An excerpt from The Dallas Morning News article about Evan Smith '87: "As a kid, 'I read and devoured and consumed all sorts of media," he says. Movies, magazines, books. "But the thing that most absorbed me was politics. The assumption I always had was that I would go into politics."
To that end, he enrolled in Hamilton College, a small liberal arts institution in Clinton, N.Y., where he took every course in government and economics in the catalog. A year's internship working for a congressman in Washington, D.C., deflected his political ambitions.
"I found it really repellent," he says. "It was a numbing grind. I was
jolted."
He returned for a final year at Hamilton. Then, what? A classmate, editor of the student paper, asked him to write. "It was the first time I had thought about journalism," he says. "I flipped for it."
From Hamilton, he went to Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism for a master's degree in magazine publishing, then to Whittle Communications' Special Reports, Business Month, Mediaweek and, finally, Texas Monthly.
From almost his first moments at Texas Monthly, Mr. Smith made it clear that he intended to run the magazine someday. He was all of 24."
