New York (magazine)
New York magazine is a weekly magazine, founded in 1968, concerned with the life, culture, politics, and style of
New York City. It 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 and culture over the years. Its format and style have been copied by other American regional city publications, such as
Philadelphia Magazine,
New Jersey Monthly and others, although
New York is the only weekly among them and therefore contains more immediate coverage. Its 2005 paid circulation is 437,181, with 94.6% of that coming from subscriptions. The website receives visits from 1.1 million users monthly.
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 1966-67, 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 incarnation, 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 would eventually marry 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 included
Michael Tomasky (city politics),
John Simon (replacing Clurman on theater),
David Denby (film),
James Atlas,
Marilyn Stasio, and
John Leonard (books). Even
Woody Allen has published a few stories.
Wolfe was a regular contributor as well, and in 1970 wrote a story that for many defined the magazine (if not the age): "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's." Wolfepainted a picture of a benefit party for the Black Panthers, studded 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.
New West, a sister magazine on the same model that covered California life, was also published for a few years in the 1970s.
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 loaded one, tainted by the work of writers who used the same techniques without the appropriate reporterly rigor.
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. Kosner's magazine tended toward a mix of newsmagazine-style stories, trend pieces, and pure "service" featuresas well as close coverage of the glitzy 1980s New York scene epitomized by financiers
Donald Trump and
Saul Steinberg. The magazine was 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 magazine story 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 quickly replaced several staff members, bringing in many emerging and established writers (including Jim Cramer, Walter Kirn, Tomasky and Jacob Weisberg) and editors (including Michael Hirschorn, Kim France, Dany Levy and Maer Roshan), and generally making the magazine faster-paced, younger in outlook, and more knowing in tone. With the the new level of journalistic energy, newsstand sales rose, and profits increased to a level not seen since. Unfortunately, the effective owner of K-III, Henry Kravis, objected to the magazine's coverage of his friends and associates on Wall Street, and 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. Miller's magazine also ran political columns by
Tucker Carlson.
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. In the spring of 2006, Moss's
New York was nominated for five National Magazine Awards by the American Society of Magazine Editors; it won in two categories, for design and for general excellence in its circulation class.
New York Magazine was once renowned for its Competitions and unique crossword puzzles. For the first year of the magazine's existence, the composer and songwriter
Stephen Sondheim contributed an extremely complex crossword-style puzzle to every third issue. (
Richard Maltby, Jr. took over thereafter; since 1980, the magazine has run a simpler crossword by Maura Jacobson.) In the remaining two weeks out of every three, Sondheim's friend
Mary Ann Madden edited an extremely popular witty literary competition calling for readers to send in humorous poetry or other bits of wordplay on a theme that changed with each installment. (A typical entry, in a competition calling for humorous epitaphs, supplied this one for Geronimo: "Requiscat in Apache.") Altogether, Madden ran 973 installments of the Competition, retiring in 2000. Hundreds of entries were received each weekand winners included the likes of
David Mamet,
Herb Sargent, and
Dan Greenburg.
David Halberstam once claimed that he submitted entries 137 times and never won. Sondheim, Woody Allen, and
Nora Ephron were fans. The Competition's demise, when Madden retired, was greatly lamented among its fans. 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, titled
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 Competitions.
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Official website
