The 8th of April 1968 marked the first issue of New York magazine, a publication that would fundamentally alter the landscape of American journalism by merging the grit of city life with the polish of high culture. Before this date, the magazine existed only as a Sunday supplement to the New York Herald Tribune, a paper that was already struggling financially. When the Tribune folded in 1966, the nameplate seemed destined for the dustbin of history, but Clay Felker and Milton Glaser saw an opportunity to create something entirely new. They purchased the rights to the name and launched a glossy weekly that was brasher, faster, and more connected to the pulse of New York City than its competitors, The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. The office was located on the top floor of the old Tammany Hall clubhouse at 207 East 32nd Street, a space Glaser owned, which became the incubator for a generation of writers who would define the era. The magazine did not consistently turn a profit in these early years, with one board member later noting that it may have touched into the black for a quarter, then out of it, but was not significantly profitable. Yet, within a year, Felker had assembled a team that included Nicholas Pileggi, Gail Sheehy, and Gloria Steinem, creating a voice that was distinctively New York and impossible to ignore.
Radical Chic and Disco Lies
In 1970, Tom Wolfe published a story that captured the magazine's spirit and the era's contradictions, titled Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's. The article described a benefit party for the Black Panthers held in Leonard Bernstein's apartment, a collision of high culture and low that paralleled New York magazine's ethos and expressed Wolfe's interest in status and class. This piece became a defining moment for the publication, establishing its willingness to tackle the complex social strata of the city with a sharp, often satirical eye. The magazine continued to push boundaries in the 1970s, publishing a 30-page preview of the first issue of Ms. magazine edited by Gloria Steinem in its year-end issue. 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, cementing the magazine's role in shaping cultural narratives. However, not every story was entirely factual. In 1976, journalist Nik Cohn wrote a story called Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night, about a young man in a working-class Brooklyn neighborhood who went to a local disco called Odyssey 2001. The story was a sensation and served as the basis for the film Saturday Night Fever, but twenty years later, Cohn admitted that he had made up the character and most of the story. This revelation highlighted the magazine's sometimes blurry line between reportage and invention, a trait that would become a hallmark of its New Journalism style.
The 1976 acquisition of New York magazine by Australian media baron Rupert Murdoch in a hostile takeover forced founders Clay Felker and Milton Glaser out, ushering in a succession of top editors including James Brady, Joe Armstrong, John Berendt, and briefly Jane Amsterdam. In 1980, Murdoch hired Edward Kosner, the former editor of Newsweek, to replace Armstrong, and the magazine shifted its mix toward newsmagazine-style cover stories, trend pieces, and pure service features. Kosner 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. The magazine was profitable for most of the 1980s, and the term the Brat Pack was coined for a 1985 cover story that captured the zeitgeist of the decade. The magazine focused on the glitzy 1980s New York City scene epitomized by financiers Donald Trump and Saul Steinberg, reflecting the era's excess and ambition. Despite the financial success, the magazine faced internal tensions, particularly when Kosner left in 1993, taking over the editorship of Esquire magazine, and subsequent budget pressure from K-III Communications frustrated the editorial team.
The Digital Pivot and the Strategist
The 21st century brought a radical transformation for New York magazine, beginning with the launch of its first website, nymetro.com, in 2001. In 2004, the magazine was sold to a family trust controlled by financier Bruce Wasserstein for $55 million, and Adam Moss replaced Caroline Miller as editor. Moss relaunched the magazine with two new sections: The Strategist, devoted mostly to service, food, and shopping, and The Culture Pages, covering the city's arts scene. This period marked a shift toward digital-only publication, with the launch of Grub Street, devoted to food, and Daily Intelligencer, later renamed just Intelligencer, its politics site, both in 2006. Vulture, its culture site, launched in 2007, and The Cut, its fashion-and-women's-interest site, in 2008. By July 2010, digital ads accounted for one-third of the company's advertising revenue, and David Carr noted in an August 2010 column that New York magazine was fast becoming a digital enterprise with a magazine attached. The Strategist, in particular, became a powerhouse, winning seven National Magazine Awards in eleven years and generating revenue through affiliate advertising, including the Amazon Associates Program. The magazine also experimented with a holiday pop-up shop called I Found It at the Strategist, blending its digital reach with physical retail experiences.
