Putting a Face on Week’s Toll of Gun Deaths

In 1969, Life magazine humanized the body count in Vietnam by publishing photographs of 217 of the 242 American servicemen killed there in a seven-day period. This week’s Time magazine features a similar portrait gallery. The difference is that this display--of Americans shot to death in their own country in a single, typical week--is almost twice as long.

Calling coroners, police and families of victims, Time reporters rounded up information on each of the 464 people who were gunned down with rifles, shotguns and handguns across the United States during the week of May 1-7.

Featured in photographs or silhouettes are young men who were blown away in family disputes and women shot in lovers’ triangles. There are victims of gang shootings, robberies and many, many suicides. Children were shot by accident; old people were murdered for their money. People of every color killed themselves or were killed.

The 26-page spread is overwhelming.

California, naturally, led the nation, with 68 gun deaths. The gunslingin’ Texans trailed far behind with 44.

For the Aware Traveler

If everybody had an ocean

Across the USA

Then everybody’d be surfing

In industrial waste . . .

It’s time to update those blissful Beach Boys tunes. As Conde Nast Traveler warns in its July issue, Americans looking to renew a summer love affair with the surf and sand this season may find themselves heartbroken.

Beachcombers in some places are as likely to encounter oil spills, sewage sludge, PCBs, DDT, mercury, arsenic, lead and medical waste as they are seashells.

That’s if the beach is still there.

Eastern and Gulf Coast beaches are already eroding at a rate of 3 to 5 feet a year and the oceans are rising at a predicted rate of about 6 inches per century, associate news editor Gary Stoller reports. But, he adds, that estimate was made before the Greenhouse Effect, which may accelerate the process by two to five times the current rate.

As one expert told the magazine: “The last two summers have indicated that the natural coastal ecosystem has gone beyond its ability to cope.”

All of which sounds like the sort of worries folks hope to escape in their travels--so what’s it doing in a travel magazine?

“Historically, travel magazines have only talked about the beauty and glory of travel,” Stoller said. “From the beginning, in ‘87, the Traveler has shown the glorious spots. But we’ve also shown where the problems are so that people can avoid those spots, or so that people in government maybe . . . can clear up those problems.”

Besides, the environment is what people travel from, through and to, so it’s only natural for a travel magazine to address environmental issues, he said.

Given the magazine’s motto--”Truth in travel”--that means not every story is going to feature turquoise waves lapping on pristine sand.

In an accompanying story, Stoller asked three coastal experts to name their favorite beaches. Malibu didn’t make it. Neither did La Jolla. And Newport’s nowhere to be seen. Instead, the list has two beaches each from North Carolina, Oregon, Massachusetts, Florida and New York, and one each from Maine and Texas.

The choices, Stoller said, were purely subjective. “We just said ‘Pick your favorite beaches.’ We didn’t really pin down the criteria.”

But Stoller doubts California was blackballed from the list because of the sort of statistics reported in the article: For instance, the EPA’s contention that “In California, more than 1,300 permits have been issued to companies and government agencies allowing them to discharge their waste directly into the state’s waters.”

Elsewhere in the magazine, Joe McGinniss, author of “Fatal Vision” and “Blind Faith,” does find turquoise waters lapping on pristine shores--although it takes a wild hydroplane flight into the Canadian Rockies to reach the shores of Fortress Lake.

And even that inaccessible spot is unlikely to remain so for long. As the trip draws to a close, McGinniss finds himself pondering “the paradox that by our very presence, respectful as we were of our surroundings . . . we were altering the nature of what it was that gave us our near mystical sense of serenity.”

Nightlife, Forbes-Style

On Aug. 1, Forbes will announce it will produce a new magazine covering clubs, rock bands, stars . . . “the whole night and dawn scene,” said publishing magnate Malcolm S. Forbes.

“It’s how we would have revamped Interview magazine had we not been outbid,” he said referring to the oversized, celebrity, life styles magazine founded by the late Andy Warhol in 1969.

In May, Brant Publications, a New York publishing house, said it had agreed in principle to buy Interview from Andy Warhol Enterprises Inc. Terms of that sale were not disclosed.

Forbes projects that his new magazine will have initial newsstand sales of 50,000 to 75,000 copies and should appear next spring.

New Latino Contender

Magazine marketing is tricky, and the Latino market especially so. In August, yet another publication will attempt to capture that huge group of readers.

But Ahora, la Revista para el Latino de Hoy (Now, The Magazine for Today’s Latino), has several advantages over the other publications that were here today and gone manana.

Other Latino publications “always wilted on the vine because they weren’t nourished by advertisements,” said Roger C. Toll, publisher and editor-in-chief.

To get advertisers, a magazine needs circulation.

Ahora already has it.

Published by Univision, the largest Spanish-language television network in the United States, the 100-page, full-color premier issue of the quarterly will be launched with a flurry of costly hoopla and a guaranteed initial circulation of 500,000.

Toll attributes that whopping launch readership to several strategic moves, foremost among them the decision to invest heavily in the as-yet-unseen product--which Toll claims will be “quality all the way.”

Other factors that just may have had something to do with getting the circulation numbers up so high so soon: The magazine will be given away free for the first year and its debut has been preceded by a four-month advertising assault by the television network that owns it. The ad campaign, Toll acknowledged, “is a tremendous weapon.”

The network has run 35 commercials a week, including teaser spots with “major Latino celebrities.”

Viewers must call the magazine to subscribe. But Toll knows it will take a strong magazine to hold readers, who, he said, have never been presented with a Spanish language magazine worth the price of subscription.

Toll believes Ahora will change that.

Enrique Fernandez, formerly an editor and columnist for the Village Voice, will edit the publication, which will be designed by Roger Black, who has served as art director at Newsweek, the New York Times, New West and Rolling Stone.

Although the magazine is not fashioned after any other publication specifically, it will have certain qualities of Time, People, Vanity Fair, and “Ebony’s involvement with a unique culture,” Toll said.

Beauty, fashion, health, sports, automobiles and “people” sections all will appear regularly. There also will be a movie section, book section, parenting advice, dance and theater columns, an astrology page and a Caliente section on “what’s hot,” he said.

Among several longer features scheduled for the first issue will be an analysis of Latino political power in Los Angeles, Toll said.