Consummate Professional

When Supersalesmen John Veronis and Nicolas Charney announced plans last month to recast and expand the staid Saturday Review (TIME, Nov. 22), they sought someone to serve as "a strong right arm" to Editor Norman Cousins. After Cousins abruptly resigned in disagreement with the magazine's new owners (TIME. Nov. 29), Charney took the title of editor and stepped up the search for what he called a "consummate professional" to help him revitalize and run the Review. The search ended last week with the selection of TIME Senior Editor Ronald P. Kriss.

Kriss, 37, will serve as executive editor while he and Charney develop the Review's four new monthly offspring, which are scheduled to start publication next September. Then, Charney says, he expects to concentrate on expanding the conglomerate parent, Saturday Review Industries, and make Kriss the sixth editor in the Review's 48-year history.*

Most Review editorial operations will move next year from New York to San Francisco, where Veronis and Charney have leased a onetime firehouse to serve as their corporate headquarters. Backed by an extra $4,000,000 that more than doubles the magazine's annual editorial budget, Kriss will not only expand the staff but also solicit more outside contributions. He will be looking particularly for "freelancers who are primarily writers rather than well-known names."

Brooklyn-born Kriss went to Harvard, where he majored in European history, and Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. He was a foreign correspondent for the I.N.S. and U.P.I, wire services in Tokyo and served as a telegraph editor for the New York Daily News before joining TIME in 1961. He has written or edited almost every section of the magazine. As a writer in The Nation section he was responsible for some 40 cover stories, and he has edited nearly 30 more as chief of TIME'S World section since mid-1969. Writers for the Review should find Kriss a moderately heavy but craftsmanlike editor with a gift for clarifying complex issues and an eye for the small but telling detail that can brighten a story. Colleagues have become accustomed to a quick temper that he claims is "like a tropical storm--it clears the air and is soon forgotten."

Charney and Veronis chose Kriss for his "broad background, which makes him an ideal anchor man for the total team of professionals we plan to assemble." The new Review will no longer reflect the personal tastes of a single editor, as it did those of Norman Cousins for 31 years. "The emphasis," says Kriss, "will be on informing the reader rather than grabbing him by the throat."

*Kriss is the second TIME senior editor to be given top responsibility at a major magazine in the past six months. Robert Shnayerson was named editor of Harper's last June.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.