Let's say you're a magazine editor and you need to illustrate a special issue about office life: What do you do for art? If you're the editor of Businessweek and you're compiling a special Business @ Work issue in collaboration with readers (a first, according to the magazine's Web site), you just do what New York did in April 2007 with its "Office Life" package and slap Rainn Wilson of NBC's The Office on the cover and in a spread inside. Oh, and you might as well get photographer Chris Buck to shoot him, like New York did.

To justify that cover placement, do a short interview with Mr.  read more »

Los Angeles Magazine's August 2008 issue: New York's July 28, 2008 issue.

After Clay Felker passed away Tuesday morning in Manhattan, The Observer spoke to some who knew him well.

Robert Benton

The first time I ever screamed “fuck” in front of a room full of women was when I got mad at Clay at the Esquire offices. We were having this argument that went up and down the hall and I reached my wits end; I just said, “You fuck!” It came out of my mouth before I knew what I had said. Clay could drive you crazy, but you never stopped caring for him.

Milton Glaser

We were once in Paris.  read more »

When I think of Clay Felker, which is often, it’s at the Peacock Alley in the Waldorf Astoria. I had just come to The Observer in 1994 and I was scared and sweating. Clay offered to meet with me once a week and kick around story ideas. I used to bring a stack of napkins. They were, by the end of breakfast, black with scrawl: call David Garth, Milton Glaser, Mrs. Astor; water, Moynihan, women and money, Brooklyn as the new Paris, Columbia vs. N.Y.U., water mains, Murdoch, CBS News, power.

Clay would sit at the Waldorf and dictate. His Felkerian takes on the world, as many have said, added up to a nonfiction novel embodying Clay’s worldview: power was his subject, exuberance was his drive.  read more »

“The secret of a magazine is passion.”

So said Clay Felker, a giant of journalism who died Tuesday morning in Manhattan at age 82. And the passion which most animated Clay was New York, the city he loved and understood so much that he founded a magazine by that name and mentored more than one generation of the city’s best writers. And while the names he minted—Tom Wolfe, Gloria Steinem, Jimmy Breslin—may loom large, Clay’s true legacy rests in his tireless and electric commitment to young journalists; where other editors saw employees, he saw passion that could be plumbed for new ideas, and channeled into the deep gorge of ambition that rumbles day and night beneath the city.  read more »

Clay Felker, the editor who created New York magazine and sat atop the mastheads of The Village Voice, Esquire, Manhattan, inc., M., and New West, has died.

As far back as 2006, Forbes' James Brady was reporting that the legendary editor was ailing and had been moved to a nursing home. That same year, Mr. Felker's wife, the writer Gail Sheehy, wrote an article for Tango magazine wrote about their life together.  read more »

In an obituary for Mr. Felker on the Web site of the magazine he created first as a supplement to The New York Herald Tribune, then as a stand-alone magazine in 1968, Kurt Andersen (himself a former editor of the magazine) ]]> http://www.observer.com/2008/media/founder-new-york-magazine-clay-felker-passes#comments Clay Felker New York Magazine Tue, 01 Jul 2008 11:06:55 -0400 Matt Haber 71441 at http://www.observer.com http://www.observer.com/2008/re-crossing-delancey

In a signed editorial by Francis X. Clines in today's New York Times, we learn that gentrification is changing the Lower East Side. While Mr. Clines concedes that this is an old story—"Hasn’t that been the case ever since this sliver of Manhattan was laid bare more than a century ago as the crammed tenement haven for immigrants?" he asks—he does seem to feel that the changes in the neighborhood are once again a pressing crisis:

As gentrification rushes in, the neighborhood is fortunate to have the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, so tourists can still walk through the way things were. A preservationist urge is also evident on the streets — from demands for tighter zoning to an “egg rolls and egg creams” block party this Sunday by The Museum at Eldridge Street.

As coincidence would have it, the blog EV Grieve recently posted a scan of Craig Unger's May 28, 1984 New York Magazine cover story "The Lower East Side: There Goes the Neighborhood." (This comes via Gothamist.)  read more »

Will Leitch, editor of Gawker Media's popular sports blog, Deadspin, is joining New York Magazine as a contributing editor. In a farewell post, Mr. Leitch writes:

It is with heavy heart — yet mirthful disposition! — that we announce that our time as Deadspin editor is about to draw to a close. After almost three years of plugging away around here, we are leaving as editor of Deadspin on Friday, June 27. We have accepted a job as a contributing editor for New York magazine. We're excited about it, but, obviously, this has been our baby and our life every day for three years — which is about four decades in blog time — and we're too emotional about the whole thing to get into much more detail about how we feel about the whole matter.

Earlier this year, Mr. Leitch and Vanity Fair's Buzz Bissinger had a very public argument about the differences between journalism and blogging on HBO's Bob Costas Now.

"Brownstoner’s posts tend to read like the reportage of a particularly smart and opinionated community paper. The comment section, by contrast, has become a rolling transcript of the borough’s new anxieties, shameful prejudices, and secret fears. For a long time, those anxieties centered on being left out or pushed out—hopeful buyers or displaced renters thwarted by prices rising out of control."–The What You Are Afraid Of, Adam Sternbergh, New York Magazine, May 25, 2008.  read more »

Emily Gould's New York Times Magazine cover story hasn't even landed with a thud on front porches and newsstands yet, but it's already garnering a ton of criticism online.

Some of the critical outlets weren't surprising.

Like Gawker, for example, since Ms. Gould's article is in many ways a rebuke of the site.

Gawker's first post officially linked to Ms. Gould's Times Magazine story received 9,133 views and 170 comments.

A follow-up post clocked in at 8,814 views with 149 comments, while a post announcing comments had closed on NYTimes.com received only 4,150 views and 83 comments.

Sadly, another, about the article's photos, topped out at only 2,556 views and 55 comments.

Finally, it seemed, for Gawker, the horse had been kicked to death.

New York magazine's Daily Intel had a wonkishly incisive post in which its editors calculated how many dollars Ms. Gould was presumed to have been paid for the words "I" and "me" in the 7,937-word article. (Eight hundred and sixty dollars, by Daily Intel's math. One wonders how many I's and me's were in New York's equally controversial first person cover story this week.)  read more »