History > 2008 > USA > Journalism (II)

The Media Equation

A Scandal in Chicago

That Justifies Investigative Journalism

December 15, 2008
The New York Times
By DAVID CARR

For the last few years, newspapers have been smacked around for lacking relevance, but the industry has finally found a compelling spokesman: Rod R. Blagojevich, Democratic governor of Illinois.

According to the criminal complaint that the United States attorney filed, Governor Blagojevich, while allegedly trying to set a price for a United States Senate seat, also spent a significant amount of time going after the press, especially The Chicago Tribune, whose editorial page had been calling for his impeachment.

The governor said he would withhold financial assistance from the Tribune Company in its effort to sell Wrigley Field unless the newspaper got rid of the editorial writers. “Our recommendation is fire all those [expletive] people, get ’em the [expletive] out of there and get us some editorial support,” he told his chief of staff, John Harris.

Who says the modern American newspaper doesn’t matter?

There is no evidence that Sam Zell, the chief executive of the Tribune Company, or any of his colleagues followed through on Mr. Blagojevich’s demand for retribution. (Gerould Kern, editor of The Chicago Tribune, told me Sunday, “Since I have been editor, I have not been pressured in any way on our coverage of the governor, our editorial page positions or the staffing of our editorial board.”)

The Tribune Company has acknowledged that that the company received a subpoena, but declined to comment further.

In a city and state where corruption is knit into the political fabric, a solvent daily paper would seem to be a civic necessity. But if another governor goes bad in Illinois — a likely circumstance given the current investigation and the fact that the last governor, George Ryan, is serving six and a half years on corruption charges — what if the local paper were too diminished to do the job?

It is not an academic issue. Last week, it was reported that the two daily newspapers in Detroit, a city whose politicians have been known to get their hands in the till as soon as voters pull the lever, will cease home delivery on most days of the week, printing a pared-down version for newsstands, with cuts in staff to match.

And last Monday, the day before Mr. Blagojevich and Mr. Harris were arrested, the Tribune Company, which has almost $13 billion in debt, filed for bankruptcy protection. It was less than a year after Mr. Zell, a man with a fondness for distressed assets, took control of the Tribune chain — which owned 11 other newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times, and 23 television stations — in a deal structured around an employee stock ownership plan that involved $8 billion in new debt.

Things have not gone as planned since then. The worst ad recession since the Depression, combined with that crushing debt, has compelled the company to sell assets — Newsday, a daily newspaper in Long Island, was sold last spring for $650 million — and cut staff. The Chicago Tribune newsroom, which had a staff of 670 in 2005, has gone through several rounds of cutbacks and buyouts that left the newsroom with 480 employees.

Some of the losses have been dear. This summer, Maurice Possley, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the paper’s premier criminal justice reporter, left, in part because he didn’t believe the newspaper was still interested in the kind of long-form investigative stories he worked on.

Last month, John Crewdson, another Pulitzer-winning reporter, was laid off from the newspaper’s Washington bureau. Two of the newspaper’s five staff members who covered state government full-time are now gone. Ann Marie Lipinski, the newspaper’s editor and a longtime enabler of The Chicago Tribune’s journalistic aggression, left last summer, and in September, a redesign with fewer articles arrayed over less space was put in place.

Almost since the day Mr. Blagojevich took office, The Tribune has shown readers that the governor’s primary interest was not always the public interest. And the paper’s reporting helped expose the outside clout of Antoin Rezko, the convicted fixer with ties to both Mr. Blagojevich and President-elect Barack Obama.

Although much of the current investigation is being led by the office of the United States attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald, the newspaper did its own work, including pointing out that the governor’s wife, Patti, received over $700,000 in real estate commissions, with much of the money coming from people who did business with the state. In the indictment, she too pays tribute to the newspaper’s effectiveness, shouting in the background as her husband talked about Tribune.

“Hold up that [expletive] Cubs [expletive],” she said. “[Expletive] them.”

It is the highest sort of compliment, if rather profane.

