A great one remembered…: MANHATTAN INC

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, August 1, 2003

Byline: Rachel Lehmann-Haupt

The bust of the dot.com business cycle killed off many magazines that celebrated the leaders of the era - The Industry Standard, Red Herring, Upside, Forbes ASAP, and the original Business 2.0.

The phenomenon is no surprise to folks who remember a clever glossy called Manhattan Inc. Before Wired turned technology geeks into rock stars, Manhattan Inc. was painting the man in the gray flannel suit in Technicolor - making leaders of the 1980s boom into larger-than-life characters. "Businesspeople were more or less unknown to the public," says Clay Felker, the legendary founder of New York magazine, who edited Manhattan Inc. in 1987 and 1988. "We did in-depth reporting that revealed the good, the bad - and sometimes the heroic."

Manhattan Inc. was the brainchild of Herb Lipson, owner of Philadelphia, Boston, and Atlanta. He wanted a glossy business mag that built on the successful city-magazine model. Manhattan Inc. would offer the inside scoop on the Big Apple's business obsessions - Wall Street, media, fashion, real estate.

Lipson launched in 1984 with Jane Amsterdam, the wunderkind editor of The American Lawyer, as editor-in-chief. In 1986, Amsterdam was replaced by Clay Felker, fresh from Today, an unsuccessful afternoon edition of the New York Daily News. According to Felker-era senior editor Michael Schrage, there had been tension between Lipson and Amsterdam because she was overly involved in the advertising side of the magazine.

Though Felker had no experience in business journalism, he applied his golden editorial formula of in-depth reporting and great writing, and took on New York's business elite.

Business boosterism was definitely not the name of Felker's game. His instincts, along with those of executive editor Peter Kaplan (then fresh out of Harvard, now The New York Observer's editor-in-chief), led the magazine to publish hard-hitting profiles of such '80s personalities as CBS's Larry Tisch and studio mogul Barry Diller.

The magazine also helped define the era, excerpting from Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe's withering look at money-crazed Manhattan culture, and Michael Lewis's trader memoir, Liar's Poker. And it helped launch writers such as John Seabrook. In an interview last year with Michael Wolff in New York, Time Inc. editorial director John Huey credited Amsterdam and Felker with inspiring the lively formula he brought to Fortune in the 1990s.

"It was important to be smart, but if it didn't have sex appeal, [Felker] lost interest," says Shrage, now a fellow at the MIT Media Lab. "That was a source of tension between him and Kaplan, because Kaplan just wanted to be smart."

While Manhattan Inc. developed a following among New York's chattering classes, after the 1987 crash it was as passe as Michael Douglas's Gordon Gekko. In a fitting irony, the magazine suffered its biggest blow on the business side with the demise of Drexel Burnham Lambert, which had been the biggest advertiser. The firm collapsed after its star banker, Michael Milken, was convicted on securities charges.

In 1990, Lipson sold Manhattan Inc. to Fairchild Publications, which quickly folded it into M, a men's fashion magazine. "Manhattan Inc. had a big impact on the business community and business leaders of New York," says Felker. "But the problem was that we needed more circulation to get the ad rate up, and we couldn't push the circulation past 60,000. It was too elite."