AN EDITOR REFLECTS
40 Years of CJR

BY JAMES BOYLAN

Every two months, I run into my old pal the Columbia Journalism Review. I remember the old days, when it looked a little crude and uncertain of itself. But that of course was its youth, and mine. Today it is better dressed and its manner is much more polished. Nonetheless, I try to look past the new clothes and see whether it is indeed the same old CJR.

I'm curious because I was, willy-nilly, present at the creation. Serving as its first editor, I helped push cjr's trial issue out into the world forty years ago this fall, and I have wondered many times since that a magazine begun so hesitantly and sketchily has survived -- survived seven deans and nine editors; financial crises and miscalculations; and an increasingly difficult competitive climate, in which it now pays the penalty of having helped to make criticism of journalism widespread and respected.

cjr emerged in a time when a complacent press seemed ripe for scrutiny. The news establishment had largely brushed off the principles stated by the Hutchins Commission in the late 1940s; it scoffed at its few practicing critics; and it believed that journalism schools should not, as it was excrementally put, "foul their own nest." But at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Edward W. Barrett, who became dean in 1956, began to speak up on the shortcomings of the business into which the school was sending its young talent. And I was drawn in when, in January 1960, I proposed that the school start a publication, initially dubbed the Columbia University Journalism Review, in which such issues could be freely and continuously discussed.

The dean, pulling along a sometimes-skeptical faculty, set the project in motion. With a pickup staff and a squad of stringers from across the country, we assembled a sixty-four page "pilot issue." Its centerpiece was a critique of coverage of the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon campaign, and the rest was a mélange of original and reprinted articles, assembled features ("How Now, Sacred Cow?"), and fillers. No advertising, although from the beginning we paid (something, at least) for all original material. We sent it out in October 1961. Somewhat to our surprise, the response was so encouraging that we began regular quarterly publication in spring 1962.

Why was CJR accepted? Partly, I think, because it was a novelty; no truly comparable publication existed, and we tried to make it accessible in two senses -- open to a broad range of opinion and interestingly understandable to all readers, insiders and outsiders. I have also had a hunch since then that there were those who decided that it was time for the press to line up on the side of the angels, and that if there had to be criticism is might as well come from Columbia. In short, approving of CJR may have looked like good p.r. Inevitably, some of our respectable supporters complained as loudly as anybody else if criticism happened to be aimed at them.

Editorially, the magazine gained momentum in its early years in part because it dealt with the handling of outsize news -- the Bay of Pigs, the missile crisis, the assassinations in 1963 and 1968, the cold war and the growing American involvement in Vietnam, the conflicts over racial equity, the troubles of the space program. We were fortunate in recruiting Ben H. Bagdikian, then capital correspondent for The Providence Journal, who became both our anchor in Washington and press critic at large, and played a large role in defining the tone and character of the magazine. He had worthy teammates and successors in Jules Witcover and Christopher Hanson.

At the same time, we had to deal increasingly with the internal stresses of journalism. These were hardly placid times. Through the 1960s, major newspaper strikes disrupted and sometimes destroyed urban newspapers. There was a looming peril of the absorption of journalism into corporate conglomerates; Bagdikian issued one of the first warnings, in 1967. In addition, there was growing tension between journalism and government, as reporters sought to report on matters cloaked by judicial or national-security restrictions.
At the end of the 1960s, the magazine's agenda shifted decisively. In the 1960s, cjr had focused on the shortcomings of the press. But in the 1970s, as the conflict between press and government ignited, notably after the publication of the secret Pentagon Papers in 1971 and the Watergate exposés a year later, cjr became nearly as much a defender as a critic of the press. Nor am I sure that criticism ever fully regained the upper hand.

As of 1968, cjr was no longer alone. Starting with the Chicago Journalism Review, dissident journalists produced publications that criticized the news establishments of their own cities. cjr gave them help by displaying their work, but most soon wilted under pressure. The survivors were the most ambitious -- the Washington Journalism Review (still publishing as the American Journalism Review) and MORE, which sought to be the voice of the New York working press. In 1978, MORE, in financial trouble, was signed over to CJR, which it had regarded as its most bitter rival.

But CJR's true competition was not to come from other reviews. As taboos about criticizing journalism evaporated, the kind of criticism that cjr provided, once an innovation, was now increasingly a part of mainstream journalism. Newspapers, magazines, television, radio, and (much later) the Internet spawned media critics by the hundreds. CJR was faced with finding the peculiar and particular things it did best, at the same time carrying out its charter obligation to evaluate the performance of journalism. And it also had the task of staying afloat without losing more money than its parent school could afford.

An initial response was to try to become bigger. CJR's frequency increased from quarterly to bimonthly in 1971; it never made the further jump to monthly publication, and has always had a problem appearing timely. Advertising was added in 1975. For a time, plans were also made to expand CJR into a kind of Atlantic Monthly of media criticism, with emphasis on consumer rather than professional appeal -- somewhat the same experiment that the magazine Brill's Content attempted, without lasting success, in the 1990s. A major campaign took the circulation to near 40,000, but it ultimately settled back closer to 30,000. It is now 22,000.

The second half of cjr's forty years have seemed to me (and now I was primarily an observer) much more difficult than the first. For one thing, CJR came to operate on a financial scale far greater than that demanded at the time of its one-horse beginnings. At least twice in the 1990s, so I was informed, deficits threatened the magazine's very existence. Moreover, cjr has gone through a series of renovations as each editor seeks to redefine its role.

Yet I look at today's CJR and realize that I still recognize the old thing. There is something at its core that has continued from the first, something that overcomes mere changes of style or personnel. As a consequence, it has continued as a seemingly permanent part of the American journalism scene.
I have my own guess about that something -- that the magazine endures in part because of what it has not been. First, it has not been dynastic. I shudder to think what might have been had I or any of my successors remained in the editor's chair for a lifetime. Or had an imperial dean seized it as a personal organ. Second, it has not been nostalgic, as it might have become had it continued with one aging stable of writers and one set of doctrines. CJR has been nobody's monopoly, and nobody's mouthpiece.

Its editors, no matter how they differed in approach, remained faithful to the effort to expand the boundaries of criticism and discussion. Today, they continue to cultivate, in contemporary ways, those same issues of responsibility and independence and honesty that were our staples in the 1960s.

Perhaps most important, CJR is universally understood to be open, as it has proved by publishing the work of literally hundreds, even thousands, of writers who have something to say about journalism. Drawing on such support, it has carried on its mission of being a reliable companion and adviser as American journalism has moved through tough, tougher, and now toughest times over the last forty years.
 
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The author was founding editor of CJR.