Terry Dunkle

Editorial Consultant

Reader’s Digest

I joined what had long been America’s most popular magazine on Groundhog Day 1984 and left on St. Patrick’s Day 1996. For those dozen years, I had the best job in print journalism. With 27 million readers in the United States and 100 million worldwide, no question was too big, no subject too difficult, no source too busy, no story too costly to produce. Plus (I’m not making this up), I got to read magazines all day.

Some of my duties:

Heading the Magazine’s Articles & Editing Department

Originally called Reading & Cutting, this team of 20 editors combed more than 600 periodicals for reprintable articles; rated and summarized every article for the four rotating issue editors; and when an issue editor selected a story for reprinting, condensed it for clarity, accuracy, and readability while preserving the author’s voice. The same editors produced original articles with staff or freelance writers, and annually helped to field more than 300,000 over-the-transom manuscripts.

Producing Issues

As an issue editor (ten weeks, three times a year), I led the 120-person editorial staff in producing the contents of the U.S. edition. Issue editors selected, top-edited, and titled all of the articles, departments (“Quotable Quotes,” “Laughter, the Best Medicine,” etc.), and end-of-page fillers; integrated legal and fact-checkers’ research into the final versions; approved all copy edits; chose the lead article; ordered the table of contents; signed off on artwork, layouts, and covers; policed ads for compliance with Digest standards on content and placement; helped the marketing team write titles for the newsstand cover; suggested and participated in PR campaigns; and monitored the results of our monthly reader poll.

Click to see covers of three of my issues:

  • The July 1993 Reader’s Digest includes a masterful report on food irradiation titled “Good Food You Can’t Get,” medical essayist Richard Selzer’s tribute to his father, and three unusually strong service pieces: “What Every Woman Needs to Know About Estrogen,” “Dealing With a Difficult Boss,” and “Make Your Child a Leader.”
  • The February 1995 Reader’s Digest features two exemplary action pieces, “Death Grip” and “Stalked by Phone.” It also presents Mary Roach’s hilarious and actionable “What I Learned From Dr. Clean” and “Do You Know Your Heart Attack Risk?”—an interactive piece that calculates your odds of an attack.
  • The December 1995 Reader’s Digest includes two major reports on moral issues: How Honest Are We? identifies the safest American city for losing a wallet, and “When TV Sold Out to Michael Jackson” reprints Maureen Orth’s Vanity Fair exposé on a whitewash interview with the accused child molester.

Producing Articles

Here are a few of the hundreds of magazine articles written by freelance or staff writers under my direction. In some cases the idea originated with me; in others, the author. In all cases I provided story advice, markups of the author’s drafts, and other editorial support.

  • America’s New Merchants of Death (Reader’s Digest, 4/93), published in all 48 editions and read in virtually every country, blew the whistle on American tobacco companies for promoting smoking among Third World children. Produced with George Polk Award-winning investigative reporter William Ecenbarger, the article generated thousands of letters asking the Clinton administration to stop helping tobacco companies open new markets abroad. [Directed.]
  • The Reader’s Digest Home Eye Test (9/90), published in 17 languages, earned endorsements from two competing professional organizations, the American Optometric Association and the American Academy of Ophthalmology. Later, it triggered a testimonial from a reader whose life it saved by spotlighting signs of a brain tumor. Produced with freelance author Robert C. Yeager, the project won the American Public Health Association’s “Paper of the Year” award—a consumer-article first. [Conceived and directed.]
  • So You Think You Want to Smoke (Reader’s Digest, 9/94) tells first-person stories of four people who wish they had never started. [Conceived and directed.]
  • Who Needs a Seat Belt? (Reader’s Digest, 5/88), produced with Popular Science writer Rob Gannon, tells moment by moment what happens in a head-on collision if you aren’t wearing your seat belt. We later published a testimonial from a woman who attributed her family’s survival to having read and discussed the article before a neighborhood shopping trip. [Conceived and directed.]

Creating Departments

  • The Verbal Edge was the first major new department to appear in Reader’s Digest in more than a decade. [Co-conceived and directed.]

Editing Articles

Here are some of the articles that I chose for publication in my issues of Reader’s Digest. Although other editors and their writers created most of them, I titled, blurbed, and top-edited the articles, as well as overseeing production of their artwork and layout. Each article is selected to illustrate a different editorial principle.

  • Are We Running Out of Trees? (Reader’s Digest, 11/93) is a one-page pictograph that explodes a popular myth.
  • The Boy With the Billion-Dollar Secret (Reader’s Digest, 12/95) represents one of my favorite Digest genres: the one-pager. This one bears a powerful lesson for young readers and their parents.
  • The Curious Cook (Reader’s Digest, 1/93) is an excellent example of an article excerpted from a book. It also illustrates one thing that all great magazine articles have in common: surprising facts.
  • Just Call Me Mister (Reader’s Digest, 2/95, reprinted from The Financial Post) decries the growing practice of first-naming customers. It drew amens from thousands of readers.
  • Easiest Way to Get Rich (Reader’s Digest, 4/94) is a pictograph for young readers dramatizing “the greatest mathematical discovery of all time—compound growth.”
  • Seduced in the Supermarket (Reader’s Digest, 7/95, from the book Total Package) reveals the art and psychology behind bottles, boxes, cans, and other product packages. Besides choosing, editing, and titling the piece, I enriched it with a few additions—including the McDonald’s paragraph on page 97, which certified a popular legend.
  • How Honest Are We? (Reader’s Digest, 12/95) placed “lost” wallets in various U.S. towns, with hidden cameras watching. America’s most popular magazine chose America’s most honest city.
  • Tales a Table Could Tell (Reader’s Digest, 4/94) began as a rambling 6000-word piece in the New York Times Magazine. We asked our editors to reorganize it as a 200-year chronological narrative, climaxing with the price the table fetched at auction. Readers raved.

And here is my all-time favorite Reader’s Digest piece, which I had the honor of helping to perfect for a fellow issue editor:

Writing

Because I had been a freelance writer, some of the articles I wrote for other publications were reprinted in Reader’s Digest:

  • The Big Glass (N/NN, from Discover, N/NN) tells the inside story of the most precise object ever made: the mirror for the Hubble Telescope.
  • The Sound of Silence (N/NN, from Science 80, N/NN) explains ringing in the ears and sounds the alarm on a major public-health problem.
  • Perseid Delights (N/NN, adapted from New York Times, July 24, 1977) alerts readers to the most watchable meteor shower in decades and explains the astronomy behind it.

Ghostwriting

I authored a few Reader’s Digest pieces for famous signers. They usually ask writers to remain anonymous, but two have kindly made exceptions:

  • A Question of Duty (Reader’s Digest, 9/95), written for a dissident Chinese doctor, is a first-person account of government-sanctioned infanticide.
  • Must We Have Nuclear Power? (Reader’s Digest, 8/90) I wrote for Frederick Seitz, then president of Rockefeller University and the American Philosophical Society, formerly president of the National Academy of Sciences.

Portfolio