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A DIFFERENT BEAT: Sobieraj
runs the Washington bureau of People, after covering
the White House for the Associated Press.
Breton Littlehales
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ask Sandra sobieraj
about her editorial mission,
and she’ll tell you about the time last February
when she arranged for a reporter to poke around
in the basement of the homeland security director.
Jittery
Americans—spurred by Tom Ridge, who had
raised the terror alert from yellow to orange—were
stockpiling emergency supplies. “I wanted to know
how much duct tape and plastic sheeting he had
stored in his own home,” says Sobieraj, MA ’94,
who had just come on board as People magazine’s
Washington bureau chief.
The answer? Several rolls
each of the tape and sheeting, plus the usual sundries
and a few surprises
like Wet Wipes, doggie toys and lots of dental
floss.
The exclusive tour of the Ridge family’s “safe
room” was the sort of thing People had in
mind when it tapped the former hard-news reporter “to
beef up its Washington coverage,” says Sobieraj
(pronounced SO-ber-eye). Her job is to take readers “behind
Washington events to learn about the personal lives
of the newsmakers,” she says.
As an Associated Press
correspondent covering the White House under Clinton
and George W. Bush, Sobieraj
earned a reputation as an enterprising, tenacious
and accurate journalist. But she yearned for a
broader canvas
on which to paint the hectic lives of the politicians,
lobbyists, journalists and analysts who dominate
the Washington circuit. In January, People gave
35-year-old Sobieraj the expanded scope she sought.
The
post brought a major shift in both her daily routine
and her approach to the news. Instead of
reporting stories herself, she directs the bureau’s
three full-time reporters and two dozen stringers
in surrounding
states. And instead of breaking news, she specializes
in the kind of personality-oriented journalism
that People helped popularize back in the early
1970s.
Spawned
by the “New Journalism” of the late
1960s (Tom Wolfe, Pete Hamill, Jimmy Breslin, et
al), the heavily illustrated news-feature magazine
emerged in 1974 as a spin-off of the “People” page
in Time magazine. It turned a profit after just
18 months—a
record for Time, Inc., and possibly the industry—and
remains a huge cash cow for the international media
empire run by its corporate parent, AOL Time Warner.
With a
U.S. readership of nearly 36 million, it reaches
one in eight Americans—more than the top-rated
TV show or biggest blockbuster film in any given
week.
Sobieraj
says joining People wasn’t about money
(though she earns a six-figure salary) or prestige
(though it instantly made her one of the most sought-after
journalists
in media-conscious Washington). What she wanted
was the chance to direct feature-oriented coverage.
After six
years on the White House beat, she says, “I’d
lost my hunger for nailing down every detail of
the President’s
new tax plan and trying to get it before the Wall
Street Journal.”
How tough was it covering the President
every day? The beat, she says, “can get quite scary
at times. These are some of the most powerful people
on the
planet, and if you piss them off, God knows how
they’ll
make you pay. The reporting is very demanding,
very high stakes, and after a while it just wears
you down.”
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‘I
wanted to work on stories [about] what these
politicians are like as human beings. If you
were to sit down and have a beer with one of
them, what could you expect?’
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She’d been driving hard for more than
a decade. Raised in a middle-class family in Rochester,
N.Y.,
Sobieraj got through Princeton on scholarships,
work-study jobs
and student loans. After working as an aide to
New York Democratic congresswoman Louise Slaughter
and earning
her master’s in communication at Stanford, she
convinced the Associated Press to give her a shot
at reporting Washington politics—and soon wound
up covering Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign.
What
followed was a career in which Sobieraj nailed
one scoop after another while reporting daily on
the Clinton White House, Al Gore’s topsy-turvy
presidential bid and the first two years of the
current administration.
She won the coveted Merriman Smith Award from the
White House Correspondents’ Association, with this
citation: “When
Gore decided at the last minute to cancel his concession
speech and called Bush back to retract, some reporters
filed and gracefully went to bed. Sobieraj ...
started tracking down staffers to learn more details.
By 7:45
a.m. she had filed the first behind-the-scenes
story, and after a two-hour nap she added the first
full account
of the now-famous ‘snippy’ exchange between
Gore and Bush.”
Despite her success in hard news,
Sobieraj concluded that “my real strength was writing
about the personalities and the styles of the people
I covered. I mean, my most
fun stories were about Bob Dole’s sense of humor
and Al Gore’s flirtation style, or George Bush
bouncing around in a truck on his ranch and talking
about trees.
“I wanted to work on stories [about] what these
politicians are like as human beings. If you were
to sit down and have a beer with one of them, what
could you expect?”
In a trend largely set by People, those
kinds of stories seem to pop up everywhere these
days. Given the
overall “softening” of journalism, does she
worry about hard issues getting short shrift?
“Not really,” Sobieraj says. “I do
think that news today is broadening, with so many more
outlets—24-hour
cable and the proliferation of network news magazines.
But if you pick up Time or the New York Times, it’s
hard to argue that issues aren’t being covered
in depth.”
People, she adds, “simply explores
issues by putting human faces on them.”
Half a year into the job,
her favorite projects have been the Ridge piece
and a candid account
of the drama that unfolded in the home of Dick
Gephardt after
his daughter, Chrissy, declared she was gay.
A drama
is unfolding in Sobieraj’s own life. She’s
engaged to marry a Secret Service bomb technician
who protected Gore while she was following that
campaign and who accompanied the President and First
Lady
while
Sobieraj was covering the Clinton administration. “Although
our White House travel logs say we crossed paths
dozens of times,” she says, “we didn’t
meet until August 2002, on a blind date.”
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