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CJR Grapevine
Double play for women's sports
Now that the Olympics have proved that women and sports make a winning combination, two publishers are planning new magazines that hope to capitalize on the connection. In April, Sports Illustrated will publish the first of at least two test issues, tentatively titled Sports IllustratedWoman. It will be edited by Sandy Bailey, 41, who has also worked at The New York Times and The Washington Post. And the monthly Cond? Nast Sports for Women, to be edited by Lucy Danziger, 37, a former editor at Allure and The New York Times style section, will make its debut in the fall. At least for now, the magazines are staking out different turfs. Cond? Nast - which as the publisher of Mademoiselle, Self, Allure, Glamour, and Vogue has a long track record in successfully marketing to women - says the main target of its new magazine will be women who are athletes, who "enjoy and participate in active sports." Sports Illustrated, on the other hand - which scored by marketing to sports fans - will aim mainly at sports fans who are women. But Sports Illustrated Woman, said Bailey, will not simply be covering more women's sporting events than its brother SI; it will take an entirely different approach to its reporting. "Over all, women have more of an interest in the human side of the story," said Bailey. "Guys would be happy to get 'this just in' about a score or a trade, while women want to know the guy's brother had cancer."
The Washington Post downsizes its "liberal conscience"
After eighteen years as a syndicated columnist at The Washington Post, Colman McCarthy was abruptly notified that his column had "run its course." Citing a marked decline in the number of newspapers that carry his work, managing editor Robert G. Kaiser told McCarthy, 59, his column would be dropped at the end of 1996. Supporters of the columnist have protested the decision, arguing that the Post needs the balance of McCarthy's progressive voice.McCarthy, who once considered becoming a Trappist monk, is a dedicated peace activist who also teaches classes on nonviolence in local public schools and law schools. The Washingtonian has called him "the liberal conscience of the Post," and the Post itself seemed to agree, featuring the quote in its own Writers Group description of the column. Now, though, "I was told I had become 'just a budget item,'" McCarthy told cjr. "I am mystified as to what the editors meant by saying my column had 'run its course.' The issues I was writing about - racism, militarism, social justice, human rights, civil liberties - have not run their course, unless I'm overlooking something." Asked whether he was saying that his column had been dropped because he was too liberal, McCarthy respond- ed: "That's a question to ask the Post. I wasn't too liberal for me." Kaiser denied there was any "ideological basis" for the decision. "I urge you to consider," he told cjr, "whether the Post would have run McCarthy's column for eighteen years if we thought it was too liberal." He also denied having told McCarthy he had become "just a budget item." In his farewell Post column McCarthy recalled his nearly-three-decade-long effort to seek out "the experts at love." Wherever he went, he wrote, "unfailingly I could find someone or some group - usually unnoticed - advancing human possibilities." The Creators Syndicate has offered to take up the column.
Germond turns down the decibels
After Jack Germond late last year quit the syndicated McLaughlin Group, the weekly pundit roundtable, some viewers wondered whether the longtime Baltimore Sun political columnist had finally become fed up with a show more renowned for its decibel level than its contributions to civilization.But Germond, 69, tells cjr his departure was simply about "mechanics." "I didn't quit because of the content of the show. I'd been doing it for about fifteen years and it would have been pretty hypocritical to quit now because of that." Citing host John McLaughlin's increasing use of people who weren't regulars and his tendency to stretch out the Friday taping sessions for hours by "fooling around," Germond adds: "What happened was that every Friday I was getting pissed off. One day of the week I'd be pissed off." Still, he had made no secret of his opinion of the show and the host. In Why America Hates the Press, a PBS documentary that aired in October, Germond said he did his time on The McLaughlin Group in order to put his daughter through medical school. (Jessica, now a medical resident, has finished the expensive part of her education.) As Germond says, "I never had any illusion that it was journalism. I never defended it. It was entertainment. And I think that used to irritate John, because he thought it was journalism."
Sayonara to Worldbusiness
When KPMG Peat Marwick, a Big Six international accounting firm, decided to raise its visibility and burnish its image by launching a sophisticated magazine about the brave new world of economic and political globalization, skeptics questioned how independent-minded the wholly-owned quarterly (later a bimonthly) could really be. But from the first issue in January 1995, the New-York-based staff of Worldbusi-ness under editor John Van Doorn, 63, surprised the doubters with a keen and feisty book that featured writers ranging from ?minences grises like Lester Thurow and Kevin Phillips to enfants terribles more often found in the pages of The Nation or Wired. No longer. Worldbusiness folded in December with just two weeks' notice to the staff. Insiders say that after a change in its top management, KPMG grew increasingly impatient with a magazine that encouraged trade with Cuba and profiled the maverick financier Sir James Goldsmith, who is famous for arguing against globalization. Losses in the millions were also a factor - and no wonder. At least two writers report that the business magazine owned by one of the largest accounting firms in the world paid each of them twice - and one of them narrowly escaped a third payment - for the same article.
Stephanopoulos goes pundit
As the articulate and telegenic senior adviser to President Clinton, George Stephanopoulos often appeared on such "newsmaker" programs as ABC's This Week to deliver the administration's latest spin. Now Stephanopoulos, 36, who retired from the White House in January, will be an articulate and tele-genic commenta-tor for ABC News, often appearing on This Week to deliver his opinion of the administration's latest spin. This swift transformation from spinmeister to pundit has distressed some in journalism. A Wall Street Journal op-ed piece called on ABC to demand he come clean about his knowledge of the Clinton scandals the next time the subject comes up on the program; The New York Times's Max Frankel lamented in the Magazine that political analysis of the president would now be provided by "one of the architects of [Clinton's] presidency who just happens to owe his celebrity and new job entirely to that president." But Stephanopoulos, who will also be writing a book and teaching political science at Columbia University, doesn't see it that way. As he told cjr: "Television today is a lot more like the op-ed page at The New York Times than the BBC with a monopoly on the news. The roundtable on This Week is the equivalent of a regular op-ed page. I am self-consciously there to portray opinions and analysis. And while I don't belittle the importance of objectivity, I don't particularly buy the notion that pure objectivity is always more illuminating. I'm proud of what I've done and I think my experience gives me something useful and valuable to contribute."
A fast climber steps on the slow track
People in the news business often pride themselves on cultivating a fine frenzy, and Paul Sagan, 38, has held some of the most frenzied jobs of all. He has been news director at CBS, he designed and launched the twenty-four-hour news channel New York 1, and most recently he was the richly rewarded president and editor of new media at Time Inc. Now he's putting his beeper on hold and leaving his job for "an eighteen-month adventure" - six months in Aspen, Colorado, and a year in Paris. He'll do a little consulting and a lot of reading, writing, reflecting, skiing, and traveling with his wife and their three primary-school-age children.cjr asked him about his unusual decision to call a temporary midstream halt to a booming career."In my business there's so much turmoil and moving around," Sagan said. "When I first went to CBS, the belief was that you stayed forever. Then suddenly that myth was shattered. A lot of people woke up and realized that this was not a forever relationship, and it was pretty embitterin But it taught a lot of people my age that the rules have changed. You have to be responsible for your own life. "I'm not advocating that companies have the right to retire anyone on a day's notice when they're having a bad morning. But I think the idea that you get out of college and forty years later there's retirement - that's not realistic."I have three Emmys at home, and that's great for the ego, but it doesn't mean anything compared to being with my kids. I also think that by stepping out for a little while, I may get a better perspective. Everything's moving at blinding speed, but yet not very quickly at all. It's easy to get caught up in short-term trends for the sake of progress, but a lot of it is spinning as opposed to moving forward. It won't be all done eighteen months from now."
