 ere's
probably no agreeing on precisely when Reader's Digest took
a turn for the worse. There was the move last year to stick a celebrity
photograph on the cover of every issue, rather than the picture of
an ordinary American whose story of heroism would inspire readers.
Two years earlier, there was the magazine's redesign, which elevated
graphics and visuals to a place of importance that previously had
been reserved for the power of the written word. Around the same time,
the mag azine dropped its familiar slogan promising "Thirty-one
articles each month . . . Each article of enduring value and interest."
There aren't 31 articles each month anymore — the February 2002
issue has only 15 — and most of those that remain sure aren't
of enduring value and interest, either.
It's a saddening transformation, and one that must especially upset
conservatives, who seem able to do little more than sit by the bed
of a good friend in the throes of a terminal illness. Reader's
Digest was not only the greatest and most popular magazine of
the 20th century, it was also a steady ally. Monthly cele brations
of traditional American values, staunch anti-Communism during the
Cold War, and an optimistic philosophy of moral and personal aspiration
made it stand out in the lowest-common-denominator world of magazine
publishing. In an unwitting tribute to the Digest's success
and influence, the Left loathed it. Conservatives of all stripes —
and perhaps most importantly, the unpoliticized, small-c conservatives
of the heartland — cherished it. The Digest was the quintessential
magazine of "red-state" America — those broad swaths
of the country colored red for George W. Bush on 2000 Election Night
maps, as opposed to blue for Al Gore.
Reader's Digest remained an outstanding magazine well into
the 1990s, but much has changed in just the last three or four years.
Editorial quality was sacrificed to a mix of poor personnel decisions
and cost-cutting maneuvers. The Digest simply isn't what it
used to be. There are still occasional flashes of the old excellence,
but now these increasingly rare moments double as disturbing reminders
of how much has been lost.
A
Magazine for Mose Everybody
Founded in 1922 by DeWitt and Lila Wallace, Reader's Digest
became what the Wall Street Journal was to call "the
greatest publishing success since the Bible." The Wallaces
printed only 5,000 copies of their first issue, but their circulation
soon skyrocketed. By the 1930s, they owned the most popular magazine
in the United States and were beginning to reach around the globe.
Today the Digest claims 12.5 million subscribers in this
country — down from an all-time high of 18 million in the 1970s,
but still an industry leader — and a grand total of 95 million
readers who see one of its 48 editions published in 19 different
languages.
The Digest
was special for a number of reasons. Just as today's Internet users
rely on search engines to mine the best sources of information on
the web, subscribers to Reader's Digest could count on the
Wal laces and their team to locate the best articles in a sea of
periodicals and reproduce them in condensed form. Even tually, about
half the magazine consisted of original material. The Digest
displayed great variety and range; each issue had something in it
for everybody, from a mother seeking health tips to a father interested
in tax cuts to a teenager thrilled by real-life ad venture stories.
Behind the whole enterprise was a typically American belief in self-improvement
that managed to find an audience not just in the U.S., but everywhere.
Reader's Digest honored individuals and their achievements
— usually ordinary people who did extraordinary things.
During the Cold War, the Digest played a vital role in educating
the American public about Com mu nism. Friedrich Hayek once said
the success of his landmark book The Road to Serfdom came
from the fact that DeWitt Wallace decided to publish a condensed
version in the magazine. In the 1970s and '80s, intrepid reporter
John Barron broke one story after another about Soviet malfeasance
around the globe. Defectors often told their tales first in the
pages of the Digest. This infuriated the anti-anti-Communists,
but even some of them had to acknowledge the Digest's achievement.
In 1982, Susan Sontag sparked a bristling controversy on the left
with this confession: "Imagine, if you will, someone who read
only Reader's Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in
the same period who read only The Nation or The New Statesman.
Which reader would have been better informed about the realities
of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it
be that our enemies were right?"
The magazine
also served more broadly as a platform for conservative ideas. It
published articles in favor of small government and missile defense
and opposed to union corruption and welfare dependency. Much of
its work in these areas was groundbreaking. In 1995, the Digest
commissioned a poll showing that majorities of people from all walks
of life — even self-identified liberal Democrats — believed
nobody's total tax burden should exceed 25 percent of his income.
Great magazines often find themselves ahead of the news cycle, and
in 1998 Kenneth Timmerman wrote a prescient story called "This
Man Wants You Dead." The subject was Osama bin Laden, and it
hit the newsstands right before the fatal embassy bombings in Africa.
