Every two weeks, 1.6 30,000 feet. At this comfortable cruising altitude, that’s how many readers reach into the seatback pocket in front of them and pick up a copy of American Way editor Sherri Burns’ magazine. She has worked for the publication and lived in our neighborhood for the past 17 years, saying she loves it here so much that the drive to D/FW Airport is “way worth it.”
How are American Way and American Airlines connected?
American Airlines Publishing is a group within the airline, and American Way is one of the titles it publishes. We’re a profit center, which means we make money (unlike the airline, until recently). We’re the freaks of the company because it’s a corporate company that flies planes, and we work for a magazine. And it’s funny because we work right next to these people who do auditing or something, and they’ve got to be the most wonderful people because we’re loud, we laugh, we throw things — somebody was riding a skateboard the other day, and they just put up with us. They’ll be talking about this new route we just got, and half the people I work with, we’re lucky that they know we fly airplanes.
What makes American Way distinct?
We try to approach it as it’s not any different than any other magazine. People always say, ‘Oh, well, you have a captive audience,’ and obviously our salespeople sell the whole captive audience thing, but it’s not necessarily true. People bring on books, their laptop, their music, and we have to compete with all of that, so to make people pick it up, we try to put the same things in our magazine that they would read in other ones. But we have to be a little more conservative because we’re a conservative airline. [Former American Airlines CEO Robert] Crandall said it best a long time ago: You’re not in the business of making people want to get out of their seat. Of course, we had Bill O’Reilly and Bill Maher on separate covers and got more angry letters … I really thought that Republicans would write more angry letters than Democrats, and I was wrong.
How do you decide what to write about?
We don’t ever really know, other than letters we get, what’s an issue or a story that people like or don’t like. With regular magazine subscriptions, you have newsstand sales. I would love to put an issue out there to see if it flops. When I’m on a flight, I watch people pick up the magazine. I love to look around and see how long they’re spending with stuff and what they’re looking at and who’s not picking it up.
I heard that your dream was a story on Tom Cruise, and you finally nabbed it a few years ago.
It wasn’t really my dream, but I mean, getting these celebrities is a huge ordeal, and the guy who does it does a really good job. He just works it. He literally had been trying to get Tom Cruise to say yes for 14 years, and he finally did. Tom Cruise was always on the list, and I was like, whatever, you’re not going to get him. They’re going to give their interview to Entertainment Weekly or U.S. News & World Report; we’re pretty low on the totem pole.
What do you enjoy reading, magazines or otherwise?
I flip. I’ll either go on a magazine binge — Newsweek, Vanity Fair, Esquire — and that’s all I’ll read, and then I’ll go on a book binge, so all my magazines just pile up, and I end up tossing them because I get behind for months. But I read all the time. It’s a nice escape because it’s not something you have to do for work.
Not flying anytime soon? Read stories from American Way at americanwaymag.com.
