U.S. Snooze Wakes Up   

After a series of embarrassing false starts, Mort Zuckerman's U.S. News & World Report is gaining on the competition.

Mortimer B. Zuckerman, his face radiating a paternal glow, doesn't know where to start talking about his pride and joy, U.S. News & World Report. How about with the more than 20 journalism awards it brought home in 1991? Or maybe with the fact that Capell's Circulation Report and Adweek both put U.S. News on their top 10 lists of hottest magazines for last year? No, how about with the latest Audit Bureau of Circulation figures instead, the ones showing that average total paid circulation is more than 2.3 million, up more than 200,000 since Zuckerman bought the magazine in 1984? No, no, he's got it now: The number of ad pages from 1984 to the end of last year jumped 15 percent – enough, it just so happens, to pass Newsweek for the first time.

Big, big grin.

Long the runt on the newsweekly playground, U.S. News is getting a lot of respect these days. "We never used to pay any attention to it," says a senior Newsweek writer. "But now we've seen things they've done that we wish we had done." Time's redesign earlier this year bore a not-so-subtle resemblance to U.S. News' front-of-the-book section. And within the last year, publications as diverse as the Los Angeles Times and MediaGuide have tipped their hats. Things are looking so good at 2400 N Street in Washington, D.C., you'd almost forget that just a few years ago U.S. News still looked like a cross between a circus and a slaughterhouse with a printing press stuck somewhere in between.

The fact is, if the magazine is doing well now, it's largely because real estate developer Zuckerman has learned to stop doing some things and start doing others. In short, as the magazine has come of age, so has its editor in chief, and none of it has come cheaply: nearly $170 million just to buy the magazine, undisclosed millions to revamp it (Zuckerman will only say he "more than doubled the editorial budget"), and the replacement of almost all of the publication's 200 staffers. As one former senior editor puts it, Zuckerman has had "the most expensive on-the-job training in history."

Interference

Zuckerman has learned three major lessons while at the helm of U.S. News. The first concerns his involvement – or interference – in the editorial process. Reports that Zuckerman was pushing all sorts of ideas onto the staff while drastically undercutting the authority and effectiveness of his top editor inspired such in-house cracks as "Mo knows layout! Mo knows captions!" The upshot was a revolving door at the highest level: Zuckerman went through four editors in the first five years.

One of those editors, Roger Rosenblatt, claims Zuckerman's intense, hands-on style wasn't the problem by itself. "I never argued with his right to do what he pleased," Rosenblatt says. "There were just severe differences of attitude between us – over how to look at the country, the world, society, and the journalist's responsibilities to those things. I won't go into detail, but had I known those differences were so severe I wouldn't have taken the job in the first place."

Word filtering out of the shop strongly suggested that Zuckerman was bending stories to support his own views, giving a whole new meaning to the magazine's catch-phrase, "News You Can Use." Allegedly, Zuckerman would show favoritism toward pals – such as blocking any reference to Michael Milken as "junkbond king" – and come down hard on enemies – such as assigning a reporter to dig up dirt on Bill Moyers, who was publicly opposing a Zuckerman real estate deal.

Zuckerman has denied it all, but one episode, clearly the most extreme, is not so easily dismissed. In the mid-1980s Zuckerman signed a contract with Depth, an unreliable Israeli news service that claimed inside knowledge of some wild and crazy stories in the Middle East, such as one about human torpedoes aimed at Persian Gulf shipping vessels. Many Depth stories never made it into the magazine because they couldn't be verified, but one – about how Iran had duped the United States into trading arms for hostages – landed on a March 1987 cover.

In an article in Columbia Journalism Review a year later, Zuckerman defended the shaky cover story and his association with Depth. He continues to defend it today, although he says U.S. News cut its ties with the news service in late 1987.

In a recent interview, Zuckerman said that Ronald Reagan and a second, off-the-record source corroborated Depth's Iran hostage story. However, Steven Emerson, a former U.S. News reporter who checked out many Depth stories, says he believes the piece was "pure fabrication." Emerson detailed his suspicions in a memo, but his warnings went unheeded.

A reporter still on staff calls the magazine's association with Depth "a horror show," a sentiment widely and openly shared among the staff at the time. Why, then, had Zuckerman published any of Depth's reports? All he will say now is that it was a necessary learning experience. But the current staffer says, "I think Mort was sold a bill of goods and thought he could be delivered exclusive stories [such as the Iran piece]. I think he also thought he could get stories that would say the kinds of things he wanted them to say."

