New York Magazine
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New York Magazine was one of the first "lifestyle" magazines. Founded by Milton Glaser and Clay Felker in 1968 as a competitor to The New Yorker, it offers less national news and more gossip, but has also published noteworthy articles on city and state politics, as well as cultural politics, over the years. Its format and style has been copied by other American regional city publications.
New York began life in 1963 as the Sunday-magazine supplement of the New York Herald Tribune newspaper. Edited by Clay Felker, the magazine showcased the work of several talented Tribune contributors, including Tom Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin. Soon after the Tribune went out of business in 1966 (lasting another year or so as a merged entity called the World Journal Tribune), Felker and his partner, the designer Milton Glaser, reincarnated the magazine as a standalone glossy. Joining them was managing editor Jack Nessel, Felker's number two at the Herald Tribune. New York's first issue was dated April 8, 1968. Among the by-lines were many familiar names from the magazine's earlier incarnations, including Breslin, Wolfe, and the financial writer George J.W. Goodman, who wrote as "Adam Smith".
Within a year, Felker had assembled a team of contributors who would come to define the magazine's voice. Breslin became a regular, as did Gloria Steinem, who wrote the city-politics column, and Gail Sheehy, who married Felker in 1984. The director Harold Clurman was hired as the theater critic. Judith Crist wrote movie reviews. Alan Rich covered the classical-music scene. Gael Greene, writing under the rubric "The Insatiable Critic," reviewed restaurants, cultivating a baroque writing style that leaned heavily on sexual metaphor. Later columnists writing for the magazine have included Michael Tomasky (city politics), John Simon (theatre), David Denby (film), Marilyn Stasio, and John Leonard. Even Woody Allen kicked in a few stories.
Wolfe was a regular contributor as well, and in 1970 wrote a story that for many defined the magazine: "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's." Wolfe--in his unmistakable style, full of elaborate punctuation, sociological reporting, and detached, witty contempt--painted a picture of a benefit party for the Black Panthers, filled with celebrity and wealth, that had been held in Leonard Bernstein's elegant apartment. The collision of high culture and low was characteristic of that moment in New York City, and New York the magazine reflected a similar mixing. One could flip from an authoritative feature on where to buy the best ice cream to a piece about a power struggle at one of the city's cultural institutions to a piece of serious classical-music criticism. New York also launched another important American periodical, Ms. magazine, which began as a special issue.
Well into the 1970s, Felker continued to broaden the magazine's palette, covering Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal closely. In 1976, a journalist named Nik Cohn contributed a story called "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night," about a young man in a working-class Brooklyn neighborhood who, once a week, went to a local disco called Odyssey 2001 and suddenly felt release from the limits of his life. The story was a sensation and became the film Saturday Night Fever, starring John Travolta; twenty years later, in 1997, Cohn admitted (in a story in New York) that he'd done no more than drive by Odyssey's door, and that he'd made the rest up. It was a common problem of what Wolfe, in 1972, had labeled "The New Journalism"--a term for reported stories that used the techniques of fiction to tell a larger truth. The term remains a somewhat loaded one, tainted by the work of writers who used the same techniques to avoid the bother of leaving their typewriters.
In 1976, the Australian media baron Rupert Murdoch bought the magazine in a hostile takeover, forcing Felker and Glaser out. A succession of editors followed, including Joe Armstrong and John Berendt, until 1980, when Murdoch hired Edward Kosner, late of Newsweek. Murdoch also bought Cue Magazine, a listings magazine that had covered the city since 1932, and folded it into New York, simultaneously creating a useful going-out guide and eliminating a competitor for ad pages. Kosner's magazine tended toward a mix of newsmagazine-style stories, trend pieces, and pure "service" features--long articles on shopping and other consumer subjects--as well as close coverage of the glitzy 1980s New York scene epitomized by financiers Donald Trump and Saul Steinberg. The magazine was quite profitable for most of the 1980s, and several stories from this era rose to the level of the larger culture: The term "the Brat Pack" was coined for a story in New York, and the first big feature on candidate Bill Clinton was a cover story ten months before his election in 1992.
Murdoch got out of the magazine business in 1990, selling his holdings to K-III Communications, a partnership controlled by financier Henry Kravis. Budget pressure from K-III frustrated Kosner, and he left for Esquire magazine in 1993. After several months' search, during which the magazine was run by managing editor Peter Herbst, K-III hired Kurt Andersen, the co-creator of Spy, a legendary (and legendarily mean) humor monthly of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Andersen soon replaced many staff members, bringing in many emerging and established writers and generally making the magazine faster-paced, younger in outlook, and more knowing. Unfortunately, Andersen's bosses disliked the result, and the new level of journalistic energy failed to translate into growth; Andersen was fired after two and a half years, replaced by Caroline Miller of Seventeen, another K-III title. Michael Wolff, the media critic she hired in 1998, won two National Magazine Awards for his column, in 2002 and 2003.
New York was sold again at the end of 2003, this time to financier Bruce Wasserstein. He in turn replaced Miller with Adam Moss, known for editing 7 Days (a short-lived New York weekly of the late 1980s) and the New York Times Magazine. A relaunch of the magazine followed in late 2004, marked by two new sections: "The Strategist," devoted mostly to shopping, fashion, travel, and food, and "The Culture Pages," covering the city's arts scene. Moss also rehired Kurt Andersen as a columnist.
Puzzles and Competitions
New York Magazine was once renowned for its Competitions and unique crossword puzzles. The composer and songwriter Stephen Sondheim contributed extremely complex crossword-style puzzles to every third issue. These lasted only a year. Richard Maltby, Jr. took over thereafter. In the remaining two weeks out of every three, Sondheim's friend Mary Ann Madden edited an extremely popular literary competition calling for readers to send in humorous poetry and other bits of wordplay. These ran until 2000 - the final one was #973 - under her editorship. (Example: Geronimo's epitaph - "Requiscat in Apache.") An average of fifteen hundred entries were received each week and winners included such illustrious names as David Mamet, Herb Sargent, and Dan Greenburg. David Halberstam is on record as admitting that he submitted entries 137 times and never won. Stephen Sondheim, Woody Allen and Nora Ephron were fans. Its demise was greatly lamented. In August 2000, the magazine published a letter from an Irish contestant, John O'Byrne, who wrote: "How I'll miss the fractured definitions, awful puns, conversation stoppers, one-letter misprints, ludicrous proverbs, openings of bad novels, near misses, et al (what a nice guy Al is!)." Many entrants have since migrated to The Washington Post's The Style Invitational." Three volumes of Competition winners were published as Thank You for the Giant Sea Tortoise, Son of Giant Sea Tortoise, and Maybe He's Dead: And Other Hilarious Results of New York Magazine Competition.