Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,873

This is the grave of Osborn Elliott.

Born in 1924 in New York City, Elliott grew up rich. His father was an investment banker, his mother a real estate agent and suffragist. He went to the fancy schools and then onto Harvard. He spent a couple of years in the Navy after graduation. He thought about the easy path–investment banking, but that didn’t really appeal to him as much as it did to the rest of his family. What he wanted for his life was journalism. So he used his connections and rose fast. After proving himself to the extent that a rich Harvard grad really needed to prove himself, Newsweek hired him in 1955 as its business editor. By 1959, he was managing editor of the magazine. In 1961, the Washington Post bought Newsweek and promoted Elliott to lead editor. He soon was chairman and basically Newsweek was his baby.

Elliott became Newsweek. It barely exists today, but of course was the nation’s #2 news magazine for decades, just behind Time. It was a nothing magazine before he took over. Well, not quite nothing but a minor magazine, one that did do some real journalism but was seen as staid and boring. Under Elliott, its subscription numbers exploded and so did its distribution in stores around the country. He wasn’t so great on the women’s issues that defined his mother’s activism though. In 1970, Eleanor Holmes Norton led a group of 60 women filing a claim with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission claiming the magazine discriminated against women workers. In fact, Newsweek had a hard policy–only men could be reporters with bylines. Elliott caved quickly. I don’t think Norton ever worked for Newsweek, but she was the big name that got plenty of attention to the cause.

What Elliott really brought to Newsweek was a deep commitment to polling. In fact, it was the first major publication that invested so heavily in polling. It is hard to imagine politics today without constant polling (hell, it’s hard to imagine Democrats taking a position in a national campaign without so much focus group polling that the message because completely muddled in consultantspeak and thus fails). But while Newsweek of course did not invent the practice of polling, it did make it central to its coverage of national politics. Elliott also sought to create a market based around young news readers (speaking of a long dead past…). Whereas Time was stodgy and conservative, Elliott had Newsweek create cover stories on anti-Vietnam protests, civil rights, and the week after the lawsuit was settled with Norton and others, the women’s movement. It also had real pop culture coverage. All this led to Newsweek becoming the news magazine of the Democratic liberal, the Clinton/Dukakis/Hart/Brown class really, whereas Time was very much the news magazine of Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush voters.

Perhaps the most important day in Elliott’s Newsweek history was on November 20, 1967, when Newsweek published a 23 page section titled “The Negro in America: What Must Be Done.” This was open advocacy on civil rights and also won the magazine Columbia School of Journalism’s Magazine of the Year award that year. Newsweek never caught Time in readership. But it was the journalism version of the CIO forcing the AFL to get off its ass and get with the times. Time became a better magazine because it had to compete with Elliott’s Newsweek.

Elliott left Newsweek in 1976 to work in Abraham Beane’s administration in New York. He became deputy mayor of economic development for $1 a year. The idea was that he would use his brains to fix the desperate job losses and economic collapse that led Gerald Ford to tell the city to drop dead. He didn’t exactly succeed, but who could have. He also realized it was a dead end job. He quit after a year to become the dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. That cushy gig he kept for a decade, then stayed on faculty until 1994. Not sure how much he really taught. If he’s anything like this type generally, he probably loved telling stories to students and probably loved grading much less. Though honestly, who can blame him for that?

Cancer killed Elliott in 2008. He was 83 years old.

Osborn Elliott is buried in Evergreen Cemetery, Stonington, Connecticut.

If you would like this series to visit other magazine icons, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Henry Luce is in Moncks Corner, South Carolina and David Lawrence is in Princeton, New Jersey. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.