A great one remembered… 7 DAYS

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Dec 1, 2002 by Greg Lindsay

Byline: Greg Lindsay

While many (maybe too many) magazines published in New York are about New York, at least in countless small ways, 7 Days was the last to challenge New York as the soup-to-nuts guide to the city. Launched in 1988, a year after both Spy and Manhattan Lawyer arrived on the scene, 7 Days was central to a brief mini renaissance in Gotham navel-gazing.

It began as a gleam in the eye of David Schneiderman, then the editor and publisher of the Village Voice under then-owner and real estate baron Leonard Stern. Schneiderman's idea was to build a glossy weekly filled with listings and features aimed at readers uptown while the Voice cemented its downtown position. But what elevated it above a cynical play was its editor, Adam Moss, a rising star poached from Esquire.

Moss, now comfortably ensconced as editor of The New York Times Magazine, arrived at the start-up without a staff and proceeded to round up a crew of young writers who prized a hyperactive and snarky tone as much as he did. "I wouldn't characterize it as snarky," he says now. "We liked to think of ourselves as being a little more generous of spirit than Spy - not that it took much."

During its short life, 7 Days evolved from a magazine-newspaper hybrid without a true editorial well to a more conventional magazine, where writers like Walter Kirn covered the change in the demographics of The New York Times' obituaries (because of AIDS) and James Cramer promised doom for the stock market (some things never change). Exposes of media barons on the cover would follow then-groundbreaking concepts like "The Underrated," a celebration of the best things city dwellers overlooked.

7 Days lasted only two years, from the spring of 1988 to the spring of 1990. The dependence on small and local advertising, during what was then the worst media recession ever, doomed it. Its legacy may be the sense of possibility it imprinted on its staff - a young cast that featured Will Dana and Jonathan Van Meter among the full-timers and revolving crew including James Ledbetter, Kirn, Phillip Lopate, and big names like Lynn Hirschberg and Hal Rubenstein. During the boom, when those insiders headed back to start-ups in droves, 7 Days was the name they invoked to show how much fun it could be even if they failed (as, ultimately, they did).