Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco, Look started in Des Moines. So what magazines came from New York City?
NEW YORK MAGAZINE
New York magazine’s roots were in a newspaper: It began in 1963 as a Sunday magazine supplement in the New York Herald Tribune. When the paper folded in 1967, former Trib editor Clay S. Felker and graphic designer Milton Glaser turned the supplement into a hip, glossy magazine that focused mostly on city culture and style. Felker and Glaser also put together a group of cutting-edge contributors: feminist activist Gloria Steinem on politics, former Trib film critic Judith Crist on movies, and journalist Tom Wolfe on pop culture, to name a few.
The Felker/Glaser days lasted less than a decade. In 1976 both men were forced out when media mega-mogul Rupert Murdoch bought New York in a hostile takeover. Since then, the magazine has changed hands several times, with each owner bringing in a new editor and a new approach. Adam Moss, the current editor, was hired in 2003 by the most recent purchaser, financier Bruce Wasserstein. Moss has been criticized for being too Manhattan-centric and also for publishing too many non-New York–related stories (like pieces on national politics). But under his leadership, New York magazine’s Web site has flourished: Today the site gets more than 5 million visitors a month.
Fun fact: Milton Glaser—graphic designer of the original New York magazine—may not be a name every New Yorker knows, but every New Yorker does know his most famous logo: I ♥ NY. He created it in 1975 as part of an ad campaign to boost tourism in the city, and it’s been ripped off for everything from dry cleaners’ hangers (“We ♥ our customers”) to T-shirts (“I ♥ spreadsheets”).
MS.
The first issue of the feminist Ms. magazine was a one-time sample inserted into the December 1971 issue of New York magazine. This was an act of bravery for its founders—Gloria Steinem, author and activist Letty Cottin Pogrebin, and several other prominent feminists—and for Clay Felker, the editor of New York. Back in 1971, feminism was controversial, denigrated, and dismissed in the national media; a new women’s magazine that wasn’t about marriage, babies, recipes, and window treatments, but instead covered the politics of equal pay, reproductive rights, and sexism, was a shocker.
Borough with the most miles of streets: Queens (2,443.4 miles).
The first stand-alone issue of Ms. went national in July 1972, and 300,000 copies sold out in eight days. From then on, the magazine was a strong voice for women of all classes, ages, and ethnicities who wanted to read about serious issues from a feminist viewpoint. (For instance, Ms. was the first national magazine to advocate for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.) The magazine often upset advertisers—both because of its outspoken feminist politics and because it ran a monthly feature called “No Comment,” which called out ads that the editors considered offensive to women. In 1977, the magazine slammed an ad that showed a gray-haired man (clothed) and a much-younger woman (in a bikini) on a yacht; the ad’s copy read, “57-ft. yacht for charter…for whatever you have in mind.”
Advertisers weren’t flocking to Ms., so the best solution seemed to be to make it a nonprofit. From 1978 to 1987, Ms. was published through the nonprofit Ms. Foundation: Founded by Gloria Steinem and others, it was the first group that offered money and services to women who wanted to “elevate [their] voices.” But the money problems didn’t go away, and the magazine changed ownership four more times. In 1998, Gloria Steinem and other feminist investors bought back the struggling magazine for $3 million—only to face bankruptcy in 2001. Finally, on December 31, 2001, a group called the Feminist Majority Foundation—also cofounded by Gloria Steinem and dedicated to women’s equality, women’s reproductive health, and nonviolence—stepped in to rescue the magazine. The group moved the operation to the foundation’s Los Angeles headquarters and has been publishing Ms. quarterly ever since.
Fun fact: When Ms. first appeared on the ’zine scene, no one knew how to pronounce its name—or even what the term really meant. Back then, there were two honorifics for women: Miss and Mrs., both of which indicated marital status—unlike Mr., which could be used for all men. Women who were unmarried or who had kept their maiden names had no honorific to use. As early as 1901, an editorial in The Sunday Republican addressed the problem and suggested Ms. as “a more comprehensive term, which does homage to the sex without expressing any views as to their domestic situation.” But it didn’t catch on.