This week, Dan Mihalopoulos, Ray Long, John Chase, David Kidwell and others at the paper continued to work every angle on the Blagojevich investigation, and follow some of their own. But some people at the newspaper, and those who have left, wonder whether The Tribune’s commitment to covering corruption is sustainable.

“I couldn’t be prouder of the people that are there and the job that they have done,” said David Jackson, an investigative reporter who worked on the Rezko coverage and is now on a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard. “But both as a citizen and a journalist, you have to wonder whether the paper will have the resources moving forward to continue to do that work. I am worried that the paper will be so diminished under Zell that it won’t be able to play that role.”

Mr. Crewdson, who had worked in the Washington bureau, was not so concerned.

In an e-mail message, he said the financial condition of his former paper would not “have kept Fitzgerald from finding out what he wanted to know and going wherever he wanted to go.”

Financial problems aside, Mr. Zell has publicly ridiculed the focus on long-term investigative projects, telling a New York investors’ conference, “I haven’t figured out how to cash in a Pulitzer Prize.”

In a speech last month at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, James Warren, a former managing editor of the paper who was asked to leave after a new editor was appointed, denounced the shift away from investigative efforts.

“Journalistically, it is hard, even impossible, to imagine the current Tribune hierarchy, bent on what it sees as more ‘utilitarian’ and locally ‘relevant’ work, championing such a time-consuming, original and inherently catalytic effort,” he said.

Mr. Kern, the current editor, said that this week confirmed that The Tribune had the conviction and muscle to cover its backyard aggressively.

“This was an extraordinary week for The Chicago Tribune,” he said. “On Monday, the company filed for bankruptcy protection, and on Tuesday, this huge story broke. There are two messages there. One, that the business model has to be reinvented and two, the importance of doing public service reporting. In the future, we will be doing fewer things and doing them better, and this kind of reporting will be a pillar of what we continue to do.”

Mr. Possley, who left the newspaper last summer, said he was encouraged that someone, at least the current governor of Illinois, felt that the biggest daily in Chicago was important, however reduced its circumstance.

“What The Tribune was doing with its reporting and on its opinion page was clearly a source of deep concern to Blagojevich and in a sense, you love to see that,” he said. “You have to worry when they start not to care. Then they begin to act as if they are in a vacuum, and that won’t be good for anyone.”

    A Scandal in Chicago That Justifies Investigative Journalism, NYT, 15.12.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/15/business/media/15carr.html?8dpc

Justices Reject Appeal in Libel Suit

December 15, 2008
Filed at 10:12 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court has rejected a plea by former Army scientist Steven J. Hatfill to revive his libel lawsuit against The New York Times over columns falsely implicating him in the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks.

The justices did not comment Monday in turning down Hatfill's appeal of a unanimous ruling by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Richmond, Va. A three-judge panel affirmed a lower court's dismissal of the libel claims on the grounds that Hatfill is a public figure and failed to prove that columns written by Nicholas Kristof were malicious.

Circumstantial evidence led the FBI to suspect Hatfill was involved in the anthrax attacks that killed five people and sickened 17 just weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft publicly identified Hatfill, who worked at the Army's infectious diseases laboratory at Ft. Detrick, Md., from 1997 to 1999, as a ''person of interest'' in the investigation.

In June, the Justice Department agreed to pay Hatfill $5.8 million to settle a lawsuit claiming officials violated his privacy rights by speaking with reporters about the case.

No one has been charged in the attacks, although the government now believes another Army scientist, Bruce Ivins, was responsible. Ivins killed himself in July.

The case is Hatfill v. New York Times, 08-483.

    Justices Reject Appeal in Libel Suit, NYT, 15.12.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2008/12/15/washington/AP-Scotus-Anthrax-Hatfill.html?hp

Latest Newspaper Endorsements in Presidential Race

November 2, 2008
Filed at 3:06 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Excerpts from recent newspaper endorsements of presidential candidates John McCain, a Republican, and Barack Obama, a Democrat.

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The Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Gazette, for Republican John McCain:

The United States and the world are on the brink of a major economic recession. Our nation also is troubled by unending war against terrorism, immigration laws in desperate need of reform and spiraling health care costs.

