Urban Survival Manuals

Who are the top tennis teachers in Los Angeles? What is the gay community like in Washington, D.C.? Who is the best sportswriter in Texas? Is Chicago 's drinking water polluted?

All of these questions have something in common. They are asked--and answered--by a lively gaggle of publications known as city magazines, a diverse, eclectic and sometimes unruly group of enterprises to crowd under one rubric. But most, whatever else they do, aspire to be urban survival manuals, guiding their readers toward the best that city life has to offer while warning them away from its pitfalls and dangers. The genre is by and large prospering: while magazines in general lost advertising pages in 1975, city magazines as a group increased their ads by some 1,100 pages over 1974, a gain of more than 10%. In fact, four of the five U.S. monthlies with the fastest growing advertising volume are city magazines.*

Most of the successful city magazines have borrowed--some of them heavily--from the graphics, format and trendy chic of New York (circ. 364,000), the pacesetting weekly first published as an independent magazine by Clay Felker in 1967. (Felker had been its editor in an earlier and simpler incarnation, when it was a Sunday supplement of the now defunct New York Herald-Tribune.) Regular features akin to Felker's "The Underground Gourmet" (budget-minded restaurant reviews) and "The Passionate Shopper" are staple fare, and New York's penchant for parlor-game lists ("The Ten Worst Judges," "The 100 Greatest Freebies in Town") has been widely copied. Unlike New York, which often ranges afield to cover events of national interest (last week's cover story was a profile of Jimmy Carter), other city magazines--all of them monthlies--generally confine their efforts to local stories. Among the best:

P: Texas Monthly (circ. 185,000), based in Austin, is a city magazine that covers an entire state with an enthusiasm that reflects the youth of Publisher Michael Levy, 29, and Editor William Broyles, 31. Levy, a Wharton School of business graduate who had practically no journalism experience before starting Texas Monthly, gave up the idea of confining a magazine to Houston or Dallas because neither city seemed likely to provide a circulation of 100,000--the minimum he felt he needed to succeed. Instead, three years ago, he started a magazine that would appeal to urban dwellers anywhere in the state. "We like to think we're writing about things that never would have been written about if we hadn't been here," says Editor Broyles, a onetime writer for the British weekly Economist. He may well be right. Texas Monthly has boldly attacked Dallas banking institutions, Houston law firms, airport safety and that most sacred of cows, college football. Texas Monthly has lacked originality and punch in its graphics, but it has become an articulate voice for the rising urban consciousness in the third most populous state in the Union.

P: Chicago (circ. 140,000) began life 24 years ago as Chicago Guide, a supermarket giveaway that listed radio programs of the city's classical music station, WFMT. In 1971, Publisher Raymond Nordstrand, 43, who came to Chicago from WFMT (he is still its station manager), decided to add articles and start selling the magazine to the public. Since then it has become one of the fattest books in the country. Today, a typical 230-page issue carries more than 100 pages of advertising. Last year Nordstrand dropped the "Guide" from Chicago's title. But on the inside, Chicago is still mostly a gray, though useful, landscape of listings that includes in a typical issue an index guide to 1,000-plus local events, critiques of nearly 80 films, as well as WFMT radio and public TV listings. Chicago runs occasional pieces of fiction and articles that cover everything from the Mafia to houseplants in a style that one reader describes as "funky, chic lakeside journalism."

P: Philadelphia (circ. 122,000) has no peers among city magazines in investigative reporting. Among the imaginatively illustrated magazine's bigger muckraking scoops: the revelation that a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter was blackmailing banks and businesses by threatening to give them bad publicity (the reporter was suspended from the Inquirer and eventually convicted), and an expose detailing how local politicians had fouled up Philadelphia's Bicentennial celebration by mismanaging funds (as a result, the city restored to the welfare fund $500,000 that it had earlier diverted to the Bicentennial). Philadelphia 's success is due to the unwavering localism of Publisher Herbert Lipson, 46, who was a charter member of a booster organization, Action Philadelphia, before taking Philadelphia over from his father in 1961. "We wouldn't do a piece on Jerry Ford," he says, "unless it turned out he was born in Philadelphia."

P: Los Angeles (circ. 100,000), now owned by a medical-book publisher, was once eagerly sought by New York's Felker. Los Angeles has developed over the past 15 years into a smooth, narrow-focus magazine that is deliberately preoccupied with helping its readers to "get the good life together" and, like many of its affluent readers, only mildly concerned with Los Angeles politics and problems. "City government is just not a spectator sport here as it is in other cities," explains Editor Geoff Miller, 39, who joined Los Angeles shortly after graduating from U.C.L.A. The sport in Los Angeles is leisure, and the magazine helps its readers play by publishing lists of 52 suggested weekend trips (an annual feature), guides to public tennis courts and 31 ways to keep the kids busy in August. Miller insists he is not worried about New York look-alike New West, a Felker bi-weekly that begins publication next month in Los Angeles. He takes comfort in the fact that New West is aiming at a slightly younger, less well-off audience.

P: The Washingtonian (circ. 64,000) is an urbane and witty ten-year-old magazine published by Laughlin Phillips, 50, a liberal, wealthy Washingtonian who co-founded the magazine after 15 years in the CIA. He and Editor Jack Limpert, 41, a former U.P.I, reporter and newspaper editor, aim to please a widely scattered metropolitan area audience with wining-and-dining columns, canny pieces on D.C. notables, some press criticism and generally light, glossy cover stories: "Sex, Power and Politics," for instance, or "Adventures in the Loveless World of the Sexually Liberated" (a sellout). The Washingtonian publishes service features that sometimes cost it dearly. Example: an article advising readers that they could buy furniture at a lower cost directly from North Carolina manufacturers prompted local furniture stores to pull their advertising.

One of the criticisms sometimes leveled at the Washingtonian and other city magazines is that they serve a narrow segment of the urban population, largely ignoring blacks in mostly black Washington, for example, and Chicanes in Los Angeles. City magazines take this course, observes Esquire Columnist Nora Ephron, because they are really glossy shopping guides for the privileged. They "have taken food and home furnishings and plant care," she wrote recently, "and surrounded them with just enough political and sociological reporting to give readers an excuse to buy them."

Not every city magazine publisher who takes the field succeeds. Within the last year or two, for example, magazines in Chicago, San Francisco and Detroit have closed their doors. But another half-dozen or so around the U.S. are coming along well. D, The Magazine of Dallas, founded in 1974, has steadily increased its circulation, which is now 42,000, and is already in the black. Cleveland, which began publication in 1972, now has a circulation of 45,000, and in 1974 had the greatest advertising growth of any U.S. monthly.

* Chicago, Los Angeles, The Washingtonian and Cleveland. The fifth is Smithsonian magazine.

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