Highest recorded temperature in NYC: 107º F (July 3, 1966) Lowest: –15º F (February 9, 1934).
In 1961, Sheila Michaels, a civil rights worker in New York City, noticed a typo on a letter sent to her roommate: “Ms.” instead of “Miss.” Unmarried and a feminist, she liked the ambiguous term and mentioned it on a feminists’ radio show about eight years later. A friend of Gloria Steinem’s heard the program and suggested it as a title for the magazine. Steinem liked it and decided to use it, but neglected to give credit to Michaels. The pronunciation we know today—“mizz”—was made popular by the magazine.
COSMOPOLITAN
Today, Cosmo is a sexy mag for twenty-something women, but it began in a much less salacious format: as a family magazine in the 1880s. Then, for a few years, it changed its focus to include articles about domestic and foreign policy, with book reviews, color illustrations, and fiction by famous writers like Willa Cather, H. G. Wells, and Edith Wharton. In 1905, media mogul William Randolph Hearst bought Cosmo.
In the 1950s, Americans began buying fewer magazines—television and cheap paperbacks became the new “in” things. Cosmopolitan struggled into the 1960s—until Helen Gurley Brown, who had never run a magazine but had written the popular book Sex and the Single Girl, became Cosmo’s editor-in-chief in 1965. Instead of following the serious path of the old publication, Brown set out to revamp it into a women’s magazine unlike any other. She was convinced that her own experiences as a single woman (men, career, independence) were the perfect material for a magazine that would appeal to a growing market of young women. She put sexy women on the cover, added titillating lines, and filled the magazine with articles that were open about sexuality. Her Cosmo dealt with relationships, fashion, beauty, health, and single life. When Brown finally retired in 1997, she’d been the magazine’s editor for 32 years and had turned Cosmo into the best-selling young women’s magazine in the world.
Fun fact: For all its salacious covers and content, Cosmo’s offices are fairly plain—editors typically keep a low profile. That tone likely comes from Helen Gurley Brown herself. In 2000 she published I’m Wild Again—an autobiography that chronicled some of her sexual adventures as a young woman, but also revealed a more sedate side of her: Brown didn’t drink, smoke, or ever cheat on her husband of 35 years. She also exercised fanatically and poured her considerable energy and passion not into sex, but into her work.
In 1883, an illustrator named John Ames Mitchell took a $10,000 inheritance and started a weekly magazine of humor, commentary, and pictures. From the get-go, Life published up-and-coming illustrators such as Gibson girl creator Charles Dana Gibson (more about him on page 138); Rea Irvin, who later became the art director of The New Yorker; and Norman Rockwell, who painted his first Life cover in 1917. But Mitchell died in 1918, and without his leadership, the magazine lost money through the 1920s and ’30s. But by then, Henry Luce was looking to buy the magazine.
Luce and his business partner Briton Hadden were already publishing Time and other magazines. After Hadden’s death in 1929, Luce began to conceptualize a new type of magazine, one that was news-centered, published weekly, and used photojournalism to tell stories. In 1936, he bought Life for $92,000, strictly to acquire use of its name. Volume 1, Number 1 of the new Life was dated November 23, 1936, and the cover photograph (of the Fort Peck Dam in Montana) was taken by Margaret Bourke-White, who would later become the first American woman to work as a war correspondent. With Luce’s vision and a slew of talented photojournalists—including Bourke, Robert Capa, W. Eugene Smith, and Gordon Parks—circulation boomed. Weekly circulation jumped from 380,000 to 1.5 million within a year. Life reached its high point of 8.5 million readers in 1969, but by then, profits were already declining. Life ended weekly publication in 1972, came back as a monthly magazine in 1978, and ceased publication completely in 2000.
Fun fact: The first Luce/Hadden-published issue of Life featured the birth of a baby named George Story, with a caption that read, “Life Begins.” Over the years, Life reported on Story’s progress as he grew up and had a family of his own. In March 2000, Time, Inc. announced the demise of Life—George Story died of heart failure a month later.
For the history of The New Yorker, turn to page 175.
Manhattan has more sneaker stores than gas stations.