I
can’t remember the last time I cancelled a magazine subscription. Readers
sometimes cancel because they’re angry. I cancelled a lifetime connection today
when I asked The New Republic to
erase my mailing label and send me a refund. I was paid up until July 2016.
You’ve
probably read about management decisions which led the editor and staff to
resign. It was one of my comfort magazines for 60 or 70 years, predating the
comfort food industry by a generation. Atlantic
and Harper’s are still in my mailbox
regularly. The New Yorker remains one
of my favorites, but magazines do change with the times. When I was 10 or 11
years old The Reader’s Digest was
sold in my school. the price was 15 cents and there were no ads. A few years
after that the Wallaces, husband and wife founders of the Digest, invited me to lunch at their Pleasantville, N.Y., offices. I went to work for them, but moved on before
later managers added advertising and a more impersonal corporate atmosphere.
My
favorite New Republic column was ascribed
to a journalist with initials, T.R.B., but no name. During my Hawaii years the writer was Richard
Strout, and I felt like a lottery winner when one day he was in town and called
on me for help . I wrote a Sunday column of foreign news and comment. Stout had
never heard of me, but he spotted my byline and I happily provided whatever he
needed. He was happy, too, and invited me to call on him next time I’d be in
Washington. We were both members of the National Press Club, so it would be
simple to meet.
Soon
after that I became director and editor-in-chief of the National Catholic News
Service, now known as CNS, just a short walk from the National Press Club. I
got in touch with my pal, but when he heard about my new job he backed off.
Journalists are not immune to religious concerns, and it seemed to me that Catholics were not his
favorite journalists. But he had the convictions and assurance of a towering journalist whose opinions were highly valued, a winner of the
Pulitzer Prize, who graduated from Harvard six years before I was born. He
wrote for The Christian Science Monitor
for 60 years, and for The New Republic
for about 40 of those years. At age 92 he died at Georgetown University Medical
Center.
He
was one of my favorites, and not just because he was an FDR enthusiast. At
least he was spared the apparent vaporization of much of the spirit he knew at The New Republic.
1 comment:
I'll have to read up on what happened, but changes at newspapers and magazines are the rule these days, and rarely for the better it seems.
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