But at the top of this mountain of challenges is the economy -- the engine that drives so much of our daily lives and determines so much of our future. At a time like this, we cannot succumb to panic. We must not throw wrenches in our path to economic recovery. And as the Great Depression taught us, the worst remedy for this country's problems would be higher taxes for individuals and businesses.

Comparing the two major presidential candidates, Sen. John McCain's approach is best aligned to spur economic recovery. This is the overriding reason The Gazette Editorial Board endorses the Republican Arizona senator over Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill.

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The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette endorsed Obama:

While mostly an enabler of the Bush world view, Mr. McCain has been a sometime maverick in the past. That happy warrior, however, was missing in this campaign. Laboring under the long shadow of the White House record, his campaign has gone further into the shadows, reduced to peddling fear and guilt by association. The ticket has not put country first, but lust for power.

The campaign of Barack Obama has been like day and night compared to this torrent of smears. Sen. Obama has counter-punched, but he has kept his dignity and focus. His eloquent grace and his commitment to speak directly to issues that matter to Americans -- ending the war in Iraq, bringing tax relief to the middle class -- have stamped him as presidential in both judgment and temperament.

His very presence on the campaign trail has refuted all the desperate slanders about him. He is what you thought he was: A decent, reasonable and intelligent American who is the only hope to bring real change.

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The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review endorsed McCain:

The only truly experienced leader in this race -- the gentleman whose resume actually is worthy of the phrase -- is John McCain, 72, war hero, former congressman and longtime U.S. senator of Arizona.

John McCain is fiercely independent. And he makes no apologies for the principles he holds dear, even if they be at odds with the traditional party base. But he has never wavered in his core belief of what Republicanism (with a capital ''R'') and republicanism (with a lowercase ''r'') are all about: Small government. Fiscal discipline. Low taxes. A strong defense. And a judiciary that does not legislate from the bench.

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The (Springfield, Ill.) State Journal-Register endorsed Obama:

We believe this country needs healing internally to end the class and cultural warfare that has reached levels today we never thought we'd see again after 9/11. The United States' current international image as the world's bully must be reformed if we hope to effect stability in regions that are now hotbeds of terrorism and nuclear adventurism. Economic recovery, as we see it, is dependent on those goals.

For those critical efforts, we believe Barack Obama is the best choice as our next president.

Throughout a grueling primary campaign that began here at the Old State Capitol, Obama went from extreme underdog to the confident, self-assured candidate of the Democratic Party. His poise on the campaign trail since then is no surprise to us. We saw it in person four years ago when he was a candidate for the U.S. Senate and, later, when he met with The State Journal-Register editorial board again after winning his Senate seat. Thoughtful, engaging and intellectually nimble, Obama exuded a sense of quiet self-confidence rare among politicians.

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The (Manchester) New Hampshire Union Leader endorsed McCain:

McCain has been tested as few men ever have, and he has never been found wanting. Barack Obama has no experience -- none. He may be the most unprepared major-party candidate ever. His own vice presidential pick says our enemies will test him quickly and severely. There is no good reason to take that chance.

Those who believe Obama's claims that he will reduce 95 percent of Americans' taxes, while he pays for near-universal health care, subsidizes clean energy, expands our military commitment in Afghanistan, adds to mass transit and highway infrastructure, etc., etc., are living in a dream world.

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The Sheboygan (Wis.) Press endorsed Obama:

On the four most urgent issues facing this country -- the economy, Iraq, health care, and energy -- Obama's plans simply seem more beneficial to all concerned, namely, the American people.

Both Obama and McCain want to cut taxes. But more of Obama's cuts would go to the middle class and more of McCain's to the wealthy. Trickle-down economic growth doesn't work. It is time to move more of the tax burden onto the wealthiest Americans, those who can most afford to shoulder it.

--And it's time to regulate more of this economy. We need to prevent the greed that got us into this mess, from getting us into it again. McCain seems too reluctant to put in place more aggressive checks and balances.

