New York (magazine)
New York is an American biweekly magazine concerned with life, culture, politics, and style generally, with a particular emphasis on New York City.
Founded by Clay Felker and Milton Glaser in 1968 as a competitor to The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, it was brasher in voice and more connected to contemporary city life and commerce, and became a cradle of New Journalism. Over time, it became more national in scope, publishing many noteworthy articles about American culture by writers such as Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Nora Ephron, Pete Hamill, Jacob Weisberg, Michael Wolff, John Heilemann, Frank Rich, and Rebecca Traister. It was among the first "lifestyle magazines" meant to appeal to both male and female audiences, and its format and style have been emulated by many American regional and city publications.
New York in its earliest days focused almost entirely on coverage of its namesake city, but beginning in the 1970s, it expanded into reporting and commentary on national politics, notably Richard Reeves on Watergate, Joe Klein's early cover story about Bill Clinton, John Heilemann's reporting on the 2008 presidential election that led to his best-selling book Game Change, Jonathan Chait's commentary, and Olivia Nuzzi's reporting on the first Trump administration. The New Republic praised its "hugely impressive political coverage" during the presidency of Barack Obama. It is also known for its arts and culture criticism, its food writing, and its service journalism.
Since its sale, redesign, and relaunch in 2004, the magazine has won several National Magazine Awards, including the award for general excellence in 2006, 2007, 2010, 2011, 2014, and 2016, as well as the 2013 award for Magazine of the Year. Since the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism opened to magazines as well as newspapers in 2016, New Yorks critics have won twice and been finalists three more times. In 2009, the Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz wrote that "the nation's best and most-imitated city magazine is often not about the city—at least not in the overcrowded, traffic-clogged, five-boroughs sense," observing that it was more regularly publishing political and cultural stories of national and international import.
The magazine's first website, nymetro.com, was launched in 2001. In the early 21st century, the magazine began to diversify that online presence, introducing subject-specific websites under the nymag.com umbrella: Vulture, The Cut, Intelligencer, The Strategist, Curbed, and Grub Street. In 2018, New York Media, the parent company of New York magazine, launched a digital subscription product for those sites. On September 24, 2019, Vox Media announced that it had purchased New York magazine and its parent company, New York Media.
History
1960s
New York was created in 1963 as the Sunday-magazine supplement of the New York Herald Tribune newspaper. The Herald Tribune, then in financial difficulty, had recently been sold to John Hay Whitney, and was looking to revitalize its business with an increased focus on editorial excellence, which included a relaunch of the Sunday edition and its magazine. Edited first by Sheldon Zalaznick and then by Clay Felker, the relaunched magazine, called New York, showcased the work of many talented Tribune contributors, including Tom Wolfe, Barbara Goldsmith, Gail Sheehy, Dick Schaap, and Jimmy Breslin. The Tribune went out of business in 1966, and New York was briefly revived as part of a combined paper, the World Journal Tribune, that lasted until May 1967. Shortly after the WJT closed, Felker and his partner, Milton Glaser, purchased the rights to the nameplate, backed by Wall Street bankers led by Armand G. Erpf and C. Gerald Goldsmith, and reincarnated the magazine as a stand-alone glossy weekly. Joining them was managing editor Jack Nessel, Felker's number-two at the Herald Tribune. ''New York''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 Nicholas Pileggi, Gail Sheehy, and Gloria Steinem, who wrote a politics column. Judith Crist wrote movie reviews. Harold Clurman was hired as the theater critic, then replaced a few months later by John Simon, who became notorious for his harsh reviews. Alan Rich covered the classical-music scene. Barbara Goldsmith wrote a series called "The Creative Environment", in which she interviewed such subjects as Marcel Breuer, I. M. Pei, George Balanchine, and Pablo Picasso about their process. Gael Greene, writing under the rubric "The Insatiable Critic", reviewed restaurants, cultivating a baroque writing style that leaned heavily on sexual metaphor. The office for the magazine was on the top floor of the old Tammany Hall clubhouse at 207 East 32nd Street, which Glaser owned. The magazine did not consistently turn a profit in these early years: One board member, Alan Patricof, later said that "it may have touched into the black for a quarter, then out of it, but it was not significantly profitable."
