2452 Farewell to The New Leader

At lunch today I was reading the library's copy of The New Leader, final issue, January/April 2006. I told my husband it was a liberal magazine, folding after 82 years of publication. He asked me why. I looked through the foreword by Arthur M. Schlesigner Jr. (didn't know he was still alive--one of JFK's men) and didn't see a reason, although there was a sort of snarky remark about a conservative "small" magazine, The Nation, which "thanks to George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and its editor Katrina vanden Heuvel, now claims to have 200,000 subscribers and to be approaching a profit for the first time in its history." Whoa, is that sour grapes, or what?

So I told him I thought most print magazines were struggling with subscribers and advertising revenues. But I never really did see a reason listed. However, it is a well written magazine, and this issue is sort of a historical overview by many well-known writers including George Gilder, who says when he wrote for it, an independent mind was demanded, Diane Ravtch, of the first Bush administration, and Daniel Bell, who's written 14 books. An 82 year life in the political/cultural media is nothing to sneer at.

Octogenarian, one of my links, wrote about this in January.