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The Albuquerque (N.M.) Journal endorsed McCain:

We encourage those who are still uncommitted and those who vote on the basis of a candidate's qualifications instead of party label to give McCain's experience a closer look and to consider the consequences of concentrating too much political and economic power in the hands of one party.

A McCain veto in the White House would provide a check on Congress likely to take a leftward swing in this election. Where principles are on the line, McCain has a history of standing firm.''

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On the Net:

The Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Gazette: http://www.gazetteonline.com/

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: http://www.post-gazette.com/

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/tribunereview/

The (Springfield, Ill.) State Journal-Register: http://www.sj-r.com/

The (Manchester) New Hampshire Union Leader: http://www.unionleader.com/

The Sheboygan (Wis.) Press: http://www.sheboyganpress.com/

The Albuquerque Journal: http://www.abqjournal.com

    Latest Newspaper Endorsements in Presidential Race, NYT, 2.11.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/washington/AP-Presidential-Endorsements.html

A Surge on One Channel, a Tight Race on Another

November 2, 2008
The New York Times
By JIM RUTENBERG

WASHINGTON — It was a lousy day to be Senator John McCain, Keith Olbermann informed his viewers on MSNBC on Thursday.

Senator Barack Obama’s surge in the polls was so strong he was competitive in Mr. McCain’s home state, Arizona. The everyman hero of Mr. McCain’s campaign, “Joe the Plumber,” failed to make an expected appearance at a morning rally in Defiance, Ohio, and the senator’s efforts to highlight Mr. Obama’s association with a professor tied to the P.L.O. were amounting to nothing.

Wait a minute ... not so fast. Click.

Things were looking up for Mr. McCain, Sean Hannity and Greta Van Susteren told their viewers on Fox News Channel on Thursday. He got a boost at an afternoon rally in Sandusky, Ohio, from none other than Joe the Plumber, who announced his intention to vote for “a real American, John McCain”; he was gaining new ground in ever-tightening polls, despite the overwhelming bias against him in the mainstream news media; and Mr. Obama’s association with a professor sympathetic to the P.L.O. was now at “the center of the election.”

On any given night, there are two distinctly, even extremely, different views of the presidential campaign offered on two of the three big cable news networks, Fox News Channel and MSNBC, a dual reality that is reflected on the Internet as well.

On one, polls that are “tightening” are emphasized over those that are not, and the rest of the news media is portrayed as papering over questions about Mr. Obama’s past associations with people who have purportedly anti-American tendencies that he has not answered. (“I feel like we are talking to the Germans after Hitler comes to power, saying, ‘Oh, well, I didn’t know,’ ” Ann Coulter, the conservative commentator, told Mr. Hannity on Thursday.)

On the other, polls that show tightening are largely ignored, and the race is cast as one between an angry and erratic Mr. McCain, whose desperate, misleading campaign has as low as a 4 percent chance of beating a cool, confident and deserving Democratic nominee in Mr. Obama. (“He’s been a good father, a good citizen, he’s paid attention to his country,” Chris Matthews, the MSNBC host, said Wednesday night in addressing those who might be leaning against Mr. Obama based on race. “Give the guy a break and think about voting for him.”)

And, perhaps unsurprisingly, each campaign is often at war against its television antagonist, just as the networks are at war with each other.

It is a political division of news that harks back to the way American journalism was through the first half of the 20th century, when newspapers had more open political affiliations. But it has never been so apparent in such a clear-cut way on television, a result of market forces and partisan sensibilities that are further chipping away at the post-Watergate pre-eminence of a more dispassionate approach.

The more objective approach came as the corporate owners of the networks pushed for higher profits and the newspaper industry consolidated and sought broader audiences. “To sell as many copies as you could to as many people as you could, you became what we considered objective,” said Richard Wald, a professor of media and society at Columbia University School of Journalism and a former senior vice president at ABC News.

Fox News Channel was founded 12 years ago with an argument that the mainstream news media were biased toward liberals and that nonliberals were starved for a “Fair and Balanced” television antidote by day and openly conservative-leaning opinion by night. But it was only in the last couple of years that MSNBC, long struggling for an identity and lagging, established itself as a liberal alternative to Fox News Channel in prime time, finding improved ratings in the mistrust of the mainstream media that had grown among on the left during the Bush years and the Iraq war.

