Clara Jeffery

Clara Jeffery (born August 25, 1967, in Baltimore, Maryland) is Editor in Chief^[1] of Mother Jones magazine.^[2]

Career

Jeffery grew up in Arlington, Virginia, and attended the Sidwell Friends School ('85), before going to Carleton College ('89). She got a Master's degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in 1993.

Between 1993 and 1995, Jeffery was a staff editor and writer at Washington City Paper. She was a senior editor at Harper's magazine (1995–2002), where she edited six articles nominated for a National Magazine Award, including essays by Barbara Ehrenreich that became Nickel and Dimed. She became deputy editor of Mother Jones, a position she had held for four years, and was promoted to co-editor in August 2006. Jeffery was promoted to editor-in-chief in May, 2015.^[3]

Together, Jeffery and Monika Bauerlein have aimed to put greater emphasis on staff-generated, daily news and original reporting. The magazine received a National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 2008 and 2010.^[4] In 2012 Mother Jones broke the story about Mitt Romney's "47 percent" remarks, which were controversial prior to Barack Obama winning reelection.

In 2002, Jeffery wrote an article on the Salton Sea for Harper's, "Go West Old Man: Where the American Dream Goes Down the Drain",^[5] which received an honorable mention in Best American Science and Nature Writing. She has also written for Slate,^[6] the Huffington Post, San Francisco Magazine,^[7] and the Chicago Reporter.

In April, 2017, after the 2017 Shayrat missile strike, with the launch of 59 Tomahawk (missile) cruise missiles in response to the Khan Shaykhun chemical attack, Jeffrey wrote on Twitter, "That the missiles are callled tomahawks must enrage a lot of Native Americans",^[8] allegedly accusing the naming due to cultural appropriation.^[9] The comment was met with mockery by some users on Twitter^[10] with many pointing out that the U.S. military has a history of naming after Native Americans.^[11] Further, the U.S. military gets permission from Native American tribes before naming after them^[12] per the Department of the Army’s Pamphlet 70-3, paragraph 1-11-4-g.^[13]

On June 9th 2017, following the United Kingdom general election, 2017, Jeffery wrote a post on Twitter in which she misinterpreted an article referring to the United Kingdom's First-past-the-post voting system as the first time a system entitled 'past the post' had been put in place, despite that system existing in the United States of America, and Jeffery editing a publication whose entire focus is on U.S. politics.^[14]

References

External links

• "Ten Young Editors To Watch," by Ana Marie Cox, Columbia Journalism Review
• "Power Sharing Women Take Over Mother Jones" Women's E-News