Times Magazine. Marzorati commented, “I really do consider myself an editor, not a writer. I’ve often written on the side. I did it more in the ‘80s but once we had our kids it became a choice between spending weekends writing or spending weekends teaching them how to ride a bike. I like working as an editor. It’s a temperament kind of thing really. I don’t have the temperament to sit alone in a room all day and write. I prefer being in a setting with other people trying to reach decisions collectively. Editing is a people business as much as anything else.” “Editing a general interest magazine for a large, elite audience is always a challenge. Essentially you wind up with a magazine that is the sum of the curiosity of the editors and writers who produce the magazine. It has no particular mandate. We are not a news magazine like Time or Newsweek but news is the content of what our stories are built upon. It has been a very stressful year in the sense that I sent reporters to Iraq and Afghanistan and other political hotspots and that has a habit of waking me up at 4 a.m. You really worry about those situations. A lot of the energy we put into the magazine is also editing stories that we call ‘they way we live now’ stories. They are stories that are actually about the real lives of real people who are our readers. That kind of story to me is just as important as a story about Iraq.”