Suddenly missing Susan

As Dylan Byers reports, FP head honcho Susan Glasser will be leaving Foreign Policy soon:

Some truly game-changing news on the Washington media scene tonight: POLITICO has hired Susan Glasser, the editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy, to serve as editor of new long-form journalism and opinion divisions — a move the editors call "the largest expansion of our company in three years."

"This next stage of POLITICO’s growth has two main components. The first is to add magazine-style journalism to our newsroom – the kind Susan has produced masterfully throughout her career," editor-in-chief John Harris and executive editor Jim VandeHei wrote in a memo to staff Sunday night. "Like all our journalism, these stories will aim to take full advantage of our digital platform and the enormous audiences available to us there. Susan will also oversee special glossy editions of this new POLITICO magazine, stocked with profiles, investigative reporting and provocative analysis."

"The second major component of this new enterprise – and Susan’s mission here – is to add vitality and impact to POLITICO’s daily report by marshaling the best outside contributors to produce analysis, argument and first-person perspectives on the news of the day. We imagine this content as melding the best of several traditional platforms – newspaper op-ed pages, for instances, or Sunday Outlook and Week in Review sections – and revitalizing them for contemporary times. The key to doing this successfully is to have a relentless editorial mind setting the agenda, with a creative sensibility for driving the conversation in Washington and beyond."

As Politico’s Wonder Twins note in their email, Glasser was responsible for turning "Foreign Policy magazine into a fascinating and indispensable publication." I’d describe that as an understatement.  

I recall my initial introduction to Susan as she was getting ready to expand FP’s web presence in late 2008. That was not exactly a moment when most businesses were thinking about expanding their activities. The rational part of my brain admired the counterintuitive nature of the move and thought it made great sense. The rest of my brain thought, "well, this will be a lovely six months before everything goes belly up." 

The fact that today, Foreign Policy is in such great shape is a testament to Susan’s leadership. As a blogger, you would think that I wouldn’t have had much interaction with Susan during my day-to-day activities. You’d be right — but that’s not all an editor does. Over the past four years, Susan’s feedback has been enormously useful for my writing here and elsewhere. In our conversations, Susan taught me a lot about the peculiar folkways of Washington’s foreign policy community. As an outsider to both the ways of glossy magazines and the ways of the Beltway, Susan has been an indispensable and wise rabbi. And also, anyone with the stones to publish this — and this — has earned my loyalty for life.

Your humble blogger wishes Susan many successes in her new organization — it will be hard, but not surprising, for her to match her successes here at Foreign Policy.