From the Nominator

Before 2023, Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) produced three university publications: Shafer Court Connections, mailed to graduates of the undergraduate campus; Scarab, mailed to some graduates of the health sciences schools; and Impact, mailed to donors. Though acknowledging the university’s history and diverse audiences, these publications were without dedicated staff and prevented VCU from having a flagship magazine. Articles were written by contributing staff or freelancers, and many were biography-heavy profiles. Scarab and Shafer Court Connections had significant (and toward the end, total) editorial overlap, and the three magazines, which also had readership overlap, reached about 85,000 households (out of 230,000+ donor and alumni households). From 2018 to 2022, VCU embarked on a reimagining of its magazines, hiring a consultant and interviewing internal stakeholders and readers. Key themes emerged. VCU—a large, public, urban research university—needed a university magazine. It needed to mail it to more people. It needed dedicated staff. And it needed a defined editorial philosophy. To achieve this, the Office of Development and Alumni Relations ended production of Shafer Court, Scarab, and Impact, consolidated their budgets, and hired two full-time editors. Today, under their guidance and with a distribution of 100,000, VCU Magazine is a twice-a-year, 68-page general interest magazine that takes a journalistic approach to tell lively, well-reported, and stylishly written and designed stories about the university community.

From the Judges

The redesigned magazine is a vast improvement. It makes great use of photography, including excellent full-page images in its front section. It also had an eye-catching news section that makes use of a variety of images, fonts, illustrations, and storytelling formats to draw readers’ attention. Features also were well told and designed. We were intrigued by stories like the one on “little wonders,” which highlighted artifacts from the university’s archives, and a Q&A on what it’s like to be in Hamilton.