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Clay Felker, Founder of New York Magazine, Dies at Home
1-Jul-2008
Written by: Ray Padgett
The 82-year-old was founder of “new journalism.”
Throat and mouth cancer finally silenced aggressive and influential journalist Clay Felker, who passed in his Manhattan home Tuesday morning, according to a New York magazine spokesperson.
Felker began his rise to journalistic stardom in the '60s, editing a Sunday supplement to the New York Herald Tribune. He gave his staff, which included writers like Tom Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin, freedom to write on whatever inspired them in the city. His techniques eventually became known as “new journalism,” starting a movement towards more dramatic storytelling and opinionated points of view.
Though the magazine went bankrupt in ’67, Felker quickly bounced back, buying the rights to the name and revamping it as a weekly “guide on how to live in this city,” in his words. By encouraging his writers to express their own personalities in their work, the magazine quickly became a star-making machine, propelling journalists like Gloria Steinman and Wolfe to national fame. He later assisted Steinman in starting woman’s magazine Ms.
A strong personality, Felker drew accusations of bullying and heavy-handedness from some, critiques that his magazine celebrated superficiality from others. However, his styles of arresting layouts, glamorous pictures, and long stories soon became the gold standard for the industry.
Felker lost control of the magazine in ’77 to media tyrant Rupert Murdoch, but he had inspired such loyalty from his writers that most left with him. Aside from a brief stint as editor of Esquire from ’78-’81, he never regained the influence he enjoyed at New York magazine. In later years, he taught magazine journalism at the University of California, Berkley.
"American journalism would not be what it is today without Clay Felker, and neither would New York City," New York Editor-in-Chief Adam Moss said in a statement. "He created a kind of magazine that had never been seen before, told a kind of story that had never been told."
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