Final Tribute

Time runs out for New Times

New Times has always been '60s going on '70s, a magazine born in the present decade but tailored for people who came of age during the last one, too old for Rolling Stone and too young for Commentary. For five years and 130 issues, the biweekly "feature news magazine," as New Times was subtitled, rushed into that demographic gap with a mix of eye-popping investigative reporting, idiosyncratic political analysis and scary environmental disclosures, all in a high-protein prose that virtually leaped off the page with youthful exuberance.

Times changed; New Times did not. Last week George A. Hirsch, the magazine's founder and publisher, announced that publication would be suspended at year's end.*Officials at MCA Inc., the Los Angeles-based entertainment conglomerate (Jaws, Airport 77) that bought New Times from Hirsch and other investors last year, said they were willing to keep the magazine going, but Hirsch found the outlook hopeless. Though circulation climbed from an initial 100,000 to today's 355,000 and advertising gained after a slow start, New Times never had enough of either to be consistently profitable.

This year the curves turned downward, while costs, notably postal expenses, were climbing. Advertisers defected to healthier general-interest magazines or promising publications aimed at specialized audiences. At the same time readers slipped off to the unlettered self-absorption that has characterized the 1970s. Indeed, New Times may have been too good for them all along. As Hirsch saw it, "Back in the Watergate days things were working better for us. Now there aren't so many people interested in investigative reporting, the environment, social and political issues. Where did they go? Well, where did all the people go who didn't vote last week?" Added Jonathan Z. Larsen, New Times' editor since 1974: "We bore readers the bad news, and they slew the messenger."

From its first issue, featuring a cover story on Spiro Agnew, New Times has seldom been guilty of faintheartedness. The magazine quoted the racial slur that drove former Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz into early retirement, printed an unflattering profile of est's Werner Erhard that Esquire had found too hot to handle, demolished liberal myths about the Black Panthers, grabbed the first interviews with Abbie Hoffman on the lam and Bill and Emily Harris in jail, found environmental horrors lurking in microwave ovens, drinking water and aerosol cans, and helped reopen the case of Peter Reilly, the young Connecticut man unjustly convicted of killing his mother. The magazine's last-page "Final Tribute" column was the last, often eloquent word on such endangered species as the country general store, George Wallace and, in the current issue, the Ford Pinto.

Hirsch, who was publisher of New York magazine from 1967 to 1971, will remain at MCA to scout new magazine opportunities for the firm and publish Runner (circ. 85,000), a monthly he launched earlier this year for devotees of that very '70s pursuit. Editor Larsen, a former TIME bureau chief and writer, will stay on for a while as Runner's editor. The rest of New Times' mostly young 17-member editorial staff will probably have drifted to other jobs by the time the magazine's last issue hits newsstands Dec. 11. That issue, a collection of articles on a single theme, was planned months before the end was known, but will be a fitting final tribute to the forces that its editors believe helped bring New Times down. The theme? Decadence. -

*Two days later, Penthouse Publisher Bob Guccione stopped Viva (circ. 361,000), the women's magazine he launched the same year New Times was born.

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