New York (magazine)

• 1. Introduction

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  New York magazine was born twice. Its first life began in 1963, not as a standalone publication, but as the Sunday supplement of the New York Herald Tribune. When the Tribune collapsed in 1966, the magazine collapsed with it. Two years later, editor Clay Felker and designer Milton Glaser bought the name, found Wall Street backing through investors including Armand G. Erpf, and relaunched it as a glossy weekly on the 8th of April 1968. That founding issue already contained a piece by Tom Wolfe, who titled it "You and Your Big Mouth: How the Honks and Wonks Reveal the Phonetic Truth about Status."

  What Felker and Glaser set out to build was deliberately rougher, more street-level, and more commercially minded than The New Yorker or The New York Times Magazine. The result became a cradle of New Journalism, a seedbed for writers who would define American magazine culture for decades, and one of the first publications explicitly designed to appeal to both men and women. The questions worth following are these: how did a scrappy city weekly become a national institution? And what happens when the city in your name stops being your main subject?

• 2. The Founding Circle

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  The office where it all started sat on the top floor of the old Tammany Hall clubhouse at 207 East 32nd Street, a building Milton Glaser owned. Glaser and his deputy Walter Bernard designed each issue and brought in artists including Jim McMullan, Robert Grossman, and David Levine to produce covers and illustrations. Jack Nessel, Felker's number-two from the Herald Tribune days, joined as managing editor.

  Within the first year, Felker had gathered a roster of contributors who gave the magazine its distinctive voice. Gloria Steinem wrote a politics column. John Simon replaced Harold Clurman as theater critic and became notorious for the harshness of his reviews. Gael Greene, writing as "The Insatiable Critic," reviewed restaurants in a baroque prose style that leaned heavily on sexual metaphor. Barbara Goldsmith produced a series called "The Creative Environment," interviewing figures including Marcel Breuer, I. M. Pei, George Balanchine, and Pablo Picasso about their creative process.

  Financially, the early years were precarious. Board member Alan Patricof later recalled that the magazine "may have touched into the black for a quarter, then out of it, but it was not significantly profitable." The publication survived on editorial ambition rather than commercial momentum, a condition that would not last long under its next owner.

• 3. New Journalism and the Story Factory

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  Tom Wolfe's 1970 piece "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's" captured something essential about New York magazine's appeal. The article described a fundraiser for the Black Panthers held in Leonard Bernstein's apartment, placing high culture and political radicalism in comic collision. Controversy followed, but so did attention.

  Nik Cohn's 1976 story "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night" traced a young man in a working-class Brooklyn neighborhood who spent his weeks waiting for Saturday nights at a local disco called Odyssey 2001. The piece became a sensation and served as the direct basis for the film Saturday Night Fever. Twenty years on, Cohn admitted in a follow-up piece in New York that he had invented the central character and most of the story.

  In 1972, the magazine's year-end issue incorporated a 30-page preview of the first issue of Ms. magazine, then being edited by Gail Sheehy contributor Gloria Steinem. A cover story by Gail Sheehy about the Beale household of East Hampton, titled "The Search for Grey Gardens," directly led to the Maysles brothers' acclaimed documentary of the same name. The magazine was not merely reporting on culture; it was generating it.

• 4. Ownership, Upheaval, and the Murdoch Years

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  In 1976, Australian media baron Rupert Murdoch bought the magazine in a hostile takeover, forcing both Felker and Glaser out. A parade of editors followed through the remainder of the decade: James Brady, Joe Armstrong, John Berendt, and briefly Jane Amsterdam.

  In 1980, Murdoch brought in Edward Kosner, the former editor of Newsweek, and simultaneously absorbed Cue, a listings magazine that had covered New York City since 1932. Kosner shifted the magazine toward newsmagazine-style cover stories, trend pieces, and consumer service features, as well as close coverage of the glitzy New York scene built around figures like Donald Trump and Saul Steinberg. The magazine was profitable for most of the 1980s. The term "the Brat Pack" entered the language via a 1985 cover story in the magazine.

