Clay Felker, Magazine Visionary, Dies at 82

Felker took a New York Herald Tribune Sunday supplement and, in 1968, transformed it into New York, a new genre of magazine, one with an unabashed focus on its namesake city. (Although, in truth, the magazine should have been called Manhattan.) In spite of its purposefully parochial coverage, it has become a standard title in many library's periodical collections.

Link to July 2 New York Times obituary.

Excerpt:

New York’s mission was to compete for consumer attention at a time when television threatened to overwhelm print publications. [Apparently, only the Internet can really carry through on this threat.] To do that, Mr. Felker came up with a distinctive format: a combination of long narrative articles and short, witty ones on consumer services.

Mr. Felker’s New York magazine became a prime practitioner of the New Journalism, again to mixed reactions. The form’s admirers believed it represented events more truthfully than traditional objective reporting could. Conventional journalism, they said, reported what people said; the New Journalists tried to present what people really felt and thought.

Review of The New Journalism, an anthology edited by Tom Wolfe and E. W. Johnson (New York Times, 6/22/1973)

Notes on the New Journalism by Michael J. Arlen, Atlantic Monthly, May 1972.

Whatever Happened to the New Journalism? by Bill Beuttler's website.

New York magazine cover archive.

"Libraries Worldwide" linked tob WorldCat record (Caveat: quick-and-dirty search for record with the most holdings)

New York (1912)

Chicago (611)

Boston (370)

Los Angeles (265)

Link to membership directory of the City and Regional Magazine Association. (Individual member listings include website link for all 201 magazines.)