Magazines: Alarm Bells in the City

For years, expanding freeways have been stretching out around Seattle, gobbling up land from the suburbs to the center of the city. In rush-hour traffic, they disgorge far more cars than Seattle can handle. But neither newspapers nor city officials had made audible complaint—until last spring when a little-known, not-quite-two-year-old monthly magazine called Seattle warned its readers that they would soon be living in a “concrete phantasmagoria” unless the city stopped building freeways and began to concentrate on rapid transit. Alerted to the danger at last, Seattle’s two newspapers, which had been busily promoting freeways, changed their minds and started calling for rapid transit. Last month the mayor asked for $1,000,000 to get a study of possible transit systems started.

All over the nation, a growing number of city magazines are sounding the civic alarm bell. Once mostly the tame products of chambers of commerce, and dedicated to singing the praises of their cities, they are now breaking loose on their own. Magazines like Seattle, Greater Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix are privately published and proudly argumentative. They tackle the kind of controversial issues—haphazard zoning, air pollution, lethargic politics, shoddy construction—that would have frightened off their predecessors. “We were a booster before,” says Alan Halpern, 39, editor of Greater Philadelphia. “Now we’re a dagger magazine.”

No Ideology. Greater Philadelphia regularly jabs at its home town. Its exposure of bankruptcy frauds last year resulted in the conviction of five local businessmen. Its criticism of the overcrowded and obsolescent city airport touched off a rebuilding program. Seattle cost its parent company, King Broadcasting, hundreds of thousands of dollars in ads when it ran an article ridiculing local wines. When a project to renovate Los Angeles’ downtown plaza stalled for three years, the magazine Los Angeles got it going again with an all-out assault on city and state agencies that were holding it up. Even Atlanta, which remains a Chamber of Commerce publication, has run pieces debunking the Ku Klux Klan and questioning the city’s cultural pretensions.

For all their iconoclasm, however, the city magazines maintain a stubborn pride in their home towns. Greater Philadelphia, for example, balances its digs at the business community with some highly flattering profiles of business and community leaders. The magazines couldn’t care less about trumpeting any particular ideology or identifying with any political party. “Some of the staunchest conservatives in their political philosophy are among the most liberal when it comes to getting things done in the city,” says Edwin Self, 45, Scottish-born editor of San Diego.

Minority Appeal. The city magazines have moved into a void left by many newspapers, which have either given up comprehensive local coverage or disappeared from the scene. Now that newspapers in so many cities are under single ownership, the magazines provide another, often sorely needed voice in city affairs. The magazines also concentrate heavily on the arts, which many papers tend to neglect. Moreover, each city is developing a pool of capable young writers who are willing to work for the magazines for little pay. “The quality of writing by these lesser-knowns is often better,” says John Victor Jr., 51, publisher of both San Diego and San Francisco. “The well-known writers sometimes slough off their efforts for us.”

The magazines openly appeal to what they call the “intelligent minority”; their circulations range from a low of 5,000 (Phoenix) to a high of 54,000 (Los Angeles). Some are showing a modest profit, and even those still in the red seem headed for financial health. Recently, several city magazines pooled their resources to hire a representative to solicit national advertising accounts. The field is so promising that a city magazine has even been started in Washington, D.C., the place where people are supposed to care least about civic affairs. In three months, the Washingtonian, published by two ex-foreign service officers, Laughlin Phillips and Robert J. Meyers, has reached a circulation of 14,000, some 10,000 more than its editors expected.

“There is no reason why local journalism should not be of the same high professional quality as national journalism,” says Peter D. Bunzel, 38, who was recruited from LIFE to edit Seattle. “I believe that quality will succeed and that we will force the newspapers to be less cornball, if only for the pride of their publishers.”