Edition: U.S. / Global

Conversations / Clay Felker; He Created Magazines by Marrying New Journalism to Consumerism

Published: April 9, 1995

FEW journalists have left a more enduring imprint on late 20th-century journalism -- an imprint that was unabashedly mimicked even as it was being mocked -- than Clay Felker. The Sunday supplement that he transformed into New York magazine in 1968 became a prototype that heralded a highly personal brand of the New Journalism that was widely imitated by other publications and by television.

Mr. Felker also edited The Village Voice, Esquire, Adweek and Manhattan inc. But it was as founding editor of New York, until he lost control to Rupert Murdoch in 1977, that he shaped his public persona.

Today he teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, where the Felker Magazine Center is being established.

At 69, he is as voluble as ever, intense but somehow relaxed. Reflections pour forth on everything from the autobiography he is working on to the course in Chinese history he is taking at Berkeley. He still loves to talk about journalism, which he did recently in a conversation in his New York City apartment. An edited transcript follows. DEIRDRE CARMODY

Q: When you relaunched New York as an independent publication in 1968, you created a new kind of magazine that has been widely imitated. Did you have a formula?

A. Well, the formula was, we believed that New York was this wonderful place to live. But it was also aimed at us as a group of journalists. Everybody who worked on New York magazine lived in Manhattan. So it was essentially a Manhattan magazine. And I believe that print -- now that broadcast has become the dominant mass media -- has to be aimed at educated, affluent people.

I've been criticized for being elitist, but that's who, broadly speaking, consumed print. We were aimed at the middle class and the upper middle class. That was our set of values -- our attitude -- to understand how to make life more interesting, to explain New York life, and that's where the service aspect of it came in. We felt one of the major activities of people was being consumers. So we ran these endless lists of what's the best this and that.

Q. Had that been done before or was that pretty much your creation?

A. Well, I'm sure that it had been done before. But general interest magazines, as a rule, did not do that. And, in fact, we started something that is so common now that most people aren't even aware of it: We started taking classified ads, which were great.

Q. What do you think of all the city and regional magazines that are essentially clones of New York?

A. Some of them are very good. At one point there were around 80 magazines that used essentially not only our formula but the same layouts that Milton Glaser and Walter Bernard [ the original art directors ] created. And in addition there were foreign magazines.

. . .I call it an eternal magazine formula. . . .I used to compare it to what the conversation is at a round dinner table or a dinner party that well-informed people talk about, that talk about real estate, that talk about business, that talk about personal gossip, you know, what new play or movie, culture, you know, this potpourri. And a lot of people pretended not to understand what the formula was because they didn't understand it was held together by the glue of a shared attitude. . . .

I had been experimenting along with several other editors in town with something that was then called the New Journalism and is now called Literary Journalism. These were people who could do that, using the traditional techniques of English literature in a different form -- which I have always felt communicates not only the facts but the emotions. And these people were those who connected emotionally with our particular kind of audience.

Q. How was New Journalism different from the very vivid and colorful writing that certainly characterized the American press for generations?

A. I don't know who coined the phrase New Journalism. I always felt that it was crazy because when I was at Duke University [ as an undergraduate ] and was wandering around the stacks one day I came across some bound volumes of Greeley's Tribune. It was right after the Civil War period. And I discovered that the writing was as fresh and as dramatic as anything being written and I said, how come I don't read daily newspapers with the same fascination as I'd read this stuff? The reason was that although these were written by basically more or less uneducated people -- they didn't have the broad education that most journalists do now -- they were using all of the classical literary techniques of storytelling, narrative flow.

And so I said, hey, there's another way to write, and I began looking for writers who could write that way. I said, we are going to express our opinion. It's got to be fair and accurate, but it has to be based on a lot of reporting put together in this dramatic form.

Q. Were there any things that you ran that you now wish you hadn't?

A. Not really. I mean, I can't think of anything.

Q. What about the "composites" associated with New York magazine, the idea of having one character who turns out to be an amalgam of people the reporter interviewed, but never letting the reader in on that.

A. Well, that was my own fault. I didn't understand. The writer [ Gail Sheehy, who is Mr. Felker's wife, in a feature about a prostitute called Red Pants ] had said -- I think it was the second paragraph, we still have the galleys -- "here's my method." I took it out because I felt that it slowed the story down.

A Lesson Learned

And it caused the problem, but we learned a lesson. Composite is never used anymore, although it was widely used by Joseph Mitchell [ the author and New Yorker writer ] . That's why I thought it was all right. I knew, say, that when he did his famous series in The New Yorker about the fish market -- Mr. Flood is a composite.

Q. You've been associated with a lot of things since New York, but nothing has had the impact or the success that New York has. Why is that? Why have you not been that successful since?

A. I have been associated with some successes that most people are not aware of. Adweek [ a trade publication ] , for example, was a big success. It started as a kind of giveaway publication. I came in and guided that editorial product while they were building it up on the business side, and we wound up with 70 journalists scattered throughout the country.

Q. What's your life like now?

A. We're going to be bicoastal. I live at Berkeley, which is where I want to live. If I'm going to live in the big city, New York is the big city. San Francisco is wonderful, but I want to live in an academic community. . . . It's another kind of a more informal life, more a life of ideas, whereas New York is a place where it the most uncomfortable, expensive place you can live in and it is all about work. I mean, there is no other reason to be a resident in New York unless you're working here, and it's about deals and who's up and who's down.

Photo: Clay Felker, journalism's alchemist, in his New York home. (James Pearson/The New York Times)