Welcome to Carnegie Reporter

One of the least known of Andrew Carnegie’s many endeavors—and one of his few real failures—was his involvement in a crusade to simplify the spelling of English-language words. The idea was originally the brainchild of Melvil Dewey, the New York State librarian who developed the Dewey Decimal library classification system, and Carnegie—who was fond of composing his own correspondence in an abbreviated style that often omitted articles and prepositions while making use of his own phonetic spelling—involved himself in this campaign until the end of his life. This wasn’t an eccentricity; it was a manifestation of his lifelong commitment to the importance of communication: anything that could be done to get the word out should be done.

It is in that spirit that we launch this new magazine, the Carnegie Reporter. In the age of the Internet, one always hears predictions that the web will replace most written communication. We’ve heard them, too, so we embark on this new venture with great respect for the new world of technology that is revolutionizing and democratizing communications, but also with the knowledge that the power of reading has not been diminished by technology but, in fact, revitalized by it.

I first discovered and fell in love with reading during my schoolboy years in Tabriz, Iran. It stimulated my thinking, my imagination, my aspirations; it placed me on the road toward discovering my future as an historian, and it enriched my understanding of the human soul in all its complexity. Certainly, we all have our own story about the time we discovered literature, the texture of the book’s cover, the smell of the pages, the way each word spun into the next until they were more than mere words on the page but an intricate web of words, creating a world beyond our own—the world of our imagination—and began to create our character, our thought process. Like the spider’s web, every piece we read adds a new layer to our understanding. Every book or magazine article we read enhances the last one and pushes us toward the next one. We move from the center out and are infinitely able to build and rebuild ourselves through reading.

We also depend on reading and writing—the essence of communication—in our role as the staff and stewards of philanthropic foundations like Carnegie Corporation; we think, we talk, we write, we read, we listen, and then try to use these tools of communication to express the goals we’ve set for our organizations and to share the results of our efforts. That is the intent of the Carnegie Reporter, to help us share what we learn from our work, and it is how we hope you will use it, too. We hope it will help you understand Carnegie Corporation and its philosophies on education, democracy, international peace and security and international development, the areas in which we currently concentrate our grantmaking. We also want this publication to be a hub for the work of other foundations, an avenue for important ideas.

Initially, this magazine will be published twice a year, and it will also be made available as an online publication. Andrew Carnegie probably would have liked that, would have liked reading about the Corporation’s work in yet another communications medium, because the Internet’s power is that it offers the word, the potency of reading and learning, to a larger and larger circle of the world’s people. In time, when everyone can log on, the Internet promises that no one will be cut off from groundbreaking scientific discoveries, literary achievements or the understanding of history—the greatest library that the world has ever known will be open to everyone, every adult, every child. In time, the world’s most wonderful ideas will be accessible to anyone who wants to learn, who wants to be thrilled and challenged and provoked. On the web, the written word is still “the written word,” and thus maintains the ability to flex its extraordinarily powerful muscle. We are both awed and humbled by that thought, and hope that our best efforts to add to what the world knows about itself will always be reflected in these pages.

Vartan Gregorian
President

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