Emory Magazine: Emory University's Quarterly Alumni Magazine in Atlanta, Georgia
Emory Magazine is the quarterly alumni magazine of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. It was first published as the Emory Alumnus in 1924, making its lineage a century long, and it is published by the university's Office of University Periodicals. Historical imprints of the magazine describe it as published quarterly and distributed free to all alumni and to parents of undergraduates, as well as to other friends of the university — a circulation model that made it the regular long-form connection between Emory and its graduates.
The magazine covers scholarship, healthcare, campus news and alumni stories from a university that began as a small Methodist college in Oxford, Georgia, in 1836 and became a major research university and academic medical centre in Atlanta. Its website is magazine.emory.edu, where back issues reaching back to the 1990s remain part of its online archive, alongside Emory's digital collections of the magazine under both its current and former titles.
Overview
Emory Magazine's quarterly rhythm and free distribution define it. The imprint carried in its issues of the late 1990s gave the publisher as the Office of University Periodicals of Emory University, at 1655 North Decatur Road, Atlanta, Georgia, and directed address changes to the magazine through the Alumni Fund Office — small details that show how tightly the magazine was integrated into the university's alumni and development operation.
Its contents, as its own site has long presented them, are organized into departments for campus news, people and puzzles, alumni news and class reporting, features and a back-cover snapshot of Emory life. A magazine that is sent to every alumnus and to undergraduate parents has to serve first-time readers and lifelong ones at once, and Emory Magazine's mix — brief news, people items, long features and Commencement coverage — is built for that dual task.
History and Founding
Emory Magazine was first published as the Emory Alumnus in 1924. Its founding is closely tied to one student. Raymond B. Nixon, a member of the class of 1925, was instrumental in launching the Emory Alumnus in 1924 during his senior year in Emory College, and he went on to edit the magazine for fourteen years, from 1927 to 1941. Nixon also taught journalism, served as an assistant to Emory's president Harvey W. Cox, directed the university's News Bureau and acted as alumni secretary — a combination of jobs he later recalled undertaking because, in days of financial stringency, nearly everyone in the administration was doing double and treble duty.
Nixon became founder and director of Emory's original journalism program and a longtime editor of the Emory Alumnus, the forerunner of Emory Magazine. When he died on December 15, 1997, at ninety-four, the magazine's spring 1998 issue marked his passing and noted that the university had established an annual international journalism lecture in his honour the previous spring. His book on Henry W. Grady, the Atlanta editor who spoke for the New South, was described by Emory's journalism director as an important biography regarded as a classic.
The University Behind the Magazine
Emory College was chartered on December 10, 1836, by the Georgia General Assembly, after Georgia Methodists decided to develop their own school. It was named for Methodist bishop John Emory, who had died in a carriage accident in 1835, and it opened in Oxford, Georgia, on September 17, 1838, when its first president, Ignatius Alphonso Few, and three faculty members welcomed fifteen freshmen and sophomores. The founders also founded the town of Oxford around it.
In 1915 Emory College moved to Atlanta and became Emory University, while the Oxford campus continued, eventually as Oxford College, where students spend their first two years before moving to Atlanta. Emory grew from 631 students and sixty-one faculty in 1915 to a university of thousands of faculty and students from more than a hundred countries a century later, with particular strength in the health sciences through its medical school, hospital system and public health work. Emory Magazine, published from Atlanta, reports across both campuses and across that whole span of schools.
Publisher and Ownership
The magazine is an Emory University publication. Its historical imprint names the Office of University Periodicals as publisher, and its modern production sits within the university's communications and creative structures. In the editor's preface to the magazine's special 175th-anniversary issue, the editor thanked colleagues across the university — in the libraries and archives, the photography department, the health sciences, the arts programs, the alumni association and development offices and the communications and marketing division — as well as the Emory Creative Group, and named Vice President of Communications and Marketing Ron Sauder and supervisor Susan Carini among those who reviewed and supported the work.
That breadth of contributors is itself part of the publisher story. A university magazine produced this way is a collective institutional product: archivists check its history, photographers supply its images, health-sciences staff supply its medical reporting, and alumni and development offices supply its class and community knowledge. The magazine's advisory board and special committees, including a committee assembled for the 175th-anniversary project, add further university-wide input.
Editorial Content and Sections
The magazine's traditional departments included In Brief, for campus news; People; Enigma, its puzzle department; alumni news, for catching up with classmates; and a Back Cover snapshot of Emory. Features carried the larger reporting: Commencement coverage, including the university's honorary degree recipients and student award winners such as the Brittain Award and McMullan Award recipients, formed a set piece of the summer issues, complete with Commencement facts on degrees conferred and the states and nations represented among graduates.