Hard-news stories
such as these were not always the magazine's most popular features,
according to the detailed reader surveys the Digest studied every
month. Yet they had a distinct following and lent ballast to the
whole enterprise. "Sometimes a magazine must lead," says
William Schulz, the longtime Washington bureau chief responsible
for so many of these noteworthy articles. "We never pandered
to people based on what a focus group told us to do."
From its headquarters
north of New York City (the address is Pleasantville, but it's really
in Chappaqua, present home of the Clintons), Reader's Digest
remained distant from the fads and trends of the general publishing
world. Astonishing commercial success unrivalled by anything else
in the business also helped it stand apart. The Wallaces lived well,
but grew embarrassed by the vast riches they accumulated. They had
no children of their own, and until their deaths in the early 1980s,
they lavished parental devotion on the people who worked for them.
The Digest became famous for cushy jobs full of perks, from
free turkeys at Thanksgiving to rides home in a limousine for employees
who weren't feeling well. The positions were well paid, too; the
Digest never crimped on expenses.
Yet one of
the Digest's great strengths — its isolation from the
buzz of Manhattan — was simultaneously a weakness. It often
didn't get the credit it deserved for its journalism. "I can't
tell you how many times I've seen our work appear on television
or elsewhere without attribution," says deputy editor William
P. Beamon. The Digest simply wasn't hip, cool, or glamorous.
"For decades, the intellectuals have looked down on the masses,"
says Schulz. "They've viewed Reader's Digest as lowbrow."
Both
Magazine and a Business
The parent company of Reader's Digest — called the Reader's
Digest Association — owed everything to the magazine, but the
magazine was not in fact the company's primary cash cow. A subscription
simply served as a gateway to a wide range of other Reader's Digest
products, such as books and records. The magazine itself was expensive
to produce, with its blank-check reporting and close editorial attention.
It functioned as a kind of loss leader for everything else.
This model
worked well for a long time, but the company began to falter in
the 1990s as it faced new challenges from competitors using sophisticated
targeting software to boost their own mail-order businesses. Reader's
Digest started to lose ground technologically, and the problem was
compounded by a legislative crackdown on sweepstakes, the main device
by which the magazine had attracted new subscribers. (The practice
bordered on deception, as it tricked many people into believing
that buying a subscription would increase their odds of winning
a prize.) Profitability sank, leading to intense pressure to cut
costs throughout the company. The magazine's free-spending ways
came under severe scrutiny. There was an additional concern, which
in some quarters verged on an obsession, that the Digest's readers
were too old — a demographic dead-end in a society increasingly
dominated by boomers. The rise of niche media also took a toll,
as general-interest magazines such as Life died off. The
Digest has survived, but continues to be battered.
Every magazine
changes over time, and Reader's Digest clearly needed to
improve its economic performance. Yet the company burned through
four CEOs in the mid 1990s, creating turmoil that badly damaged
the magazine's editorial side. The talented editor Kenneth Tomlinson
quit in 1996. Many consider him the magazine's last great editor.
"He really understood what the Digest is all about,"
says one former staffer. Most of the magazine's top editors had
been Tomlinson hires, and virtually all of them were, like Tomlinson
himself, political conservatives.
Christopher
Willcox, also a conservative, replaced Tomlinson — but he was
immediately forced into a round of belt-tightening. The editorial
staff was reduced, much of it by way of natural attrition and forced
retirements. Morale dropped sharply. Today there is a vigorous debate
among current and former Digest employees (some two dozen
of whom were consulted for this article) about Willcox's role in
the magazine's decline. Some say it began on his watch, while others
describe him as a last-ditch defender of the Digest's tried-and-true
ways. Whatever the truth, Willcox set in motion a series of significant
editorial changes. He moved the table of contents off its familiar
place on the front cover and boosted the magazine's visual impact.
The overall number of Digest stories began to drop, with
the expensive hard-news stories among the first to go. "If
there were three political articles in every issue, Willcox took
it down to two," complains one former editor. "He cared
more about look than content. He didn't do much to maintain standards."
Willcox was
more responsive to the marketers' demographic hand-wringing than
Tomlinson had been, but the corporate side of the magazine never
took to him — and especially not Thomas O. Ryder, an American
Express executive who became CEO in 1998. In January 2000, Ryder
finally moved against Willcox by creating a brand-new position at
Reader's Digest: editor-in-chief of the Reader's Digest Association
— i.e., the whole company — which outranked Willcox's
job as editor-in-chief of the magazine. Ryder hired Eric Schrier
from Time's health-publications division to fill it, and Willcox
resigned less than two months later. Schrier effectively served
as the magazine's top editor for the next year and a half.
