Michael Caruso, Smithsonian’s new editor, sees a livelier future for magazine

Michael Caruso announced his arrival at Smithsonian Magazine with a cover image of a 50-foot snake poised to bite off the heads of unsuspecting readers.

Subtlety is not Caruso’s strong suit, nor his ambition.

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In many ways, the 42-year-old magazine and its new editor are opposites. The publication has been sedate, erudite and decidedly unflashy. Caruso is a brash adventure-seeker with a relentless need to be relevant.

This will not be your elderly dentist’s Smithsonian.

“It just hadn’t been urgent,” Caruso says. “Nobody was running up to me saying, ‘Hey, did you see this article in Smithsonian Magazine?’ And I’d like to make that happen more often.”

After longtime editor Carey Winfrey announced his decision to step down in April 2011, an executive search firm was enlisted to find his replacement. Smithsonian executives settled on Caruso, the son of a renowned industrial designer, who has had a frenetic career in publishing.

The Columbia University graduate started out as a messenger at the New Yorker, where he delivered stories back and forth between editors, watching each piece evolve. He became the sports editor at the Village Voice and broadened the definition of “sports” to include big-wave surfing and camel racing. At 29 he became the Voice’s executive editor, then left to join Vanity Fair under the legendary Tina Brown.

He has since done stints at Los Angeles magazine, Details magazine, Men’s Journal, Portfolio magazine, a short-lived golf magazine he created and a video Web site he founded. He had been the deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal Magazine for just a few months when he got the call gauging his interest in the top spot at Smithsonian Magazine.

“The first question I had was: ‘Why are they calling me? I’m in New York,’ ” he recalls. “And to be honest with you, I wasn’t super-familiar with it. I think like a lot of people, I’d seen it in the past and had a generally good impression of it, but it just wasn’t front and center of my radar.”

But, as the 50-year-old Caruso puts it, “the New Yorker wasn’t calling me to be the editor there,” so he was willing to consider it. He quickly learned that Smithsonian Magazine has a circulation of 2.1 million, making it one of the biggest consumer magazines in the nation and one of the very few to have grown in readership over the past decade. It has the bandwidth to cover the arts, science, culture, history and pretty much anything else its editors find fascinating. And it has the resources of the world’s largest museum system behind it.

Caruso was sold. “We were looking for somebody who was articulate and thoughtful and really cared about that kind of subject matter,” says Tom Ott, who until recently was the president of Smithsonian Enterprises, the money-making arm of the museum. “We wanted someone who had really interesting and creative approaches to what they thought they could do with the magazine brand. And my impression [of Caruso] was that he’s a guy who has unbundled energy. Life excites him, and it’s very obvious in the way he talks and works.”