Storms, Scandals, and the Pulitzer Prize
The 2010s saw New York magazine navigate a series of high-stakes challenges and triumphs, from the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy to the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. In October 2012, New York's offices in lower Manhattan were without electricity in the week following Hurricane Sandy, so the editorial staff published an issue from a quickly constructed temporary newsroom in the midtown office of Wasserstein & Company. The issue's cover, shot by photographer Iwan Baan from a helicopter and showing Manhattan half in darkness, almost immediately became an iconic image of the storm, and Time called it the magazine cover of the year. The image was republished as a poster by the Museum of Modern Art, with proceeds benefiting Hurricane Sandy relief efforts. The magazine also took the top honor at the National Magazine Awards, again receiving the Magazine of the Year award for its print and digital coverage. In 2018, the magazine's art critic Jerry Saltz won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, the first time a magazine critic had won the award since it opened to magazines in 2016. The magazine continued to tackle controversial topics, including a 2019 piece on E. Jean Carroll's accusations against Donald Trump, which had ongoing legal ramifications for the former president. The magazine's ability to adapt to changing times while maintaining its editorial integrity was evident in its continued success and influence.
The Cut, Grub Street, and Cultural Dominance
The 2020s have seen New York magazine expand its digital footprint and cultural influence, with The Cut and Grub Street becoming dominant forces in their respective fields. The Cut, launched in 2008, shifted focus from fashion to women's issues more generally, and in 2018, it published Moira Donegan's essay revealing her as the creator of the controversial Shitty Media Men list, a viral but short-lived anonymous spreadsheet crowdsourcing unconfirmed reports of sexual misconduct by men in journalism. The site also published Everywhere and Nowhere, Lindsay Peoples's essay about the fashion industry's inhospitability to Black voices and points of view. In 2024, The Cut published an article in which a woman confessed to abusing and neglecting her pet cat, Lucky, and advocates took to social media by storm seeking justice for Lucky. Grub Street, covering food and restaurants, was expanded in 2009 to five additional cities served by former nymag.com sister site MenuPages.com, and in 2013, it announced that it would close its city blogs outside New York and bring a more national focus to GrubStreet.com. The magazine also expanded into television and movies, notably with Hustlers, a feature film adapted from a story by Jessica Pressler, and Inventing Anna and The Watcher on Netflix, and Sex Diaries on HBO. The magazine's ability to adapt to new media formats while maintaining its editorial voice has been a key factor in its continued success.
Puzzles, Competitions, and Literary Legacy
New York magazine has long run literary competitions and distinctive crossword puzzles, contributing to its unique literary legacy. 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. Sondheim eventually ceded the job in order to write his next musical, and Richard Maltby, Jr. took over. For many years, the magazine also syndicated The Times of London's cryptic crossword. Beginning in early 1969, for 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 given theme that changed with each installment. Altogether, Madden ran 973 installments of the competition, retiring in 2000. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of entries were received each week, and winners included David Mamet, Herb Sargent, and Dan Greenburg. David Halberstam once claimed that he had submitted entries 137 times without winning. Madden published three volumes of Competition winners, 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. Beginning in 1980, the magazine ran an American-style crossword constructed by Maura B. Jacobson, who retired in April 2011, having created 1,400 puzzles for the magazine, after which the job passed to Cathy Allis Millhauser and then Matt Gaffney. In January 2020, Vulture began publishing daily 10x10 crosswords by two constructors, Malaika Handa and Stella Zawistowski, and continued its expansion into games with the launch of Cinematrix, an addictive movie trivia game, in 2024, followed by Telematrix in 2025.