St. Olaf Magazine: The Award-Winning Magazine of St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota
St. Olaf Magazine is the magazine of St. Olaf College, the private liberal arts college on Manitou Heights in Northfield, Minnesota. Published three times a year by the college's Office of Marketing and Communications, it features stories — written by professional writers and developed by the magazine's editor in consultation with the college's chief marketing officer — that showcase the strengths of the college, its students and its alumni. The college describes it plainly as its award-winning magazine, and its honours record supports the claim.
The magazine serves a community that calls itself the Oles: more than three thousand current undergraduates and generations of graduates of a college founded by Norwegian-American Lutherans in 1874. Its editorial policy states that the magazine aims to strengthen personal connections to St. Olaf, encouraging alumni engagement, regular giving, volunteering, mentoring and service as ambassadors for the college, alongside balanced coverage of academic innovation, vocation, faculty-mentored research, off-campus study and the challenges facing higher education.
Overview
Each issue of St. Olaf Magazine blends feature stories, alumni profiles, a historical column called Almanac, alumni news and class-related updates. Alumni profiles are chosen to show graduates whose achievements, professional contributions, leadership and service exemplify the college's tradition of excellence. Features range widely: a Minnesota Teacher of the Year building an inventive classroom, a genetic counsellor mentoring students entering medicine, students working at the college's STOGROW farm, and the annual World Views photo essay drawn from the Gimse International and Off-Campus Studies Photo Contest.
The magazine's setting matters to its content. St. Olaf sits on a 920-acre campus west of downtown Northfield, a town it shares with its friendly rival Carleton College — whose alumni magazine is a near neighbour in every sense. St. Olaf's Norwegian and Lutheran heritage, its strong music tradition and its extensive off-campus study programmes give the magazine a distinctive palette of stories that a generic alumni publication would not have.
History and Founding
The magazine's own history reaches back to 1936, when it was first published as the St. Olaf College Bulletin, according to the college's account of the publication's development. For more than eighty years, in the college's words, it has showcased the strengths of the college, its alumni, students, faculty and programmes. The title St. Olaf Magazine and the modern feature format developed from that bulletin tradition over the following decades.
The institution behind it is older still. St. Olaf was founded on November 6, 1874, by Norwegian-American pastors and farmers led by Pastor Bernt Julius Muus, and named for King Olaf II of Norway, the country's patron saint. Classes began on January 8, 1875, under its first principal, Thorbjorn N. Mohn. It began as St. Olaf's School, added a college department in 1886, became St. Olaf College in 1889 and granted its first Bachelor of Arts degrees in 1890. The magazine chronicles the modern heir of that school: a college of 3,124 undergraduates in fall 2024, affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
Publisher and Ownership
St. Olaf Magazine is published by St. Olaf College, with editorial offices in the Office of Marketing and Communications. Its editorial policy, published on the magazine's website, explains that stories are developed by the editor in consultation with the chief marketing officer, within the strategic goals of the college as directed by the president and the Board of Regents, and that stories have always met those longstanding guidelines. Donor stories of one page are determined by the development staff's strategic goals within the same editorial framework.
The policy also states that, in accordance with the college's non-discrimination policy, the magazine does not discriminate on the basis of legally protected status. Practically, the alumni office and the magazine work as one system: class notes and personal news are submitted through the college's share-your-news channel to the Office of Alumni and Parent Relations, address corrections go to Advancement Services, and the magazine's print deadlines — February 1 for spring, June 1 for fall and October 1 for winter — structure the alumni community's contributions.
Editorial Content and Sections
The magazine's coverage areas are spelled out in its editorial policy: academic innovation and high-impact practices; vocation and career preparedness; new college initiatives; faculty-mentored research; interdisciplinary learning communities; off-campus study; and topics relating to higher education, including access and affordability. A presidential essay on the cost of a college education and St. Olaf's response, written by President David R. Anderson for the Fall 2012 issue, is a representative example of the magazine taking on a national higher-education question directly.
Regular features give issues their character. Almanac, the history column, has dipped into topics from the arrival of the bathtub at St. Olaf in the fall of 1892 to the visit of actress Betty White to campus. World Views presents winning photographs from students studying around the world, with images from countries including Egypt, Ghana, Japan, Morocco, Tanzania, Thailand, China, Ecuador, Italy and New Zealand. Alumni Portraits and alumni achievement features honour the year's award recipients, including Distinguished Alumni, Alumni Achievement and Distinguished Service honourees.
