CONWAY — The founder and editor of the critically acclaimed magazine The Oxford American was fired after an internal investigation, the publisher said Monday.
Marc Smirnoff, who started the award-winning magazine in 1992 in Oxford, Miss., and Carol Ann Fitzgerald, the managing editor, were terminated from the staff Sunday, publisher Warwick Sabin said in an e-mail.
Earlier, Sabin declined to say what led to the investigation and ultimately the pair’s departure from the magazine about Southern culture.
“As with all Oxford American personnel matters, the details are confidential,” Sabin said.
In an e-mail later, however, Sabin wrote that the magazine’s board of directors had hired attorneys earlier this month “to conduct a thorough and fair investigation of allegations made against” Smirnoff and Fitzgerald.
“The entire Board then met for two hours on Sunday to carefully review and discuss with counsel the findings of the investigation, and it voted unanimously in separate roll calls to terminate the employment” of Smirnoff and Fitzgerald.
Sabin commented after the Arkansas Times newspaper posted an item on its website reporting that Smirnoff said he and Fitzgerald were in the process of hiring lawyers “to find out what exactly” their next step is.
“One thing they asked me was had I ever served alcohol at a party to underage interns,” Smirnoff told the Times. “And the answer was, ‘yes.’ I know that’s illegal and I have to own up to it.”
The Times also reported that Smirnoff had made a statement on Facebook in which he wrote that the firings had taken place “in the strangest, most secretive manner imaginable.”
Smirnoff’s phone was not accepting calls, and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette could not reach him for comment. No one came to the door of his apartment building when a reporter rang the buzzer. A phone number for Fitzgerald was also unavailable.
Smirnoff also did not reply to a request for comment sent through Facebook.
Sabin said earlier that he believes “the mood among the staff at the magazine is very positive. Everyone is very motivated to continue their work, and everyone feels confident about the future.”
Money is not believed to be part of the investigation which led to Smirnoff and Fitzgerald’s departures. Both worked in the editorial offices on the University of Central Arkansas campus. The business offices are based in Little Rock.
The magazine, which has endured more than a few financial bumps over its 20-year history, has closed four times, not counting suspensions of publication, but has gradually been recovering from previous money problems.
For a time in the 1990s, bestselling author John Grisham even helped the struggling magazine out financially.
Sabin said last week that the magazine’s “financial health is just as sound as it was a year ago.” The magazine’s finances are “very healthy,” he said Monday.
A UCA police log from Wednesday night, when Sabin called to ask that police change the editorial offices’ locks and not allow employees inside, said Smirnoff and Fitzgerald were under an internal investigation “regarding inappropriate conduct.”
“Mr. Smirnoff was very upset and agitated,” the log added.
Sabin is now also the magazine’s interim editor.
“It’s extraordinarily unlikely that I will be the permanent editor,” Sabin said. “My responsibilities as publisher are substantial.”
While he may hire a new editor, Sabin said the magazine also “may be finding creative ways to enlist talent in behalf of the magazine.”
“We might employ guest editors for various issues,” he said. “I think there are a lot of things we can do to inject new energy into the magazine, and so I’m keeping an open mind as far as how the future of the editorial staff will be” organized.
Guest editors might include “a combination of established names and emerging talent,” he said.
“A substantial part” of the next issue, due out Sept. 1, has been completed, Sabin said. He did not know whether Smirnoff ’s byline or any of his work would appear in that magazine, he said.
“There may be instances where his work is reflected in the final content,” Sabin said, adding that there also “may be ... those things that don’t make it into the issue.”
The departure of Smirnoff, 49, was a topic of conversation from Conway to New York.
In New York, David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, was getting into a cab when he returned a call seeking his reaction.
Surprised by the development, Remnick said, “The magazine is invaluable. ... This is one of the great small magazines in America. ... At The New Yorker, it’s a fantastic regular dispatch from the culture of the South, both its literature and its music.”
On how Smirnoff’s departure will affect the publication’s future, Remnick said, “He founded it, and anytime a founder is still its editor, it’s very much an extension of that editor.”
In that regard, Remnick compared the publication to The New York Review of Books and The Paris Review.
The former “is still very much an extension of [editor] Robert Silvers,” Remnick said, and The Paris Review is likewise that of the late George Plimpton, one of three people who started that literary magazine in 1953.
“Smirnoff was the magazine,” Democrat-Gazette columnist John Brummett, an Oxford American reader, wrote in an e-mail. “He epitomized it as a quirky and obsessive place that celebrated the written word but lacked any commercial plausibility.
“I can no sooner imagine The Oxford American without Smirnoff than the Clinton library without Clinton. But Warwick Sabin is a resourceful guy,” Brummett added.
Sabin said, “Many publications have experienced change of leadership, even when that leadership has been around for a long time.”
He mentioned Harold Ross, who founded and edited The New Yorker until he died in 1951, and Lewis Lapham, Harper’s former longtime editor.
“Those publications have endured, and so will The Oxford American,” Sabin said.
In Oxford, Miss., a local blogger jokingly reported Monday that Smirnoff was going to work for the Garden & Gun magazine. In the February issue of The Oxford American, Smirnoff had written a more than 3,000-word chastisement of the South Carolina-based magazine. He said it had joined certain other publications in a “similar whitewashing of the South.”
Sabin said editorial employees would be allowed back in their offices, though he wasn’t sure if it would be before today. He said the investigation remained under way.
The Oxford American, through its Little Rock attorney’s office, refused to release any information - including the salaries - requested under the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act.
In an e-mail, attorney C. Tad Bohanon rejected the request, even though the magazine uses state-owned UCA facilities and still owes the university $700,000.
“Mr. Sabin is not a ‘public official or employee’ within the scope” of the law, Bohanon wrote. “The Oxford American is neither a governmental agency wholly or partially supported by public funds or expending public funds.”
Sabin, asked earlier about the debt, said, “We do desire to pay that debt back, and we’re not looking to escape from it. What UCA is doing is allowing us the opportunity to find ways to pay it back, and that’s what we’ve been working on.”
The magazine owed the same amount in January.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 07/17/2012