Magazine Professionals Skeptical of Success : New Publisher Tries to Revive U.S. News

In the high buildings around Manhattan, where most of America’s magazines are published, U.S. News & World Report is not a favorite cousin.

That tedious little book out of D.C.? It’s dull. It’s odd. It isn’t published in New York. No one that anyone knows reads it.

“I’ve scanned it on occasion,” Ray Cave, managing editor of Time magazine, said.

“It doesn’t move with a great deal of enthusiasm for the news,” Newsweek Editor Rick Smith offered diplomatically.

‘Magazine Is a Dog’

“C’mon,” growled another leading magazine executive, “the magazine is a dog.”

The men in the tall buildings also are skeptical about Mortimer B. Zuckerman, the real estate mogul who six months ago bought U.S. News with promises to revitalize it. Even some of his own employees dismiss him. “He’s a journalism groupie,” one U.S. News staff member said. “He likes hanging around the reporters’ locker room.”

Despite such sentiment, Canadian-born Zuckerman--a self-avowed journalistic amateur, naturalized American citizen, millionaire real estate developer, lawyer and professor--intends to transform the least-read of America’s three news weeklies into the magazine--to borrow an advertising phrase--of a new generation.

Zuckerman, 47, bought the magazine last October, largely because he is convinced that most young Americans’ world views are converging with those of the archetypal reader of U.S. News, a middle-aged Midwestern businessman.

“It was unthinkable to imagine when I was in college that Ronald Reagan would get two-thirds of the vote between ages 18 and 30,” Zuckerman said, explaining why he bought U.S. News. “But, in the most recent election, that’s what he got.”

Shifting of Attitudes

“It was among his strongest constituencies, and it reflects, I think, a different view of the country, a shifting of the population, a shifting of attitudes, both cultural and political. The magazine with the most authentic voice for this group, with a history connecting it to this new mainstream of America, is U.S. News,” Zuckerman said.

The magazine was founded by David Lawrence in 1926 as the United States Daily, a kind of abridged Congressional Record. His approach, which was changed only grudgingly in 50 years, was a utilitarian format with all the subtlety of a crew cut: a mix of staccato news briefs and articles in memo form with key words underlined.

Although the largest concentration of its generally conservative readers live in Orange County, U.S. News draws a higher percentage of its readers from Midwest and Southern states and much lower percentage from Eastern states than either Newsweek or Time. It is the magazine, geographically, of the center.

With 2.1 million readers as of June, 1984, it also is the magazine of the minority, lagging behind Newsweek’s 3 million and Time’s 4.6 million.

Smaller Profits

U.S. News also makes a much smaller profit. The year before Zuckerman bought it, the magazine reportedly earned less than $2 million, about a quarter of what some analysts had expected from its roughly $90 million in revenues.

Zuckerman will not detail his plans for turning U.S. News around, but signs suggest that he may follow the course that many publishing insiders consider his best hope: appealing to the growing audience for business news. According to this view, the five-year circulation increases experienced by Forbes, Fortune, Business Week and the Wall Street Journal signal a growing appetite for business reporting among younger readers, a trend that Zuckerman believes will continue.

Zuckerman acknowledges that he plans to initiate a series of feature departments devoted to such subjects as personal financial services, technology and economics. However, U.S. News still will avoid the personality and arts departments popular in Time and Newsweek. Some have suggested that one model Zuckerman has in mind is the Economist, the British economic and business magazine that combines conservative politics and sophisticated economics with an acerbic prose style.

“I’m interested in a fundamentally serious magazine,” Zuckerman said, “dealing with public policy and issues political and economic.”

Paid $164 Million

Zuckerman paid $164 million for U.S. News last October, outbidding such publishing veterans as New Republic Chairman Martin Peretz, the Hearst Corp. and Forbes magazine’s Malcolm Forbes. The developer’s ardor might have been intensified by his real estate company’s partnership with U.S. News in the building of the magazine company’s downtown Washington headquarters, which has an estimated $200-million market value.

However, veterans of the news magazine field doubt Zuckerman’s chances of transforming the poor cousin of news weeklies into something more.

One reason is Zuckerman himself--Zuckerman the outsider, the realtor. “I know Mort, and we talked about U.S. News,” one leading executive said. “I think he had no idea what to do with that magazine when he bought it. It’s an ego trip for him. I don’t see how you can escape that conclusion.”

But Zuckerman has encountered skepticism before and, so far, has managed a record of accomplishment--and an accompanying self-confidence.

For example, he was graduated from his native Montreal’s McGill University at 19. In the next five years, he earned law degrees from McGill, a master’s of law from Harvard and an MBA from Wharton.

