George Hirsch knew it wasn’t going to end well with Clay Felker. Though New York, the magazine they co-founded in 1968, had been a huge success, working with the gifted but temperamental editor had become intolerable. Hirsch, who’d given up a promising career at Time Inc. to publish New York, began plotting his next venture. First, on a lark, he ran the Boston Marathon, though he’d never run a race, not even the 100-yard dash, as an adult. He regretted only not training first.
In 1972, Hirsch left New York with a concept for a national version of The Village Voice or The Boston Phoenix, rooted in New Journalism and muckraking reporting. Not as stuffy as The Atlantic or The New Republic, not as lefty as Mother Jones or Ramparts, more adult, less fawning than Rolling Stone. The result, New Times, aimed to cover what Time and Newsweek missed and the mainstream ignored.