The presidential campaign, and the partisan and ideological intensity surrounding it, has been the perfect subject for both sides, providing endless fodder to play to the persuasions of their audience and mock the views expressed on the rival network.

The result is a return to a “great tradition of American journalism,” Mr. Wald said. “Basically you chose your news outlet if it made you happy, if it reinforced all your views.”

Indeed, voters who primarily get their news from Web sites like The Huffington Post by day and MSNBC by night, and those who primarily get theirs from The Drudge Report by day and Fox News Channel by night would have entirely different views of the candidates and the news driving the campaign year. (At second place in the ratings, behind Fox News Channel, CNN is maintaining a far more traditional approach to news this year.)

When Politico.com reported on Oct. 21 that the Republican National Committee had spent $150,000 on clothing for Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, Mr. Olbermann interrupted his 8 p.m. program on MSNBC to promote the story and discuss it, as did Rachel Maddow, whose program follows.

Fox News Channel reported it first the next morning, on “Fox & Friends,” in a segment in which the report was described as sexist and unfair, and Bill O’Reilly and Ms. Van Susteren later criticized the news media on their programs for giving it as much attention as they had.

“It was ridiculous,” said Mr. O’Reilly, singling out The New York Times in particular for covering the purchase.

That was a role reversal from spring 2007, when news broke that former Senator John Edwards had paid $400 for a haircut out of his Democratic presidential campaign account.

Mr. Olbermann named Mr. Hannity the “Worst Person in the World,” a running feature on his program, for making fun of Mr. Edwards’s haircut and showing video of him styling his hair before an interview.

Mr. O’Reilly had said of Mr. Edwards at the time: “He runs around telling Americans the system is rigged, while paying $400 for a haircut. This guy is a one-man sitcom.”

Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism at the Pew Research Center, said, “To some extent, they are reverse images of each other.”

The group has studied the tone and content of the election-year coverage and found that Mr. McCain has been the subject of more negative reports in general than has Mr. Obama on issues that include assessments of their performances in polls, the debates and running their campaigns.

But within that universe, the study found, the share of positive reports on Mr. McCain at Fox News was above the average of the news media at large, and the share of negative reports about Mr. Obama was higher, too. (The study found that the mix of positive and negative was roughly equal for them on Fox.)

And the study found that MSNBC featured a higher percentage of negative reports about Mr. McCain than the rest of the news media and a higher share of positive reports about Mr. Obama. CNN was more generally in line with the average.

Mr. Rosenstiel said Fox News Channel and MSNBC showed ideological differences, “obviously more so at night.” And executives at those networks said that opinion was kept to their prime-time lineups and away from their news reporting.

Officials at the Obama and McCain campaigns said in interviews last week that they believed they were treated fairly by the reporters assigned to them at the two networks, including Major Garrett and Carl Cameron at Fox News Channel and Kelly O’Donnell and Lee Cowan at NBC News. (NBC pools some political newsgathering efforts with The New York Times.) And advisers to both campaigns show up for interviews on both networks.

Mr. Obama’s campaign aides said they were pleased when Shepard Smith, the Fox News Channel anchor, this week dressed down Joe the Plumber, a k a Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, for agreeing with a voter who called a vote for Mr. Obama “a vote for the death of Israel.”

Reporting that Mr. Obama supported Israel, Mr. Smith added with exasperation, “It just gets frightening sometimes.”

And Ms. Maddow has expressed skepticism about Mr. Obama’s call for more troops in Afghanistan.

But officials at both campaigns also said there had been plenty of instances when they have perceived bias in regular news coverage. On Fox News Channel, for instance, Gregg Jarrett, referring to Mr. Obama, asked a guest, “Do economists say that in fact his policies could drive a recession into a depression?” (The guest, Donald Lambro of The Washington Times, responded, “Well, I haven’t read that, no.”)

Raising a report about Obama campaign suspicions that Mr. McCain got an unfair peek at questions to be asked of him at a joint forum at the Saddleback Church, Mr. McCain’s campaign wrote to NBC News in August, “We are concerned that your news division is following MSNBC’s lead in abandoning nonpartisan coverage of the presidential race.”

