The Death of George Magazine


January 6, 2001


BROOKE GLADSTONE: George Magazine is going to fold. That story was broken this week by Inside.com which called the magazine started by John F. Kennedy, Jr. "that monthly testament to America's persistent crush on the Kennedys." David Carr writes on these matters for Inside.com, and he joins us now. Hello, David!

DAVID CARR: Hi, how are you, Brooke?

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Very well! Now JFK, Jr. wanted to take the two worlds he lived in - celebrity and politics - and use one to get people interested in the other! So what was wrong with that plan?

DAVID CARR: He was only willing to play the celebrity angle up to a certain point. As somebody who had been covered in the tabloid press, he wasn't too interested in gossip, and of course if people are going to read a magazine about politics and celebrity they'd want lots of nice, juicy gossip.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But they got a lot of tri-corner hats and cleavage on the cover each month.

DAVID CARR:I don't think anybody's unaffected by the sight of Cindy Crawford wearing a weird hat and not much else. But George confronted serious tempo problems, let's face it, as a monthly magazine in a fast-moving business. If you look at their cover this month, they had Linda Tripp on their cover. Well we just concluded the most interesting election of the last century I'd say, and it's kind of a problem that they didn't have anything about it in their current issue.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Now Tina Brown at Talk also seems to be enamored with the idea of making politics sexy, and that's also going south. Is there a lesson here?

DAVID CARR: Well I think it's smart to point to Tina as somebody who, who got this started at The New Yorker at, and at Vanity Fair before it, and yes, it's been a little more difficult to Talk Magazine. The new Talk Magazine just landed on my desk, and it's got more of Heather Graham than you'd ever imagine seeing. [LAUGHTER] And I don't think she's probably interviewed on Social Security reform, although I can't be sure.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now getting back to George -- would it have been more successful if it had been named "John?"

DAVID CARR: Yeah, but that was one of his founding tenets is that it was not about him--

BROOKE GLADSTONE:But John was a kind of brand. Maybe he wasn't enough of a brand. Oprah's O magazine is now the biggest success story of 2000. Martha Stewart's doing pretty well. We know that Rosie O'Donnell is going to be associated with McCall's and hoping to revamp that magazine to make more money. What is the lesson here --that you have to really be a brand to sell a magazine?

DAVID CARR: John Kennedy when he was alive was not willing to do the things. He took off his clothes once and, and posed naked in his magazine, and that sold a lot of issues, but in terms of being on the cover every month, he just wasn't willing to do it. Oprah on the other th--hand is a mentor of a legion of women and is more than willing to dress up and smile nice for the camera to move, move magazines, and I don't think the industry has ever seen anything like it. I don't know if Rosie O'Donnell's going to have the same success.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But if he had performed as a brand should, would the magazine then have been successful you think?

DAVID CARR:I don't know. I thought it was a fairly weird idea for a magazine to kind of have the head of the New Republic and the heart of Vanity Fair, and the problem with it is not so much readers -- they, they had readers; they had half a million readers. But magazine ad buyers like to see things in nice little baskets; nice, discreet little baskets. And George was number one in its category because it invented its own category, and people who buy the ads can't fit into a little category; don't traditionally do very well. And there's no natural ads for this.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And just one last question. Was there any article or any contribution in George that it will be remembered for?

DAVID CARR:I think the only thing I personally remember about it is that column in which he did pose naked with a piece of dangling fruit, and he called his relatives "poster boys for bad behavior" which seems to suggest that my interests along with the interests of a lot of its readers was fundamentally about the Kennedy family and not about the magazine that he conceived.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well thank you very much.

DAVID CARR: Thank you, Brooke.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: David Carr is a senior correspondent for Inside.com.