InDigestible: The decline of a great magazine

National Review, Feb 11, 2002 by John J. Miller

Every magazine changes over time, and Reader's Digest clearly needed to improve its economic performance. Yet the company burned through four CEOs in the mid 1990s, creating turmoil that badly damaged the magazine's editorial side. The talented editor Kenneth Tomlinson quit in 1996. Many consider him the magazine's last great editor. "He really understood what the Digest is all about," says one former staffer. Most of the magazine's top editors had been Tomlinson hires, and virtually all of them were, like Tomlinson himself, political conservatives.

Christopher Willcox, also a conservative, replaced Tomlinson-but he was immediately forced into a round of belt-tightening. The editorial staff was reduced, much of it by way of natural attrition and forced retirements. Morale dropped sharply. Today there is a vigorous debate among current and former Digest employees (some two dozen of whom were consulted for this article) about Willcox's role in the magazine's decline. Some say it began on his watch, while others describe him as a last-ditch defender of the Digest's tried-and-true ways. Whatever the truth, Willcox set in motion a series of significant editorial changes. He moved the table of contents off its familiar place on the front cover and boosted the magazine's visual impact. The overall number of Digest stories began to drop, with the expensive hard-news stories among the first to go. "If there were three political articles in every issue, Willcox took it down to two," complains one former editor. "He cared more about look than content. He didn't do much to maintain standards."

Willcox was more responsive to the marketers' demographic hand-wringing than Tomlinson had been, but the corporate side of the magazine never took to him-and especially not Thomas O. Ryder, an American Express executive who became CEO in 1998. In January 2000, Ryder finally moved against Willcox by creating a brand-new position at Reader's Digest: editor-in-chief of the Reader's Digest Association-i.e., the whole company-which outranked Willcox's job as editor-in-chief of the magazine. Ryder hired Eric Schrier from Time's health-publications division to fill it, and Willcox resigned less than two months later. Schrier effectively served as the magazine's top editor for the next year and a half.

Reader's Digest generally had elevated its top editors from within the magazine. Both Tomlinson and Willcox had spent years working for the Digest before their promotions. They understood what several current and former Pleasantville insiders call "Reader's Digest values," in part because these values had shaped their professional careers. Schrier, however, was an outsider hired at a time when the magazine was letting go of some of its most seasoned editors. He was a competent magazine professional, but Reader's Digest had always wanted something more than technical skill; it wanted a particular worldview, plus an understanding and appreciation of why that worldview resonated with millions of people in the United States and abroad. "Schrier has no sense of the magazine's history," complains one former editor. The new editor was different in other ways, too. Each of his predecessors-going back before Tomlinson to the days of Ken Gilmore in the 1980s and founder DeWitt Wallace himself-was a known conservative. Yet Schrier is a political mystery. People who work with him daily don't know his views on fundamental issues. "My opinions are a private matter," he says.