Magazine legend Clay Felker has been eulogized for fostering New Journalism, but today at The New Republic, Marc Weingarten, author of The Gang Who Wouldn’t Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, and the New Journalism Revolution, contends that Felker’s more significant legacy is the creation of the much-maligned category of “service journalism.”
Clay Felker’s most significant contribution was inventing the concept of service journalism, the magazine as proto-search engine.
And though service journalism is often, as he writes, viewed as a contradiction in terms, Weingarten argues that Felker succeeded in the practice, by doing it so stylishly and smartly that his New York magazine became a vital tool for navigating the city in the ’70s.
You can read the whole article here