Kaplan transformed the New York Observer and was part of the city's publishing elite during the magazine era's last golden agePeter Kaplan, who died on Friday at 59, of cancer, was an editor whose career spanned and encapsulated what one of his many employees and protégées – John Homans now at New York Magazine – calls the "late Renaissance" of American journalism.It is a career mainly associated with the New York Observer, which he edited for 15 years, but one that also tells a larger story of how the world turned in New York publishing. Kaplan came to the city from Harvard in 1976, when print – newspapers, books, magazines – was arguably the most influential business in the city. Time, Inc was Google. Ivy League editors were princes among the mighty. He went to work at New Times, a bi-weekly feature news magazine, launched a few years before by Jon Larsen (whose father was of the Time, Inc elite) and George Hirsch, a former publisher of New York Magazine, from which all other magazines of the period descended. New York was started by Clay Felker, who all editors aspired to be. (New York, after 45 years as a weekly, has just announced that it is scaling down to a biweekly schedule.)Single title magazine companies seemed like a reasonable model and could be found all over town – or, as it were, midtown. Who didn't want to be in publishing?In 1976, Rupert Murdoch launched a successful hostile takeover of New York Magazine, which also got him its sister publication the... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2013-12-02 00:00:00 UTC ]