Audience and Circulation
The readership is the Ole community: alumni first, together with parents, faculty, staff and friends of the college. The magazine is published three times annually — spring, fall and winter — and mailed to that community, while its website carries stories for readers who prefer to read online. Submission deadlines for class notes are published for each issue, and the alumni office actively solicits personal and professional news, weddings, births and obituaries, with high-resolution photographs, for inclusion.
The audience is notably engaged with the college's distinctive traditions, from the St. Olaf Christmas Festival, dating to 1912, to one of the nation's extensive off-campus study programmes, in which the majority of students take part. Between 1995 and 2020, 154 St. Olaf graduates were named Fulbright Scholars and 35 received Goldwater Scholarships — the kind of outcomes the magazine's profiles of alumni achievement are designed to document and celebrate for readers who share the same education.
Print and Digital Editions
The print edition remains central, but the magazine's online presence began in 2003 and has been rebuilt several times. Announcing a fresh online presence, the college explained that the magazine's digital form had evolved from single PDFs to the Zmags publishing platform, and then to a website designed to bring the publication to life on laptops, tablets and mobile devices, with web-exclusive content adding sound and imagery to the printed stories. The announcement reassured print loyalists that the hardcopy edition was not going anywhere and that the enhanced online version would complement it.
Earlier digital editions were offered in a flip-publication format, with readers invited to click a cover to read an issue. Today the magazine's site organises stories by issue and theme, carrying alumni features, news and magazine-tagged stories in a continuous flow. That archive makes individual features — on study abroad, on faculty, on alumni in public life — findable long after the print issue has been recycled, and it lets the college link magazine storytelling directly from its news pages.
Notable Editors and Contributors
Carole Leigh Engblom was the magazine's longtime editor, writing and editing many of its signature features in the 2000s and 2010s and describing the digital transition as an exciting journey for a traditional print publication. The magazine's contact page lists Kari VanDerVeen as editor, with art direction by Don Bratland of Holmes Design, a member of the class of 1987. Jeff Sauve, the college archivist, has been a regular contributor through the Almanac column, mining St. Olaf history for each issue.
Contributors are frequently professional Twin Cities writers and alumni authors, exactly as the college's digital announcement described: stories by some of the best Twin Cities writers, with photographs from around the world. Named contributors in past issues include J. Trout Lowen, Kim Ode, Suzy Frisch, Patricia Grotts Kelly, class of 1977, Marla Hill Holt, class of 1988, and faculty voices such as historian L. DeAne Lagerquist. Presidents and senior administrators also write for the magazine when an issue takes up a question of college policy.
Awards and Recognition
St. Olaf Magazine built an unusually strong awards record in Minnesota and regional competition. At the 13th annual Minnesota Magazine & Publishing Association Excellence Awards, reported in its Fall 2009 issue, it earned seven awards, including Gold for Overall Excellence, Bronze for Overall Best Design, Bronze for Best Feature Article, Silver for Best Regular Column for Almanac, Silver for Best Cover, Silver for Best Use of Photography and Bronze for Best Single Topic Issue — plus a Bronze for Best Alumni or Institution Magazine in the 2009 Pride of CASE V Awards.
The run continued. The Fall 2010 issue reported seven awards at the 15th annual Minnesota awards, including Gold for Best Overall Design and a Gold for Best Alumni or Institution Magazine in the 2010 Pride of CASE V Awards. Fall 2012 reported six more Minnesota awards, including Gold for Overall Excellence, Gold for Overall Best Design, Gold for Best Feature Article and Gold for Best Feature Design for the feature Call of the Wild, and Gold for Best Profile Article. Few college magazines of its size can show a comparable sequence.
Recent Developments
In recent years the magazine has continued its three-times-a-year rhythm under its published editorial policy, with stories developed around the college's strategic priorities: vocation and career preparation, faculty-mentored research, interdisciplinary learning and the affordability question in American higher education. Its recent alumni features have included stories on the lifelong impact of a semester abroad, on alumni whose work convinced the college to require vaccines, on what prompts young people to take political action, and on alumni building intentional, resilient and equitable communities.
The college it covers is also changing. St. Olaf welcomed President Susan Rundell Singer, listed as president in current college references, succeeding David R. Anderson, whose byline appeared in the magazine on the cost of education. With 3,124 undergraduates, a 920-acre campus including extensive natural lands, and a student body drawn to its music, global study and science programmes, the college gives its magazine a steady supply of material. Ninety years after it began as a bulletin in 1936, St. Olaf Magazine remains the printed and digital thread tying Oles back to Manitou Heights.
