Revive us again! Clay Felker and a hallelujah for the magazine business!

Magazines are slick, sometimes sophisticated plays for reader attention, subscriber loyalty. And I love them.
Their circ departments must know I’m a mark. They’re always sending me their “professional rate” discount offers. So I take more than I need as a sampler.
Those markdowns suggest churn to me. Subscribers get super savings so publishers can try to stay even with their declining customer lists.
Maybe its time for another magazine revival. There is a certain sameness about all that pass in front of me.
Clay Felker built the model 40 years ago as New York. The glossy challenged even The New Yorker, the one legendary journalist Harrison Salisbury famously called “perhaps the best magazine ever.”
Everywhere you looked editors imitated New York’s graphic design by Milton Glaser, the narrative writing style by the likes of Tom Wolfe or Jimmy Breslin and the sassy service information.
When I became a newspaper features editor, our tribe was still trying to borrow as much of the tone as we could get away with.
Felker came out of The New York Herald Tribune tradition. It was said The Trib’s editors went out for sex at lunchtime, while The New York Times editors merely went for a drink.
Sexiness was and is a main ingredient to compete with other media, especially when TV does more show and tell than even movies once thought they could get away with.
New York’s groundbreaking editor invented a formula without being formulaic.
“American Journalism would not be what it is today without Clay Felker,” said the magazine’s current editor, Adam Moss. The Times quotes his statement in an appropriately generous obit. Felker died at age 82 in his Manhattan home. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/business/media/02felker.html?ex=1372737600&en=20a30abd0cea6d55&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
He was middle-aged and I was starting out when he taught me editors could be full of themselves. And how!
Felker and his friends Ben Bradlee, executive editor of The Washington Post, and Tom Winship, editor of The Boston Globe, spoke like a trio of mythological Graces, or maybe it was Titans, to our graduate journalism class at Columbia University.
Honestly, those egos sucked the oxygen right out of the classroom.
Humility has its place in editing. But so does chutzpah, the creative life of Clay Felker shows.
In the reinvention of modern media on all print and broadcast and digital platforms, journalism will need a revivalist of his style.