Clay Felker is the reason I got into magazine journalism.
Felker, who died last week at 82, was better known as the editor of New York and Esquire and champion of New Journalism, as this New York Times’ remembrance so aptly summarizes.
But to me he’ll always be the guy who started New West. In 1976, Felker brought his East Coast literary sensibilities and New Journalism panache out to California to start a sister magazine to the city glossy he’d begun in New York. He fittingly called it New West.
New West was a classic. California stories told by California writers. My heroes were on those pages. Some, like Joan Didion, had already made a name for themselves. Others, like Ruth Reichl, were still on their way.
I was in college in Los Angeles in those days and an aspiring journalist. So when my senior year was coming to an end, I applied for an internship at New West. To my surprise, I got it.
But the job came with a hitch. Although it was full time, it didn’t pay a dime. Of course, I didn’t realize then that that was probably due to the fact that the magazine wasn’t making enough money to pay an intern. But I was poor too, and couldn’t afford to work for free.
So instead of working at New West that summer, I got job doing paste up and proofreading at a chain of weekly community newspapers. Not glamorous, but it paid the rent.
The rest is history. New West changed its name to California and eventually went out of business. Felker had already left for greener pastures. I enrolled in a journalism graduate school in the Midwest, although I eventually came back to Los Angeles.
But New West stayed with me. I still keep my favorite Joan Didion column from the magazine tucked into an old journal in my nightstand. It’s the one where she goes back to UC Berkeley as a guest lecturer and muses about what it means to be a writer.
Though I didn’t get the chance to work there, New West made me believe that some day I could be a writer too. And for that I say, thank you Clay Felker.