Reader's
Digest generally had elevated its top editors from within the
magazine. Both Tomlinson and Willcox had spent years working for
the Digest before their promotions. They understood what
several current and former Pleasantville insiders call "Reader's
Digest values," in part because these values had shaped
their professional careers. Schrier, however, was an outsider hired
at a time when the magazine was letting go of some of its most seasoned
editors. He was a competent magazine professional, but Reader's
Digest had always wanted something more than technical skill;
it wanted a particular worldview, plus an understanding and appreciation
of why that worldview resonated with millions of people in the United
States and abroad. "Schrier has no sense of the magazinehistory,"
complains one former editor. The new editor was different in other
ways, too. Each of his predecessors — going back before Tomlinson
to the days of Ken Gilmore in the 1980s and founder DeWitt Wallace
himself — was a known conservative. Yet Schrier is a political
mystery. People who work with him daily don't know his views on
fundamental issues. "My opinions are a private matter,"
he says.
If the overt
conservatism of the traditional Digest began to recede under
Willcox, it took a nosedive under Schrier. When Willcox introduced
a new design for the magazine with the May 1998 issue, he divided
the table of contents into different headings, with hard-news pieces
tending to appear in a section labeled "Currents." That
issue featured a piece by Michael Barone critical of bilingual education
(right before California's crucial vote on Prop. 227), another by
Trevor Armbrister on the unintended consequences of the Americans
with Disabilities Act, and a blistering Michael Kelly column reprinted
from the Washington Post on Bill Clinton's lies (this was
during the Monica Lewinsky scandal). From a conservative reader's
standpoint, this was pretty satisfying stuff. It didn't last. Exactly
three years later — in the May 2001 issue — stories listed
under "Currents" included "So Tiny, So Sweet . .
. So Mean: Hummingbirds will do anything to get their next meal"
and a consumer-tip piece headlined, "Should Your Next Camera
Be Digital?" (There is now no "Currents" section
at all.)
Editorial downsizing
continued after Willcox's departure, but Schrier went on hiring
more outsiders. Jacob Young, who is said by some to be openly hostile
to Digest traditions, arrived from People and is now
executive editor. Catherine Romano, a number-two editor at both
Cosmopolitan and Maxim — magazines about half
a step removed from soft porn — signed on as deputy editor.
Schrier also created the new position of West Coast editor, whose
job is to develop celebrity profiles. And in December, a new editor-in-chief
of the magazine appeared on the masthead: Jacqueline Leo, another
New York publishing professional with no previous connection to
the Digest. In short, the magazine of red-state America is
now run almost totally by blue-state Americans.
A few conservatives
remain, most notably Schulz — though he recently stepped down
as the Washington bureau chief and is now called editor-at-large.
"The kind of politics Ken Tomlinson represented is abhorrent
to the current leadership," says one editor no longer affiliated
with the Digest. "There are a few genuine conservatives
left behind, but they're hold-outs, like Japanese soldiers still
fighting for the emperor at the end of 1945."
Personnel is
policy, of course, and these dramatic staff changes have led to
a shakeup in the magazine's content. The February 2002 issue, for
instance, has a picture of Meg Ryan on the cover — and inside
there's a ten-page interview with her, which can only be described
as vacuous. ("How do you feel about turning 40?") The
back cover features a photo of "Alaska's all-girl rescue squad,"
which links inside to an unspectacular story of low-grade feminism.
A package of stories on terrorism breaks no new ground; they read
like consumer-advice columns. (If a "nuclear suitcase device"
goes off in your neighborhood, you are warned to "stay indoors.")
There's a good story on a tough judge in Alabama — an old-school
Digest piece — but it's short and lonely. "That's
Outrageous," a popular feature that calls attention to bureaucratic
abuse and cultural rot, has been reduced in size, and may not even
exist in a couple of months, according to magazine insiders. Another
semi-regular department, "Mugged by the Law," already
has gone extinct. Instead of hard-news stories, there is a wealth
of what the magazine professionals call "short commitment"
pieces — mini articles that don't take much time to read or
much thought to process.
Very little
is special about the current issue, both in the sense that so much
of its content is instantly forgettable and in the sense that it's
not much different from other recent issues. The last time a celebrity
didn't appear on the cover of the Digest, a magazine that
once honored ordinary Americans in almost everything it did, was
March 2001. Since then, the cover has been a parade ground for beautiful
people, including Muhammad Ali, Tom Hanks, and Princess Diana. The
Digest's distinct voice is falling silent; the once-mighty
magazine is becoming indistinguishable from the swarm of other publications
that genuflect to the stars of Hollywood, offer new diet recipes
for women, and produce nothing of enduring value or interest.
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