Five Things You Need to Know About Indianapolis Monthly’s New Editor-in-Chief

Chances are, you know Michael Rubino‘s work for Indianapolis Monthly. The award-winning longform articles. The watering-hole reports. The bygone Replay sports digests, which always found a fresh way to skewer Tom Brady. He has been a prolific writer and editor for Indianapolis Monthly for the last 10 years. Today, he takes the reins as editor-in-chief from four-year veteran Amanda Heckert, who has moved back home, to South Carolina, where she will serve as deputy editor of Garden and Gun magazine. What you need to know:

  1. Though he was born in New York City, Rubino is a lifelong Hoosier—from Jasper, which is near French Lick. The regional familiarity came in handy when he connected the dots on an obscure period of Larry Bird’s past in 2014.
  2. He graduated from Wabash College and had no problem publishing a photo of himself wearing the school’s dorky required hat.
  3. A craft-beer lover who wrote the early definitive Sun King story, he knows Zombie Dust’s local distribution schedule down to the hour.
  4. For every lighthearted piece on Indiana’s zipline craze or Andrew Luck’s beard, he has also written a deep, investigative article that took many months to report. “The Long Con” swindle is a favorite read around the office, while “The Boy With Half a Brain” tearjerker garnered attention from the Columbia Journalism Review.
  5. He would trade his kids for Fat Dan’s brisket.

Connect with Michael Rubino on Twitter.