Lamar Graham '07 Appointed Executive Editor of Parade
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In November 2007, Lamar Graham '07 was appointed executive editor of Parade, the national Sunday newspaper magazine. The most widely circulated publication in America, Parade reaches more than 70 million readers each week through 415 newspapers in all 50 states.
During his time at Parade, Graham has served on both the editorial and business sides of the publication. He got his start there in 1998 after successfully pitching a freelance article about the disappearance of small farming towns in the Midwest and receiving hundreds of letters from satisfied readers after it was published. In January 2000, he became Parade's first technology columnist. A year later, he was named managing editor.
Graham switched to the business side when he was named general manager in 2004. "As GM, I spent a lot of time working with our counsel on distribution contracts with newspapers," he explains. Under his watch, the magazine added more than 60 new papers to its distribution list. He says studying law helped him, as GM, to better understand how to effectively negotiate contracts; today his education is helping him to ensure solid practices on the editorial side of the magazine. "Day to day, a magazine has to deal with a lot of legal issues - copyright, trademark, libel, privacy," Graham says. "When you reach more than 70 million people, you have to be accurate and fair, and law school gave me a much better sense of what those concepts mean."
Graham knew early in life that he was meant to be a journalist. He got his first journalism job at 15 working for his hometown paper, in Carrollton, Missouri. A 1987 graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, he worked as a reporter for numerous papers across the country, including the Columbia (Mo.) Daily Tribune and The Virginian-Pilot, in Norfolk, Va. He also freelanced for magazines including Spy and TV Guide and worked as a staff writer for GQ and as senior writer for Men's Journal. He says an advanced degree was always in his plans, and Brooklyn Law School drew him to its ranks later in life when he realized how important the law was to the business of publishing.
Graham says law school was a great experience, grueling as it was for an older student. "I hadn't been in a classroom if 16 years," he says. "The first night, kids were breaking out laptops to take notes. They didn't even have laptops when I was in college." He continued working at Parade - and became a father - while attending classes part-time, graduating cum laude. Not surprisingly, Graham found legal writing particularly rewarding. "As a journalist, you eventually start doing things intuitively, and you forget about how you do them. Legal writing made me stop and think about how I was putting sentences and stories together," he says. "It gave me a new perspective on the mechanics of writing."
"The law is the central organizing principle of business in this country," Graham notes, explaining that law school gave him the ability to cross the lines between business and law more easily. "In general, lawyers understand the law, and businesspeople understand business," he says. "Now I'm able to play the role of the translator."
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