And sometimes the approaches have been noticeable simply through what the networks cover. After NPR reported late last week that a McCain supporter, former Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger, questioned whether Ms. Palin was “prepared to take the reins of the presidency,” MSNBC repeated it roughly 20 times over the course of the day, CNN mentioned it four times, a review of programming on the monitoring service ShadowTV found. And Fox News Channel did one segment, in which it interviewed Mr. Eagleburger, who apologized and said Ms. Palin was “a quick study.”

Fox News Channel executives would not comment for this article. Phil Griffin, president of MSNBC, agreed that at night his network gave a decidedly opinionated viewpoint.

“All of our material is based on fact — our guys work really hard on it, and the point-of-view shows make their conclusions,” Mr. Griffin said. “In this modern era, you’ve got a variety of places that look at the day’s events. Some you respect more than others, others you recognize as having a point of view, some you see as factual in a different way, and it all blends together into how you make your decision for what’s going on.

“The burden is a little more on the individual.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the Fox News Channel anchor Gregg Jarrett as Greg Palkot. Another version misspelled Mr. Jarrett’s given name as Greg.

    A Surge on One Channel, a Tight Race on Another, NYT, 2.11.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/us/politics/02tube.html

Clay Felker, Magazine Pioneer, Dies at 82

July 2, 2008
The New York Times
By DEIRDRE CARMODY

Clay Felker, a visionary editor who was widely credited with inventing the formula for the modern magazine, giving it energetic expression in a glossy weekly named for and devoted to the boisterous city that fascinated him — New York — died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 82.

His death was of natural causes, said his wife, the author Gail Sheehy. He had had throat cancer in his later years.

Mr. Felker edited a number of publications besides New York magazine. There were stints at Esquire; The Village Voice; Adweek; Manhattan, inc.; and others; he created an opposite-coast counterpart to New York and called it New West.

But it was at New York that he left his biggest imprint on American journalism. He founded it as a Sunday supplement to The New York Herald Tribune in 1964. Four years later, after the newspaper had closed, he and the graphic designer Milton Glaser reintroduced New York as a glossy, stand-alone magazine.

New York’s mission was to compete for consumer attention at a time when television threatened to overwhelm print publications. To do that, Mr. Felker came up with a distinctive format: a combination of long narrative articles and short, witty ones on consumer services. He embraced the New Journalism of the late ’60s: the use of novelistic techniques to give reporting new layers of emotional depth. And he adopted a tone that was unapologetically elitist, indefatigably trendy and proudly provincial — in a sophisticated, Manhattan-centric sort of way. The headlines were bold, the graphics even bolder.

The look and attitude captured the attention of the city and influenced editors and designers for years to come. Dozens of city magazines modeling themselves after New York sprang up around the country.

Mr. Felker’s magazine was hip and ardent, civic-minded and skeptical. It was preoccupied with the foibles of the rich and powerful, the fecklessness of government and the hijinks of wiseguys. But it never lost sight of the complicated business and cultural life of the city. Articles were often gossipy, even vicious, and some took liberties with sources and journalistic techniques.

Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Gloria Steinem and others in Mr. Felker’s stable of star writers helped give the magazine national prominence. Meanwhile, what he called its “secret weapon,” its service coverage — on where to eat, shop, drink and live — kept many readers coming back.

Mr. Felker eventually lost New York to Rupert Murdoch in a bitter takeover battle in 1977. But his influence can still be felt in the current magazine, from its in-crowd tone to its ubiquitous infographics and inventive typography tailored to each article.

“Clay was obsessed with power, and he invented a magazine in the image of that obsession,” said Adam Moss, New York’s current editor. “His New York took you into backrooms and boardrooms and reported on the secret machinations of the city’s players.”

Mr. Felker’s roster of writers also included Ken Auletta, Julie Baumgold, Steven Brill, Elizabeth Crow, Gael Greene, Nicholas Pileggi, Richard Reeves, Dick Schaap, Mimi Sheraton and John Simon. Many of them called him the best editor in the country, although some said he was autocratic and took joy in hectoring and humiliating them.