1970s
Wolfe, a regular contributor to the magazine, wrote a story in 1970 that captured the spirit of the magazine : "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's". The controversial and often criticized 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 and expressed Wolfe's interest in status and class.In 1972, New Yorks year-end issue incorporated a 30-page preview of the first issue of Ms. magazine, edited by Gloria Steinem. Gail Sheehy's "The Search for Grey Gardens", a cover story about the notorious mother-and-daughter Beale household of East Hampton, led to the Maysles brothers' acclaimed documentary.
As the 1970s progressed, Felker continued to broaden the magazine's editorial vision beyond Manhattan, covering Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal closely. He also launched New West, a sister magazine on New York
In 1976, the Australian media baron Rupert Murdoch bought the magazine in a hostile takeover, forcing Felker and Glaser out. A succession of top editors followed through the remainder of the decade, including James Brady, Joe Armstrong, John Berendt, and Jane Amsterdam.
1980s
In 1980, Murdoch hired Edward Kosner, the former editor of Newsweek, to replace Armstrong. Murdoch also bought Cue, a listings magazine founded by Mort Glankoff 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 shifted the mix of the magazine toward newsmagazine-style cover 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 cover story in the magazine.1990s
Murdoch got out of the magazine business in 1991 by selling his holdings to K-III Communications, a partnership controlled by financier Henry Kravis. Subsequent budget pressure from K-III frustrated Kosner, and he left in 1993, taking over the editorship of Esquire magazine. After several months 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 emerging and established writers and editors, and generally making the magazine faster-paced, younger in outlook, and more knowing in tone. 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. In part owing to the company's financial constraints, Miller and her editors focused on cultivating younger writers, including Ariel Levy, Jennifer Senior, Robert Kolker, and Vanessa Grigoriadis. She also hired Michael Wolff, whose writing about media and politics became an extremely popular component of the magazine.2000s
The magazine's first website, under the url nymetro.com, appeared in 2001. In 2002 and 2003, Wolff, the media critic Miller had hired in 1998, won two National Magazine Awards for his columns. At the end of 2003, New York was sold again, to a family trust controlled by financier Bruce Wasserstein, for $55 million. Wasserstein, early in 2004, replaced Miller with Adam Moss, who had founded the short-lived New York weekly 7 Days and then edited The New York Times Magazine. That fall, Moss and his staff relaunched the magazine, most notably with two new sections: "The Strategist", devoted mostly to service, food, and shopping, and "The Culture Pages", covering the city's arts scene. Moss also rehired Kurt Andersen as a columnist. In early 2006, the company relaunched the magazine's website, previously nymetro.com, as nymag.com.New York in this period won design awards at the National Magazine Awards and was named Magazine of the Year by the Society of Publication Designers in 2006 and 2007. A 2008 cover about Eliot Spitzer's prostitution scandal, created by the artist Barbara Kruger and displaying the word "Brain" with an arrow pointed at Spitzer's crotch, was named Cover of the Year by the American Society of Magazine Editors and Advertising Age. The next year, another cover, "Bernie Madoff, Monster", was named Best News & Business Cover by ASME. New York won back-to-back ASME Cover of the Year awards in 2012 and 2013, for "Is She Just Too Old for This?" and "The City and the Storm" respectively. Design director Chris Dixon and photography director Jody Quon were named "Design Team of the Year" by Adweek in 2008.
When Bruce Wasserstein died in 2009, David Carr of The New York Times wrote that "While previous owners had required constant features in the magazine about the best place to get a croissant or a beret, it was clear that Wasserstein wanted a publication that was the best place to learn about the complicated apparatus that is modern New York. In enabling as much, Mr. Wasserstein recaptured the original intent of the magazine's founder, Clay Felker." Wasserstein's children retained control of the magazine, which continued to be overseen by his deputy Anup Bagaria.
In 2006, New York
With the launch of Grub Street, devoted to food, and Daily Intelligencer, its politics site, both in 2006; Vulture, its culture site, in 2007; and The Cut, its fashion-and-women's-interest site, in 2008, New York began shifting significant resources toward digital-only publication. These sites were intended to adapt the urbane sensibility of the print magazine for a national and international audience, and attract readership that had been lost by print magazines in general, particularly fashion and entertainment outlets. By July 2010, digital ads accounted for one-third of the company's advertising revenue. David Carr noted in an August 2010 column, "In a way, New York magazine is fast becoming a digital enterprise with a magazine attached."