The Stories We Can't Forget: The Washington Monthly at 50.

• Date: 01 November 2019
• Author: Glastris, Paul

Two thousand nineteen has been a tough year for journalism--and not just because the president called reporters "enemies of the people." On the same day, two high-quality thought-leader magazines, Governing and Pacific Standard, announced that they were folding. Money magazine ended its print edition. Small local newspapers and big digital outlets alike have continued to downsize.

In this environment, it's a mystery how the Washington Monthly remains in business-even to me, and I run the joint. Honestly, given our long history of rickety finances, you'd think we would have been the first to go.

Yet here we are, alive and well and still publishing long-form stories that help to set the policy agenda in Washington on everything from antitrust to higher education reform. In fact, 20x9 marks our fiftieth anniversary of doing this kind of work. Who'd have thought?

To celebrate this unlikely occasion, we asked some of the editors who have worked here over the decades (typically as young people, doing two-year stints of hard duty at low pay before going on to stellar careers in journalism) to revisit a story they published in the Monthly that had legs--that is, had impact on the world, or on themselves, or presaged something big to come, or was totally wrong in an interesting way. The idea was to capture the ongoing legacy of the magazine through personal narratives.

As I read through the resulting...