“His voice, his personality, his superhuman animation were horrifying, of course, but they were also the best part of working with him,” Ms. Crow, who later became editor of Mademoiselle and who died in 2005, wrote in 1975.

“Clay’s booming tenor voice was simply the most noticeable manifestation of the 100 percent in-your-face and in-your-ears and in-your-brain atmosphere he created wherever he went.”

The supercharged atmosphere of New York was a long way from Webster Groves, Mo., where Clay Schuette Felker grew up. (His German immigrant forebears had changed their name from von Fredrikstein to Volker and later anglicized it as Felker.) Early references list Mr. Felker’s birth date as Oct. 2, 1925; he later gave it as Oct. 2, 1928. His father, Carl, was the managing editor of The Sporting News; his mother, Cora Tyree Felker, had been women’s editor of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch before having children.

After enrolling at Duke University, Mr. Felker left college for a three-year hitch in the Navy before returning to graduate in 1951. At Duke he edited the undergraduate newspaper and married Leslie Aldridge, another undergraduate. The marriage ended in divorce, as did his second marriage, to Pamela Tiffin, an actress.

In 1984 he married Gail Sheehy, who first wrote for him at The New York Herald Tribune and who later became widely known as the author of “Passages” and other books.

After college, Mr. Felker was a reporter for Life magazine for six years and worked on the development of Sports Illustrated. He later became features editor of Esquire but quit when his rival, Harold Hayes, got the top job. In 1963 he joined The Herald Tribune and became founding editor of the supplement New York.

When he and Mr. Glaser rolled out the revamped, stand-alone version in 1968, the reviews were mixed. “Though occasional critics find New York excessively slick and too often frivolous, the magazine undeniably generates excitement — an excitement that is winning readers not just in Manhattan but in urban centers across the country,” Newsweek said in 1970.

Others were less impressed. “Boutique journalism,” Mr. Breslin called it when he quit the magazine in 1971, fed up, he said, with its dilettante attitude. Ms. Steinem was bothered by the magazine’s East Side orientation. “When the city is falling apart, we are writing about renovating brownstones,” she said.

But Ms. Steinem stayed on as a staff writer and was rewarded when Mr. Felker helped her and others start the feminist magazine called Ms. He inserted a 40-page preview of Ms. in New York’s issue of Dec. 20, 1971, and helped finance the first issue.

Many of Mr. Felker’s writers followed him from The Herald Tribune. One, Mr. Wolfe, the magazine’s most visible stylist, shared many of Mr. Felker’s views and thrived on the freedom his boss gave him to write satiric, sometimes savage articles about what became known as the New Society.

“Together they attacked what each regarded as the greatest untold and uncovered story of the age — the vanities, extravagances, pretensions and artifice of America two decades after World War II, the wealthiest society the world had ever known,” Richard Kluger wrote in his book “The Paper: The Life and Death of The New York Herald Tribune” (Alfred A. Knopf, 1986).

Probably no article better captured this strain of social-history journalism than one whose title created an American idiom: “Radical Chic.” With unsparing detail and barely concealed mockery, Mr. Wolfe, exhausting 20,000 words, described a fund-raising party given by Leonard Bernstein in his glamorous Manhattan apartment, attended by rich liberals and Black Panthers, the militant proponents of black power who were the recipients of the evening’s charitable event. The article, appearing in June 1970, outraged both the liberals and the Panthers, but the issue sold out.

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.

“Nonsense,” its critics countered. They considered New Journalism fiction masquerading as reportage, and its practitioners as manipulators of reader responses.

One article, about a prostitute and her pimp, titled “Redpants and Sugarman,” drew heavy criticism when it was later revealed that Redpants was a composite figure created from all the prostitutes that the writer, Ms. Sheehy, had interviewed.

Mr. Felker later said he had erred in not letting readers know the truth about Redpants. He said that Ms. Sheehy had originally explained her method in the second paragraph but that he had removed it. “I felt it slowed the story down,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 1995.