  Murdoch sold his magazine holdings in 1991 to K-III Communications, a partnership controlled by financier Henry Kravis. Budget pressure followed. Kosner left in 1993 for Esquire. His successor, Kurt Andersen, co-creator of the humor monthly Spy, moved quickly to bring in younger writers including Jim Cramer, Walter Kirn, Michael Tomasky, and Jacob Weisberg. In August 1996, Andersen was fired. He later said the real reason was his refusal to kill a story about a rivalry between investment bankers Felix Rohatyn and Steven Rattner that had troubled Kravis, who was part of the magazine's ownership group.

• 5. The Moss Reinvention

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  At the end of 2003, financier Bruce Wasserstein bought New York for $55 million and installed Adam Moss as editor in early 2004. Moss had founded the New York weekly 7 Days and then edited The New York Times Magazine. His relaunch that fall added two new sections: "The Strategist," devoted to service, food, and shopping, and "The Culture Pages," covering the city's arts scene.

  The redesigned magazine accumulated National Magazine Awards rapidly: general excellence in 2006, 2007, 2010, 2011, 2014, and 2016, plus Magazine of the Year in 2013. Design director Chris Dixon and photography director Jody Quon were named Design Team of the Year by Adweek in 2008. A cover created by artist Barbara Kruger about Eliot Spitzer's prostitution scandal won Cover of the Year from the American Society of Magazine Editors and Advertising Age that year. The following year, a cover headlined "Bernie Madoff, Monster" won Best News and Business Cover from the same organization.

  Restaurant critic Adam Platt won a James Beard Award in 2009. The Underground Gourmet critics Rob Patronite and Robin Raisfeld won two National Magazine Awards. The "Strategist" department alone won seven National Magazine Awards in eleven years. When Wasserstein died in 2009, David Carr of The New York Times wrote that he had "recaptured the original intent of the magazine's founder, Clay Felker" by making it the best place to understand modern New York.

• 6. Going Digital and Going National

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  The magazine's first website launched in 2001 at nymetro.com, and by 2006 the company had relaunched it as nymag.com while simultaneously building a network of standalone verticals. Grub Street and Daily Intelligencer both launched in 2006; Vulture followed in 2007; The Cut arrived in 2008. By July 2010, digital advertising accounted for one-third of the company's total ad revenue. That August, David Carr observed that New York was "fast becoming a digital enterprise with a magazine attached."

  In December 2013, the magazine announced it would shift from 42 print issues per year to 26 plus three special editions, moving to a biweekly schedule the following March. On the 24th of September 2019, Vox Media purchased New York magazine and its parent company, New York Media LLC. Pam Wasserstein became Vox Media's president.

  The Pulitzer Prize for Criticism opened to magazines in 2016. Since then, New York's critics have won twice: Jerry Saltz in 2018, and Andrea Long Chu in 2023. Three more critics were finalists: Justin Davidson in 2020, Craig Jenkins in 2021, and Sara Holdren in 2024. Stories from the magazine have been adapted into films and television series including Saturday Night Fever (1977), Hustlers (2019), Inventing Anna (2022), and The Watcher (2022), extending the magazine's influence well beyond its pages.

• 7. Puzzles, Competitions, and the Crossword Legacy

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  Stephen Sondheim contributed a cryptic crossword to every third issue for the magazine's entire first year of publication. The puzzles were extremely complex. Sondheim eventually stepped away to write his next musical, passing the job to Richard Maltby, Jr. For many years the magazine also syndicated the cryptic crossword from The Times of London.

  Beginning in early 1969, Mary Ann Madden ran a literary competition in two out of every three issues, inviting readers to submit humorous poetry or wordplay on a rotating theme. One memorable entry, submitted for a competition calling for humorous epitaphs, offered this for Geronimo: "Requiescat in Apache." Madden ran 973 installments before retiring in 2000. Entries numbered in the hundreds, sometimes thousands, each week. Winners over the years included David Mamet, Herb Sargent, and Dan Greenburg. David Halberstam once claimed to have submitted 137 times without ever winning.