APRIL 8 • 2021 | 27

A

ndrea Sachs tried, but 
she just couldn’t stop 
being a journalist.
Sachs, who grew up in Oak 
Park and received B.A. and 
J.D. degrees at University of 
Michigan, tried 
to go back to her 
first love, English 
literature, when she 
retired from Time
magazine in 2014. 
She was working 
on her Ph.D. thesis 
(on the works of Ralph Ellison 
and Richard Wright) at Hunter 
College in New York when 
COVID hit.
“From the beginning of the 
pandemic, I was drawn to write 
about that,
” said Sachs, found-
er and editor of The Insider, a 
weekly online magazine she 

started in March 2020. The name 
is a pun of sorts; it’s an inside 
view of pandemic life for people 
stuck inside. Its motto, printed 
on the masthead is “Hands on 
the heart, six feet apart.
”
Sachs aimed her magazine at 
friends and family, but thanks 
to word-of-mouth and social 
media, readership ballooned. In 
February, The Insider grew 42 
percent to reach 10,000 unique 
viewers. 
The Insider — view it at thein-
sider1.com — is produced by a 
band of writers and editors who 
work communally but remotely.
Sachs estimates more than 
a dozen Jews who live in or 
formerly lived in Metro Detroit 
have written for the magazine. 
They include former Detroit News
columnist Laura Berman; well-
known Detroit attorney David 
Fink; Merrill Lynn Hansen, a 
paralegal from West Bloomfield; 
industrial psychologist Alan 
Resnick of Farmington Hills; 
Tobye S. Stein, a retired human 
resources officer from Northville; 
Joel Dzodin, formerly of Oak 
Park, who now lives in Israel; 
Bonnie Fishman, well-known 
chef who recently moved to 
California and Jessie Siegel, 
formerly of Oak Park, who now 
lives in Washington, D.C. 
“It really surprised me that 
people were coming to me who 
wanted to write,
” Sachs said. “I 
think people have a lot on their 
mind right now because of the 
pandemic, and I think people 
want to talk about it.
” 
The Insider has written about 

people who survived COVID 
and run obituaries on those who 
didn’t. Three writers chronicled 
their own battles with the virus. 
After graduating from college 
in the mid-1970s, Sachs prepared 
for a law career. She’
d considered 
getting a graduate degree in 
English, but colleges weren’t hir-
ing English teachers at the time, 
so it seemed like a dead end. 
The legal profession was adding 
women, and law schools were 
looking for promising female 
students. Her father, the late Ted 
Sachs, was a successful Detroit 
attorney who loved his work. So, 
she enrolled in U-M’s law school.
Sachs says she knew it was a 
mistake almost from Day 1 but 
stuck with it, graduating and 
taking a job as a government 
attorney in Washington, D.C. 
Her epiphany came, after three 
unhappy years as a lawyer, on 
March 30, 1981, the day Ronald 
Reagan was shot.
“I ran down to the hospital 
where he was taken because it 
was history in the making,
” she 
said. “I watched the print report-
ers do person-on-the-street 
interviews and was interviewed 
by three female journalists about 
my own age. I was AWOL from 
work all day; I never went back 
to my office. When I left the hos-
pital grounds, all I could think 
was, ‘This is what I want to do!’”
She knew that day she was 
meant to be a journalist.

CAREER AT TIME
She moved to New York short-
ly afterward and got a mas-
ter’s degree from Columbia 
University’s Graduate School 
of Journalism in 1983. 
After “a nanosecond” work-
ing at Glamour and Good 
Housekeeping, she joined Time
magazine in 1984 and stayed for 
29 years, covering the legal and 
book publishing beats.
She left in 2014 after a corpo-
rate reorganization. “I got out 
when the going was good!” she 
said, adding, “There were other 
things I wanted to do.
”
Sachs has borne the startup 
costs and ongoing expenses of 
The Insider, whose contributors 
are unpaid. “No one’s getting rich 
working for The Insider, least of 
all me,
” she said. “It’s a labor of 
love for all of us.
”
She is starting to look for ways 
to bring in paid advertising and 
plans to pass along any income 
to her contributors. “
As someone 
who’s made her living as a jour-
nalist, the last thing I want to do 
is exploit writers!” she said. 
Sachs says she expects The 
Insider to continue past the 
pandemic because the problems 
and opportunities raised by the 
disease will last. “I think we’re all 
in for a change of lifestyles for a 
while,
” she said. 

Contact Andrea Sachs at editor@

theinsider1.com.

Veteran journalist and Oak Park
native starts pandemic publication.

 The
‘Inside’ Scoop

Andrea 
Sachs

BARBARA LEWIS CONTRIBUTING WRITER

DOUG DWORKIN

Andrea Sachs celebrates 
receiving her COVID vaccination 
in the detergent aisle at a New 
York pharmacy.

