New York is a weekly magazine concerned with the life, culture, politics, and style of
New York City. Founded by
Milton Glaser and
Clay Felker in 1968 as a competitor to
The New Yorker, it offers less national news and more gossipy, tabloid-like stories, but has also published noteworthy articles on city and state politics and culture over the years. It was one of the first "
lifestyle" magazines, and its format and style have been copied by other American regional city publications, such as
Philadelphia,
New Jersey Monthly and others, although
New York is the only weekly among them and therefore contains more immediate coverage. Its 2005 paid circulation was 437,181, with 94.6% of that coming from subscriptions. The website receives visits from 1.1 million users monthly.
History
1960s
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,
Barbara Goldsmith, and
Jimmy Breslin.
Soon after the
Tribune went out of business in 1966–67, Felker and his partner,
Milton Glaser, purchased the rights with money loaned to them from
Barbara Goldsmith's husband at the time C. Gerald Goldsmith and reincarnated the magazine as a stand-alone glossy. Joining them was managing editor
Jack Nessel, Felker's number two at the
Herald Tribune.
New Yorks 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 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. (Sheehy would eventually marry Felker, in 1984.) Harold Clurman was hired as the theater critic. Judith Crist wrote movie reviews. Alan Rich covered the classical-music scene. Barbara Goldsmith was a Founding Editor of New York magazine and the author of the widely-imitated series, “The Creative Environment,” in which she interviewed such subjects as Marcel Breuer, I. M. Pei, George Balanchine, and Pablo Picasso about their creative process. She even persuaded Picasso to donate his three-story statue, "Sylvette," to New York University. Gael Greene, writing under the rubric "The Insatiable Critic," reviewed restaurants, cultivating a baroque writing style that leaned heavily on sexual metaphor. Woody Allen contributed a few stories for the magazine in its early years. The magazine's regional focus and innovative illustrations inspired numerous imitators across the country. 1970s
Wolfe, a regular contributor, to the magazine, wrote a story in 1970 that for many defined the magazine (if not the age): "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's". The article described a benefit party for the Black Panthers, held in Leonard Bernstein's apartment, in a collision of high culture and low that paralleled New York
magazine's ethos. In 1972, New York
also launched Ms. magazine, which began as a special issue.,
a sister magazine on New Yorks model that covered
California life, was also published for a few years in the 1970s. 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).
Well into the 1970s, Felker continued to broaden the magazine's palette, covering
Richard Nixon and the
Watergate scandal closely. In 1976,
journalist 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; the story was a sensation and served as the basis for the film
Saturday Night Fever. Twenty years later, 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 recurring problem of what Wolfe, in 1972, had labeled "The
New Journalism."
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.
1980s
In 1980, Murdoch hired Edward Kosner, who had worked at
Newsweek. Murdoch also bought
Cue, 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" features—long articles on shopping and other consumer subjects—as well as close coverage of the glitzy 1980s New York City scene epitomized by financiers
Donald Trump and
Saul Steinberg. The magazine was
profitable for most of the 1980s. The term "the
Brat Pack" was coined for a 1985 story in the magazine.
1990s
Murdoch got out of the magazine business in 1991, selling his holdings to
K-III Communications, a partnership controlled by financier
Henry Kravis. In January 1992,
New York ran the first big magazine story on presidential candidate
Bill Clinton, ten months before his election in November.
In 1993, budget pressure from K-III frustrated Kosner, and he left for
Esquire magazine. 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 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. Newsstand sales rose, and profits increased to a level not seen since.
In August 1996,
Bill Reilly fired Andersen from his editorship, citing the publication's financial results. According to Andersen, he was fired for refusing to kill a story about a rivalry between investment bankers
Felix Rohatyn and
Steven Rattner that had upset
Henry Kravis, a member of the firm's ownership group. His replacement was Caroline Miller, who came from
Seventeen (another K-III title).
2000s
In 2002 and 2003,
Michael Wolff, the media critic hired by Miller in 1998, won two
National Magazine Awards for his column. At the end of 2003,
New York was sold again, to financier
Bruce Wasserstein, for $55 million.
Wasserstein replaced Miller with
Adam Moss, known for editing the short-lived New York weekly of the late 1980s "7 Days" and the
New York Times Magazine.
In late 2004 the magazine was relaunched, most notably with 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.
In 2007, the magazine once again bested its own ASME awards performance, with seven nominations (including one in the Public Interest category for a story by Robert Kolker) and five wins, including a rare repeat award for General Excellence. Much of the coverage the next day noted that the magazine's sometime rival,
The New Yorker, took home no awards that night, despite receiving nine nominations, and also noted that
New York was the first magazine to win for both its print and
Internet editions in the same year. Though media coverage rarely forms a consensus, most press critics have considered Moss's remade magazine a success, and suggest that it has improved substantially under his leadership.
The
February 25,
2008 issue featured a series of nude photographs of
Lindsay Lohan. Shot by Bert Stern, the series replicated several poses from Stern's widely reproduced final photos of
Marilyn Monroe, shot shortly before the actress's fatal drug overdose. That week, the magazine's website received over 60 million hits and with traffic 2000 percent higher than usual.
Puzzles and competitions
New York Magazine was once known for its competitions and unique
crossword puzzles. For the first year of the magazine's existence, the composer and lyricist
Stephen Sondheim contributed an extremely complex
cryptic crossword to every third issue. In the style of British crosswords (as they are sometimes called), the cryptic crosswords feature clues that include a straight definition and a wordplay definition.
Richard Maltby, Jr. took over thereafter. Since 1980, the magazine has also run an American-style crossword, always by Maura B. Jacobson. The cryptic crosswords were eventually dropped.
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, sometimes thousands, of entries were received each week, and winners included the likes of
David Mamet,
Herb Sargent, and
Dan Greenburg.
David Halberstam once claimed that he had submitted entries 137 times without winning. 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 Posts similar "
Style Invitational" feature. 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.
Blogs
New York Magazine has a variety of online blogs including The Cut, Daily Intel, Grub Street, The Projectionist, The Sports Section, Surf and Vulture. Daily Intel has become popular for its weekly recaps of the television show
Gossip Girl (TV Series). Daily Intel also posts popular "Sex Diaries" on Mondays.
"The Cut" features current fashion happenings and is a popular destination for fashion bloggers looking for reliable and recent fashion news.
The
New York Magazine Blogs are also very popular for their commenters. They have even appeared in the blog posts.
See also
