Story of the Year Hit Close to Home

Newspapers and television and radio ride lickety-split on the quickest cultural currents; books, films and documentaries drift more languidly as they sort things out.

But magazines, from pointy-headed academic journals to giddy fanzines, take the world in at an intermediate pace, exploring matters that more urgent media rush past, while also looping back to put breaking news in perspective.

Back in February, for instance, Jon Katz wrote in an uneven Rolling Stone essay: “Still overwhelmingly owned, staffed and run by whites, and white males in particular, the media are stymied and discomfited by racial issues.”

And, in another Katz essay: “. . . Journalism’s flight from the awful realities and complexities of race has left this story largely in the hands of bigots, idiots and opportunists.”

But Katz couldn’t have been talking about the magazine medium, where the issues of urban plight, justice, economics and race that lurched into the broader consciousness in April had been scrutinized for several years.

STORY OF THE YEAR

Newsweeklies did an excellent job of covering the riots. But the greater service to a befuddled public came in subsequent months as an array of magazines tried to figure things out.

Some highlights:

* John Edgar Wideman’s thoughtful analysis of the riots from an African-American perspective in the September Esquire.

* James Bernard’s edgy look at the gangsta role in the riots in the July 16 The Source.

* The June World Monitor’s analysis by Alvin and Heidi Toffler of how the new economy rushing in to replace old smokestack industries will likely leave the inner-city poor even further behind.

* Utne Reader and Modern Maturity came through with unintentionally timely looks at what the latter termed “the Dynamics of Diversity.”

Best quotes:

* Shelby Steele, in the June Utne Reader: “Selfish white guilt is really self-importance . . . a sort of moral colonialism. The selfishly guilty white person is drawn to what blacks least like in themselves--their suffering, victimization and dependency. This is no good for anyone--black or white.”

* Harper’s magazine’s Lewis Lapham: “Among all the nations of the earth, America is the one that has come most triumphantly to terms with the mixtures of blood and caste, and maybe it is another of history’s ironic jokes that we should wish to repudiate our talent for assimilation at precisely the moment in time when so many other nations in the world . . . look to the promise of the American example.”

* And, alas, don’t forget this White House adviser’s lament about the leadership vacuum, as quoted in U.S. News & World Report two weeks after the riots: “This is a time for history. But nobody here wants to commit history. That would take passion and conviction.”

BIG STORY NO. 2

Presidential politics, from the earliest primaries to the selection of Clinton’s cabinet, kept all varieties of magazines busy.

Highlights include:

* Rolling Stone’s round table with William Greider, Jann Wenner, Hunter S. Thompson, P. J. O’Rourke and Bill Clinton in an Arkansas diner.

* Jay Rosen’s Harper’s story about how political consultants manipulate the public by creating “packages of stimuli . . . that will ‘resonate’ with vague notions and images floating around in the increasingly foggy cultural ether.

“Ultimately, this is the shift that should worry us. Not the waning of print and the rise of television, not the triumph of visual imagery over the word, but the victory of the resonance principle over the reality principle, the substitution of an electronic commons for the world we actually have in common--the world where bridges decay, ozone evaporates, people suffer, and economies collapse.”

BIRTHS

The economy is picking up for magazines, with many reporting advertising rate increases for 1993.

At the same time, new titles began proliferating like candidates in the Los Angeles mayoral race.

Among more notable launches:

* Straight Arrow Press’ Men’s Journal, which might be termed “Adventures on the Edge of Male Menopause,” is poised to fill in where a number of other new men’s magazines failed.

* Quincy Jones’ slick Vibe gives voice to the increasingly mainstream hip-hop nation.

* Outdoor Family, a modest, small-scale family operation out of Sacramento, assists nature lovers in getting out because of or in spite of children.

DEATHS

* M, Clay Felker’s stylish men’s magazine, bit the dust.

* So, sigh, did Quayle Quarterly, which lost its raison d’etre .

HEALTHY TRENDS

* Picking on the Los Angeles Times: Buzz magazine launched a new column, written by the pseudonymous Margo Magee (remember the girl from Apartment 3-G), and Los Angeles magazine got in a hard shot in the fall. Some of the criticism is off target. But The Times is a big paper and can take it.

UNHEALTHY TRENDS

* Artistically bankrupt celebrities and their fawning photographers are again using the noxious cigarette habit as shorthand for glamour, rebellion and sexiness. What’s next? How about an Interview photo spread in which Madonna models bustiers while hooked up to a cancer ward respirator?

SNAP JUDGMENTS

Even successful magazines experience cycles of energy, vision and editorial excellence. Tracking such cycles is always subjective, but:

* At the moment, Business Week is better than Fortune and Forbes--it’s snappier and more insightful, perhaps because it’s less geared to the big men with bloated salaries at the head of oversized corporations.

