The Tough Old Bird

For durability and consistency, no editor of national magazines excels Norman Cousins. He has not only survived 38 years in a highly competitive field; he has stubbornly insisted that his publications reflect his own tastes. The latest venture to bear his imprint is Saturday Review/ World, a combination of two former Cousins magazines. On the evidence of the first three biweekly issues, the total product may well turn out to be better than the sum of its parts.

If SR/ World inspires a sense of dej`a vu, it is no accident. Cousins edited the original Saturday Review for 31 years, then quit in 1971 when the new owners, John Veronis and Nicolas Charney, announced plans to transform SR into four special-interest monthlies. Cousins then founded World, an earnest and rather bland biweekly. After the Charney-Veronis venture collapsed last spring, Cousins bought back the SR name and subscription list. So instead of competing with the new SR, Cousins' World ended up absorbing it.

Solid Reporting. The new magazine reflects the fireside approach that always characterized Cousins' editing of the old SR: chatty editorials; decorously risible cartoons; spacious, ambling feature articles on topics that interest Cousins. SR/ World offers reportorial reach along with the literary and cultural interests of the old SR, and the amalgam so far seems to work. The first issue featured some solid reporting by Horace Sutton on the Cuban community in Miami and its links with Watergate. In the same issue, Novelist Herbert Gold contributed a lyrical review of John Dos Passos' letters and diaries, concluded that the novelist was "a person much richer than the dry and programmatic stance of U.S.A. indicates."

Subsequent issues carried cover stories on Andy Warhol and George Gershwin. These articles, while not exactly breaking new ground, provided competent retrospectives on two very different but indigenous U.S. artists. Alternating supplements on science and education (a holdover from the Charney-Veronis experiment) have offered thoughtful pieces on the moral quandaries of psychosurgery and the inequities produced by funding public education through property taxes. Joining the SR/ World masthead and beefing up its critical sections are some old SR contributors who parted company with Cousins when he left the magazine in 1971: Critics Irving Kolodin (music), Henry Hewes (drama) and Walter Terry (dance).

SR/ World has a healthy beginning-circulation base of 550,000, plus 200,000 short-term subscribers who signed on with Charney and Veronis, most of whom are not expected to renew (World's circulation was just under 200,000). Advertising revenue from the last issue of World was $29,300, while the first SR/ World pulled in $200,000. But SR/ World expenses are also up, and advertisers seem wary of the new product; the current issue carries only 20 pages of ads (compared with 46 for the inaugural appearance). Magazine spokesmen say ad sales are now on the up swing. If advertisers support the venture and the initial editorial quality is sustained, the old SR trademark--a phoenix rising from its own ashes--will be more appropriate than ever.

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