“But we learned a lesson,” he said. “Composite is never used any more.”

Few readers flipping through its pages would have mistaken New York as a magazine for the five boroughs. That was never the idea.

“Everybody who worked on New York lived in Manhattan,” Mr. Felker told The Times. “So it was essentially a Manhattan magazine. And I believe that print — now that broadcast has become the dominant mass media — has to be aimed at educated, affluent people.”

He added: “I’ve been criticized for being elitist, but that’s who, broadly speaking, consumes print. That was our set of values — our attitude — to understand how to make life more interesting, to explain New York life.”

In its first year as an independent publication, with an initial circulation of 50,000, New York lost $1.7 million. In the fall of 1969, still in the red, New York went public, offering 20 percent of its stock at $10 a share. The next year, with circulation at 240,000, the magazine finally broke even, and Mr. Felker became publisher as well as editor.

Demanding as his job at New York was, he was hungry for more. In 1974 New York acquired The Village Voice, the liberal New York weekly. (That same year he moved New York into new quarters on Second Avenue, complete with gym, staff dining room and full-time chef; today, the magazine, published by New York Media Holdings LLC, has headquarters in the former Newsweek building on Madison Avenue). In 1976 Mr. Felker started a clone of New York for the California market, calling the magazine New West.

By the end of that year, Rupert Murdoch, the Australian press baron who had just paid $30 million to add The New York Post to his chain of newspapers in Australia, Britain and the United States, made an offer to buy New York. It set off several weeks of high drama, complete with front-page coverage in the New York press.

Mr. Felker refused the Murdoch offer. Then, worried he might lose his magazine, he asked his old friend Katharine Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post, to back him in a bid to keep the company. Mrs. Graham offered to buy out Carter Burden, the principal stockholder, who held 24 percent of the stock. Mr. Burden, who had once been the subject of an unflattering profile in Mr. Felker’s magazine, turned her down.

The next day Mr. Murdoch flew to Sun Valley, Idaho, where Mr. Burden was skiing, and made a deal. Mr. Felker immediately obtained a temporary restraining order to block the sale. Meanwhile, tales of Mr. Murdoch’s lurid tabloid journalism were causing such agitation among New York staff members that they walked off the job an hour before the magazine’s closing deadline, saying they would never work for Mr. Murdoch.

Concerned that the walkout would hurt his efforts to block the sale, Mr. Felker frantically tried to find his writers and get them back to work. After looking through bars on the East Side, he finally found them at a McDonald’s. But by then it was too late to meet the deadline.

And suddenly it was over: Mr. Felker was out. An agreement was signed before dawn on Jan. 7, 1977. Mr. Murdoch gained control of the company and agreed to buy Mr. Felker’s shares for $1.4 million.

Mr. Felker was never able to recreate the brio of New York. In 1978 he joined with Associated Newspapers to buy Esquire and was its editor and publisher until 1981. He became a producer at 20th Century Fox; the editor of Daily News Tonight, an afternoon edition of The Daily News in New York; the editor of Manhattan, inc., a magazine for Wall Streeters; and editor of various smaller publications.

In addition to Ms. Sheehy, Mr. Felker is survived by a sister, Charlotte Gallagher; a daughter, Mohm Sheehy of Cambridge, Mass.; a stepdaughter, Maura Sheehy of Brooklyn; and three stepgrandchildren.

Although repeated surgery to address his throat cancer impinged on his ability to speak in his later years, Mr. Felker continued as a consultant to magazines. In 1994 he became a lecturer at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. The next year the school established the Clay Felker Magazine Center.

The West Coast became his second home. And while he loved teaching, nothing ever quite equaled those high-living and hard-working days when New York City was his muse and New York magazine his darling.

“I know why Clay is such a good editor,” said his friend the novelist and playwright Muriel Resnick. “He works until 8 o’clock. He goes somewhere every night. He’s out with people, he talks to people, he listens to people. And he doesn’t drink.”

David Carr contributed reporting.

    Clay Felker, Magazine Pioneer, Dies at 82, NYT, 2.7.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/business/media/02felker.html