* Harper’s is better than the Atlantic--its “Readings” and “Index” make it a browser’s paradise, and support the longer articles, while the Atlantic’s essays--generally important and interesting--too often seem to go on . . . and on . . . and on . . .

* Newsweek, with its fabulous new front-of-the-book departments such as “Conventional Wisdom Watch” and “Periscope” and its crisp writing and graphics, leads Time and U.S. News.

* Smart Money, the new Wall Street Journal bimonthly, is more satisfying than Money, which is stuck in a rut of too-similar stories: “10 Must-Get Mutual Funds for the 37-Year-Old Middle Manager.”

* Many Time Warner publications, in fact, seem to be floundering, frantically reaching for the lowest common denominator to attract readers. Once-noble publications such as Life pander a la People with Royal Family dirt-dishing. Only Entertainment Weekly is secure in its identity at the moment, providing a weekly diet of fun-to-read, middlebrow fare.

* The New Republic may have the best grip on the crazy, no-longer-bipolar political scene of any magazine.

* Lingua Franca makes academia interesting.

* The American Way is an airline magazine that doesn’t dismiss its readers as a captive audience.

* Paul Krassner’s The Realist has kept just enough of its ‘60s flavor to be old-fashioned hip but not anachronistic.

* Emerge is the gutsiest black magazine going.

* Outside continues to fill a niche for outdoorsy adventurers.

* Any publication that receives and prints so many letters from readers who are foaming at the mouth with rage, and who demand that they be removed from said publication’s mailing list, can’t be all bad. Heterodoxy, which attacks alleged political correctness wherever it finds or imagines it, is also well-written and thought-provoking.

* Magazine Week is an even better source of information on magazinedom now that it has been overhauled.

* Reason magazine keeps cranking out stimulating stories. And Virginia Postrel is one of the sharpest editors--and clearest writers--in the business.

* The Washington Monthly snaps and yaps at all powers that be, including the press. Its March issue noted that since 1989, 85% of the “investigative” articles by reporters at the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and the Washington Post were derived from government reports.

* Other stalwarts: New Perspectives Quarterly, The Nation, The New York Review of Books and Smithsonian. And National Geographic remains a national treasure--the writing is less turgid these days, and the photography and cartography remain stunning.

THE YEAR’S LOW POINTS

* Vanity Fair’s kiss-up to former editor Tina Brown in a photographic roundup of women.

* The letters in Utne Reader criticizing an article that suggested Utne readers might not have much to say to Cosmopolitan readers. Huffed one sappy reader: “Expressions of snobbishness seem fundamentally contrary to the creation of a community that respects diversity.”

THE YEAR’S HIGH POINTS

* The Aug. 17 New York magazine on black attorney Lawrence Otis Graham’s weeklong stint at a snooty (and racist) country club.

* Forbes enlisted Saul Bellow, John Updike, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and James Q. Wilson to address the issue, “Why Do We Feel So Bad?”

* Fortune magazine’s Aug. 10 “Special Report: Children in Crisis.”

* Sandra Tsing Loh’s article in Buzz on the Stalinistic multicultural nuttiness that accompanies the doling out of $25 million in funds by Los Angeles’ Cultural Affairs Department.

” . . . If someone else is paying for your work, doesn’t that make him your boss? Isn’t the artist supposed to be a sort of maverick, a guerrilla fighter who hovers on the outskirts of society, independent of it, critiquing it?”

* American Lawyer tackled the Rodney King beating verdict twice. Agree or disagree with them, but the articles illustrated that the media have been timid to the point of obfuscation about the beating, the verdict and the riots.

* Essence magazine’s tribute to fatherhood, “Our Fathers, the Ones Who Leave and the Ones Who Stay,” which included these words from Bebe Moore Campbell: “If he is righteous, a father helps to mold a young girl’s soul into the spirit of a woman. If he misuses his power, he can tear her heart to shreds, wounding her in places that may take years to heal.”

* The June Life magazine’s picture of women on the Capitol steps. One shot shows the only two women senators (prior to the fall election); the other shows the gender gap reversed, with 98 women engulfing two men.

* The May/June Mother Jones study of leading women’s magazines’ less-than-sisterly treatment of employees who become mothers.

* The pre-Brown New Yorker’s two-parter, “A Silent Childhood,” about Genie, a “wild child” discovered in Temple City and studied by linguists here in Los Angeles with ultimately tragic results.

* Consumer Reports’ three-part “Health Care in Crisis.”

* With its diminutive photo of Danny DeVito against a sea of white space, the cover of the current L.A. Style (the magazine is up for sale by American Express) is gimmicky but a grabber.

* Penthouse’s interview with Gennifer Flowers: Believe it or don’t, but it was hilarious to read about the supposed proclivities of our next President.

* In the March GQ, Joe Queenan attended a men’s gathering and, after chanting “hey baba hepwa, hepwa, baba hepwa,” for 36 hours, concluded: “The men’s movement is difficult to get a handle on because of the myriad strains of personality disorders that it encompasses.”