Kurt Andersen ~ magazines

I CREATED SPY in 1986 with Graydon Carter, who was my co-editor, and Tom Phillips, our publisher. It was a pretty remarkable adventure. We covered culture and politics and the media and the rich and powerful and unaccountable in New York and Hollywood and Washington in a way no one else was doing at the time. According to Jack Shafer, writing in 2009 in the New York Times Book Review, Spy was one of "a handful of 20th-century American magazines...whose glory days continue to influence editors," and "not only grabbed the zeitgeist but shaped it."

Alas, Spy's content isn't (yet) archived online, but here is a slideshow of our covers from the fall of 1986, when we launched, through the spring of 1993, when I left.

Among other things, we embarrassed George H.W. Bush's horrid chief of staff; distributed a hoax-cum-parody issue of the New York Times on the floor of the Democratic convention; established important First Amendment law (Cliffs Notes, Inc. v. Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc., 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals) with our parody of Cliff's Notes; produced bestselling books (Separated At Birth?) and prime-time NBC shows (nine pieces from which you can read about and link to here); and started breaking even financially after three years. We were willing to be lucky, as E.B. White said that all New-Yorkers-by-choice needed to be. Although Graydon and Tom were my official co-founders, Spy simply wouldn’t have flourished the way it did (or, quite possibly, survived its first year) without our remarkable founding team of colleagues, including Stephen Doyle, Joanne Gruber, Bruce Handy, Alex Isley, George Kalogerakis, Anne Kreamer, Jamie Malanowski, Susan Morrison and Steven Schragis. We sold the magazine in 1991, I left in early 1993, and it continued publishing until 1998. A few years later, when Lisa Simpson informed some new friends that Spy was no more, we glowed with pleasure.

In 2006, on Spy's 20th anniversary, Miramax Books published Spy: The Funny Years, a quite beautiful coffee table book containing a history of the magazine (by George) and an anthology of some of its best pieces (edited by Graydon and me). It got stupendously generous notices -- from the New York Times, the L.A. Times, the New York Observer, Print magazine, the Toronto Globe and Mail, and pretty much everhwhere else it was reviewed.

At the beginning of 1994 I became editor of the weekly magazine New York. That also involved collaboration with very talented colleagues, and likewise proved to be a character-building adventure, but of a somewhat different kind than Spy: after presiding for two-and-a-half years over increases in circulation and advertising and profits and verve I was fired, evidently because the magazine had gotten too interesting, or at least too annoying in its coverage of the then-owner's business and social and political associates.

In 1999, exactly a year after I called the “digital revolution” a “bubble” in The New Yorker, I teamed up with Michael Hirschorn (who had worked with me at New York) and Deanna Brown to create Inside.com, which was an online news service and an associated biweekly magazine employing a couple of dozen extraordinary reporters and writers covering the entertainment and media businesses. Once again: excellent colleagues, good work, excessive attention from the press, new frontiers, delightful while it lasted, etcetera. We sold Inside to Brill Media Holdings in 2001, which in turn sold it to Primedia. Primedia, alas, does not maintain an archive of Inside articles on the web. But you can get some random, superficial glimpses or what Inside.com was like -- on June 3rd , 2001, for instance -- through the good offices of the internet archive called the Wayback Machine.

During 2004 and 2005 I was the guest editorial director of four issues of Colors magazine.

And in 2006 I helped start a little magazine-ish entity called Very Short List, a free email service which every weekday recommends one excellent (and possibly overlooked) book, movie, DVD, CD or other cultural thing. VSL's original backer, IAC, sold it to The New York Observer in 2009.