Talking With Anita Sharpe
Co- Founding Editor of Worthwhile Magazine
by Mary Davis, Mythic Passages editor

Anita Sharpe and Kevin Salwen are the co-founding editors of Worthwhile, an Atlanta based national magazine which has now successfully published five issues with the sixth issue coming soon. Time-Warner distributes Worthwhile nationally. Worthwhile is also now an official sponsor of the Mythic Imagination Institute.

On a recent sunny day in late December, Anita and I met at our favorite coffee shop for this interview. I had prepared a list of questions, but we rambled a bit.

I begin with Anita's story. She is an Atlanta native who left Atlanta to attend Vanderbilt University. In response to my question about her own story, Anita mentions Steve Jobs' commencement address at Stanford this year in which he said, "...You can't connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards." Anita says, "Looking back, every step led here!"

After returning to Atlanta, Anita first wrote for an Atlanta area daily newspaper. Then she moved to the Atlanta Business Chronicle, as a writer initially, later becoming ABC's Editor. Her next step was writing for the Wall Street Journal where she spent six years, earning a Pulitzer Prize in 1997 as a member of the WSJ writing team which covered AIDS. Her writing which earned the Pulitzer was about governmental funding and response to AIDS. While at the Wall Street Journal, she also met another WSJ writer, Kevin Salwen, who would become her Worthwhile business partner and co-founding editor. She says, "Kevin and I talked a lot."

Anita continues, "Business writing was journalism's ghetto. I have an ongoing fascination with work and why work is so badly broken in the way it is organized. Work often does not tap into people's passions or use people's talents. And yet business is the most powerful force in the western world today. Business can be and should be the strongest force in changing society, improving the world, making things better.

"Take these dynamics — the broken world of work, the need for change — and there was no media community reflecting this. The existing business communications are one-half century old. They were set up to cover the stock market, but not to cover passion and purpose as well as profit!"

Our discussion leads to the issues surrounding money. She points out that Worthwhile is definitely interested in money-making, in profit, that their three "P's" (Passion, Purpose and Profit) are each important. Anita says that historically many people trying to do good in the world have eschewed money as "bad," instead of seeing that money can create good. "Money is not to be worshipped or seen as evil, but in fact money is neutral, money is energy. "

We return to the creation of Worthwhile Magazine. Anita and Kevin continued their discussions, which intensified after September 11, 2001. They kicked around more ideas, and had the "Eureka! We've got it!" moment when they decided that business could be the laboratory for changing the world. They had founded an on-line business magazine company earlier, and they used the profits from that business to develop the prototype of Worthwhile. In January of 2003, they obtained interviews with Kenneth Cole and Robert Redford just on the strength of the magazine's concept. With the prototype, they were able to obtain "great angel investors, sophisticated people primarily from banking and media."

I had once asked Anita during the prototype development phase, just what Worthwhile would be. She had answered then that their goal was a magazine which combined O, The Oprah Magazine and Fortune. As she says, "Oprah focuses on living one's personal truth and mission, being all you can be, satisfaction in life, and on life after the hours of work. Fortune is the opposite, focusing on the business brain, how business and industry are organized, and on life from 8 to 5."

"Worthwhile focuses on life as a whole, not separating work from the rest of life. One of our readers recently commented, 'Worthwhile is the first magazine I didn't know whether to leave at home or take to my office.' We have 170,000 visits a month to our website and over 100,000 combined subscription and newsstand sales. In my two decades of being a journalist, I've never seen such a passionate response!"

"We have realized in the course of publishing the magazine that we have a much bigger idea. We are in the process of ranking companies, of developing values-based metrics for companies. We have our hands full for the next four years as we build out the business — the book business, conferences, and web-based aspects including a social network component. The United States has 42 million white collar workers, and one half of these are women. Ninety percent of these persons (and ninety eight percent of these women) do not yet subscribe to business magazines, and eighty six percent of these white collar workers want meaning in their lives!"

I ask how they interested Time-Warner in the national distribution of Worthwhile. Time-Warner saw that Anita and Kevin were creating a new category and they wanted to be a part of it.

When I question her about their creative process itself, Anita answers, "So much of it is putting into the magazine what we ourselves want to read. I like to include my heroes like Alice Waters who had such an impact on American cuisine and the organic food movement with her founding of Chez Panisse. It's like Mel Zeigler, the Banana Republic founder says, 'Be your first customer.'"

To my question about Anita and Kevin as a business team, "Kevin is funny, witty. He comes from the passion side. I come from the purpose side, the 'cultural creatives' side. I like to include my heroes. Each of us brings a certain sensibility that makes a better product than if either one of us did it by ourselves. It just works...and it is also a work in progress."

On taking the risk of leaving a good and financially secure career at the Wall Street Journal, Anita responds, "I felt called. I felt some sense of destiny. I still feel it, even through the bumps in the road."

Another important aspect of this story is that Anita and several women friends found themselves in "fresh transition" at the same time in 2000 as they were changing careers. They created a group which still meets monthly and which demonstrates the kind of difference women can make financially for one another. Approximately a dozen of these friends are investors in Worthwhile, members of a limited corporation they formed primarily to assist with the development of Worthwhile. Anita says, "The magazine would not have happened the way it did without the support of this group, both financial and emotional. They gave us concept validation."

I ask Anita how she sees the Mythic Imagination Institute and Worthwhile Magazine connection, and she reminds me that she had learned about MII and our 2004 Mythic Journeys Conference from me when we were meeting several years ago in this same coffee house! She had been excited about our concept and about the persons who were presenters at Mythic Journeys. In fact we arranged access for Anita's Worthwhile interviews of our presenters Matthew Fox and Joyce Carol Oates during our conference. Anita says, "Mary, I realized that we are on parallel tracks, reaching the same market, with our shared interests in how people spend their days with more meaning, with a spiritual connection. We're playing in the same sandbox!"

And on life now, how is Worthwhile Magazine changing Anita Sharpe's life? "I'm living what we're writing about — the purpose and the passion — and at some point, the profit!"

Visit Worthwhile Magazine on the Web

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