By the time he was 29, Zuckerman had made $5 million in real estate. The next year, he started his own firm, Boston Properties, and ran it while teaching at Harvard and part time at Yale. Today, Forbes lists Zuckerman, who became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1977, as one of the 400 richest men in America, estimating his net worth last October at more than $200 million.

In 1980, he bought the struggling 123-year-old Atlantic Monthly, hired a new editor, quadrupled its news budget and made news by publishing a revealing interview with Budget Director David A. Stockman and by serializing two major books, Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon B. Johnson and Seymour Hersh’s portrait of Henry A. Kissinger.

“We have more than tripled our ad base and raised circulation. . . . I think we will confound the skeptics,” Zuckerman said, predicting a profit for the Atlantic by 1986.

Some Are Skeptical

Even granting success at the Atlantic, many of the pros say, Zuckerman is in over his head at U.S. News. “When you’re playing around with those monthlies, you can lose 6, 7 million (dollars) maybe, if you hit a real bad patch,” one leading magazine executive said. “But a weekly will lose money like I think he never dreamed of.”

However, not everyone is writing off Zuckerman. “He really has a considerable intellectual capacity,” former Boston Globe Editor Thomas Winship said. “He’s got a lot of daring and a pretty good eye for picking talent. I’m not the pessimist that most people are about very bright people. I think he’s got a 50-50 chance.”

Zuckerman’s first major step in pursuit of his new audience was to hire Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Shelby Coffey III to replace Editor Marvin Stone, who held the post for nine years. Coffey was in charge of national news at the Post and was rumored to be one of the leading candidates to succeed Post Executive Editor Benjamin C. Bradlee.

But the choice of Coffey is surprising in that he is best known as editor of the Post Style section, a pioneer of the kind of personality journalism, orchid-and-lily prose and fashionable subject matter, that are the antithesis of everything for which U.S. News stands.

Coffey, however, dismisses concern about his background. “Any editor has to understand his audience and his product. The magazine is going to keep growing, and we are very committed to its traditions of straightforward news coverage.”

Zuckerman also insists that the magazine’s basic personality will remain the same. Emulating Time or Newsweek, he agreed, “would be suicide.”

Gradual Changes

The changes may come gradually. Zuckerman has hired widely admired designers Walter Bernard and Milton Glazer to do covers for the magazine and British designer Edwin Taylor to develop prototypes of complete graphic redesigns. The magazine also will have the capacity to run full color pictures on every page by July.

In addition, Zuckerman has hired David R. Gergen, former Reagan Administration communications director, and former GOP Rep. Barber B. Conable Jr. of New York as columnists. Former Times of London Editor Harold Evans has spent the last six months working on prototypes of an editorial overhaul.

Zuckerman and his team already have merged business operations with the Atlantic (a move expected to save $500,000 a year) and have done away with several of U.S. News’ more curious business practices, such as a billing system that cost the magazine millions in lost interest. These changes alone would have doubled last year’s profits, sources said.

However, most agree that the real task will be to attract that younger audience to U.S. News without alienating the loyal 2 million who subscribe now.

Actually, the three news weeklies have demographically similar readerships, although Newsweek has the best educated audience and Time the wealthiest. But, in income and education, U.S. News readers lag far behind those of Business Week, Forbes and Fortune--a factor that could loom large if U.S. News tries to move closer to that audience and its advertisers.

Bright Spot

A bright spot, Zuckerman and Executive Vice President James Glassman emphasize, is that U.S. News’ share of readers age 18 to 34 swelled by 25% in 1983, dropping the median age of U.S. News readers to 40.2, only 3 1/2 years older than Time’s and Newsweek’s.

But some question whether Zuckerman, who supported the presidential candidacy of Sen. Gary Hart (D-Colo.), can happily own a magazine whose readers generally are conservative.

Zuckerman might have answered that by saying that his politics were irrelevant. Far from doing so, however, the U.S. News chairman rather eagerly outlined his view of what American fiscal, military and social policy should be.

Zuckerman’s view involves a conservative skepticism about the power of the federal government to effect “social engineering,” a hostility, now fashionable among Democrats, to federal budget deficits, and a sense, perhaps neo-conservative, that President Richard M. Nixon’s policy of detente toward the Soviet Union led to Soviet adventurism abroad.

“I think the rebuilding of our defenses and redeploying a new level of military capacity is appropriate. On the other hand, what is not appropriate is the wasted, bloated, costly excess built into our military procurement program.”

Conservative Change

Although Zuckerman said the news columns of his magazine will “continue the U.S. News approach of being very direct, very fairminded,” he conceded that it is important that he and his editor share an affinity of political views, and he implied that his ideas were in sync with this conservative change he has perceived across the country.

“What we think is that, for the first time in the history of the magazine, U.S. News is in the mainstream of America, not because U.S. News has changed, but because the country has changed.”