Long features could be ambitious. The autumn 2011 issue marked Emory's 175th anniversary by presenting 175 things readers should know about the university, drawing on the archives, the libraries and the collective knowledge of the institution, with the university historian Gary Hauk's history of Emory kept beside the editor's computer for weeks. Stories in that project ranged from the new roundabout in Emory Village and the Calhoun Oak to the Great Monkey Hoax of 1953 and the Andrew Sledd affair — history told with affection, but not only the flattering parts.
Notable Editors and Contributors
Raymond B. Nixon is the magazine's foundational editor: launcher of the Emory Alumnus in 1924, editor from 1927 to 1941, journalism teacher and programme founder, and the man named Emory's Man of the Year by the student yearbook in 1942. His 1949 essay for the magazine's twenty-fifth anniversary, recalling his years holding the alumni secretary and editor jobs in nominal capacity because there was no money to add staff, remains a primary account of how the magazine began.
In a later era, the magazine's masthead in its late-1990s online issues listed Andrew W. M. Beierle as editor, Sharla A. Paul as associate editor and Michael Hooten as art director, with Ann Borden as director of photography and contributors including Allison O. Adams, Greg Fulton and Krista Reese. For the 175th-anniversary issue, the editor credited associate editor Mary Loftus and art director Erica Endicott as the core team. Endicott's editorial design portfolio for the magazine, covering 2013 and 2014 issues, preserves cover stories and features from that period under titles such as a collaborative research cover story and lessons from Emory classrooms.
Audience and Circulation
Emory Magazine is distributed free to all alumni and to parents of undergraduates, as well as to other friends of the university, according to its own imprint. Free distribution to the full alumni body makes it a universal Emory publication rather than a membership benefit: a graduate who never joins or gives still receives the university's account of itself four times a year, and parents encounter Emory's scholarship and health research while their children are students.
The audience spans Emory's unusual two-campus undergraduate experience — students who begin at Oxford College in Oxford, Georgia, and finish in Atlanta — and its graduate and professional schools, including medicine, nursing, public health, law, theology and business. Health sciences colleagues were specifically thanked in the anniversary issue's credits, reflecting how much of the magazine's reporting draws on Emory's hospitals and health research, and how many of its readers are clinicians and health alumni as well as liberal-arts graduates.
Print and Digital Editions
The print magazine appears quarterly, and Emory has built substantial digital access around it. The magazine site at magazine.emory.edu holds back issues in web form reaching back through the 1990s — spring, summer, autumn and winter issues with contents pages, departments and features — alongside newer issues and an online presence the magazine itself once promoted as EM Online, inviting readers to complete surveys shaping the direction of both the print magazine and its online edition.
Beyond the magazine site, Emory Libraries' Emory Digital Collections, launched in April 2020, has added issues of the magazine — previously titled Emory Alumnus — to its Emory Alumni Publications collection, digitizing the historical run for research. That archival treatment matters: a magazine first published in 1924 is a running primary source for the university's history, and Emory's librarians treat it as one, adding issues alongside the Emory Report newsletter collection and Oxford College student newspapers.
Awards, Anniversaries and Milestones
The magazine's own milestones structure much of its history. It marked its twenty-fifth anniversary in 1949 with Nixon's retrospective, and its seventy-fifth volume was on newsstands by the summer of 1999, when volume 75, number 2 covered the university's 154th Commencement. The 175th anniversary of Emory itself, in 2011, produced one of the magazine's most collaborative issues, built with a special committee, the libraries and archives and the university historian Gary S. Hauk, author of a history of Emory since 1836 that the editor used as a constant reference.
Anniversary journalism of this kind is a distinctive alumni-magazine genre, and Emory Magazine's version ranged from institutional landmarks to curiosities a purely promotional publication might have omitted. Including the Great Monkey Hoax and a president-era controversy alongside roundabouts and beloved trees signalled an editorial confidence that alumni would rather read a true, rounded history than a brochure — a confidence that traces back to a magazine founded by a journalism teacher in 1924.
Recent Developments
Emory Magazine continues as Emory University's quarterly alumni magazine from Atlanta, with its site maintaining current and back issues and its historical run being steadily digitized by Emory Libraries. The direction set in its anniversary-era work — drawing heavily on archives, health sciences, arts programmes, alumni and development knowledge from across the whole university — remains the model for a publication that must represent a research university, an academic medical centre and a two-century-old college in Oxford in the same pages.
Its essentials are distinctive among American alumni magazines: a founding in 1924 as the Emory Alumnus by a senior student who became its editor for fourteen years; quarterly publication by the university; free distribution to alumni, undergraduate parents and friends; and a home institution chartered in 1836 whose story — from fifteen students in Oxford, Georgia, to a global university in Atlanta — the magazine has now been telling, under one title or another, for more than a hundred years.
