From the Editor: Supply Chains, Staff Changes, and My Farewell

I learned something about global supply chains as a Princeton graduate student, but it was not until a few weeks ago that I really understood how they worked. Or didn’t work. The magazine you are reading now is the evidence: At 40 pages, it’s the thinnest magazine PAW has published in 20 years. 

In recent months, PAW managed to escape cutbacks forced on other magazines by a global paper shortage. In early February, after we’d laid out this issue as a 72-page magazine, our lucky streak ended. The pandemic-induced paper shortage was exacerbated by striking workers at Finnish paper mills, sympathetic dock workers, and truckers whose protests affected freight movement at the U.S.-Canada border. We are searching for alternate supplies of paper but don’t know when we’ll be back to printing the kinds of issues we want to produce. 

In the meantime, we’ve worked to preserve the things we believe are most timely and meaningful, including content from readers. We prepared two versions of PAW, one with Class Notes for the classes of 1937 through 1973 (columns run through the Class of 1976, so everyone can read about other classes on campus at the same time), and one for the classes of 1974 through 2021 (columns begin with the Class of 1971). Grad-alum notes appear in both versions. To read all the columns missing from your issue, go to paw.princeton.edu/class-notes; a QR code at the beginning of the Class Notes section in the print magazine will also take you there quickly. 

We cut back on both editorial and advertising, eliminating half our feature content and trimming coverage of campus and alumni news. Many of these articles are posted at paw.princeton.edu. These measures allowed us to maintain PAW’s monthly publishing schedule, enabling us to be more timely than other alumni magazines. 

Though we regret the sudden change in our offerings, we’re glad we could make sure PAW continued to come out on schedule, with full coverage available at paw.princeton.edu. Readers who have trouble accessing PAW Online should email paw@princeton.edu for assistance. Thanks for your understanding.

There are other changes underway at the PAW office, and they’re happier. Carlett Spike has been promoted to associate editor, handling news of alumni and research. Since her arrival in 2019, Carlett has been our primary campus-news reporter — a job filled now by Julie Bonette, who joined PAW in January. Most recently, Julie wrote magazine articles and other material for Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering, winning an award for feature writing from CASE, the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. 

From left: Spike, Bonette, MacMillan

Photos: Kathy F. Atkinson; Eli Burakian; Frank Wojciechowski

Meanwhile, some longtime PAW employees are retiring. Colleen Finnegan left her job as advertising director over the winter, while Nancy MacMillan will retire in June after an extraordinary 32 years at the magazine. Nancy’s departure is especially hard to bear; she’s been not just the master of PAW’s financial and business matters, but the keeper of institutional knowledge — something that’s impossible to replace. 

There’s one more retirement to announce: my own. I’ll be leaving PAW in August, confident that the change in governance negotiated between the University and PAW board chair Marc Fisher ’80 leaves the magazine positioned to thrive. I’ll say farewell in another issue; for now, I point you to the ad on page 10, kicking off the search for my successor.