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.”
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.”
Movie rights, anyone?
TOM NUGENT is a freelance writer in Hastings, Mich.