Whatever pressure Zuckerman may have been exerting, he appears to have backed off. "We may go for weeks and not hear a thing from Mort," says an editor who survived the meddling era. "If we do, it's usually a note suggesting we check something, never an order. I think his 'meddling,' if you want to call it that, was born of a real sense of frustration over why he couldn't get the magazine to do what he wanted right away. He wanted to improve the magazine very quickly."

Zuckerman agrees, to an extent. When asked about what he might have done wrong in trying to better things, he says, "I believe there was such a fundamental commitment on my part to [achieving] an editorial quality that, on occasion, I've been impatient to arrive at it. More impatient than the situation lent itself to."

Star Search

Lesson Two has been about the pitfalls of designer journalism. Until late 1989 there was evidence of a persistent though perhaps naive belief that big names – William Broyles Jr., Edwin M. Yoder, John Podhoretz, Robert Bork Jr., among others – would make the magazine a real contender. But a news organization works better with teamwork than with individuals who just happen to work in the same office, as the results of Zuckerman's hires indicates.

"They felt enormously superior to us," one pre-Zuckerman editor says of the stars. "Which might not have been so bad except some of them didn't even do anything. Mort put one very well-known historian on the masthead as a contributing editor, and the guy never wrote anything for us for years. I saw a piece by him in Newsweek before he did anything for us."

Inevitably, the product – and morale – suffered. A former reporter says that competing egos and goals put stories through "a horrible mulching process" in which copy was rewritten beyond recognition. (At its worst, as many as eight bylines tagged a story.) Bigger problems, though, lay at the top. Zuckerman's first three hires for the post – Shelby Coffey, David Gergen and Rosenblatt – had two things in common: name recognition and no experience in editing a weekly newsmagazine.

"Coffey turned out to be a better hard news editor than we thought," says James Wallace, recently retired after 28 years with the magazine. "But the guy seemed incapable of making a decision. There was an almost audible sigh of relief among many when he left." Coffey, who is now editor of the Los Angeles Times, declines to discuss his difficulties at the magazine.

"Gergen was a nice guy," says Jim Killpatrick, another former longtime editor, "but an absolute disaster. He had so many other things going on," which made for "an awful lot of late closings."

"The magazine had several stages of transition," Gergen replies, "and I had it at the churning stage. I felt the best long-term investment we could make was in people, not in editing. I'd edit during the beginning and end of the week, and recruit people in the middle of the week." He says he enjoyed the challenge, but also felt "I could not fully develop my own voice [as a journalist]." In the fall of 1988 he left the top spot to become editor at large and devote his time to public affairs commentary.

Then came Rosenblatt. The former Time senior writer had originally been hired as an essayist – his strength – which helped raise the overall quality of writing in the magazine, but which also conflicted with the fundamental news mission Zuckerman wanted to maintain. Rosenblatt now writes for several publications, including Life magazine and the New Republic, and recently authored a book on abortion as well as a Broadway play.

"I thought they all had talent," Zuckerman says. "I don't think you can deny that... But how those talents mesh with everything else, when you've never worked with those people before, you just don't know ahead of time." Having made the same mistake thrice, he finally turned to talents he knew – Michael Ruby and Merrill McLoughlin, a married couple who'd been on staff for about three years – and appointed them co-editors. They were not household names, but rather two respected journalists from the ranks who knew how to crank out a newsweekly.

Ruby and McLoughlin probably best represent the current approach to staffing. Says one reporter, "I think Mort has realized that growing your own stars works better than trying to buy them elsewhere. The people who've won the awards are not big names, they're not flashy people, they don't even dress particularly well. They're just good, hard-working reporters. That, and the willingness to turn them loose, is all you need. The message has finally gotten through."

Consistently Inconsistent

Lesson Three, perhaps the most important, has been the evolution of a coherent management philosophy. "I don't think Mort had ever worked in such a big organic whole such as U.S. News before," says McLoughlin. Some, such as Wallace, attributed Zuckerman's initially "scattered" management style to his real estate experience. "As a developer you have projects and project managers," Wallace says. "But a publication requires a much more consistent hand on things."

Zuckerman never lacked ideas. The trouble, rather, was a poor understanding of how some ideas work organizationally, combined with a lack of follow-through. "I always said that if you're going to screw around and father a child then you'd better stick around and pay the goddamn bills for the kid," says Alicia Mundy, a former U.S. News reporter. "What Mort did was to father all these ideas, and then take off."

The most unfortunate bastard was the short-lived investigative unit. "Mort really wanted to do it," says a reporter who was close to it. "But Rosenblatt [then recently installed as editor] didn't really see it as part of the magazine. Mort basically said, 'Fine, okay, but let's at least try some of the stuff,' " and left it to everyone else to sort things out.

The rift at the top over the investigative unit ran straight down – some editors were for it, others against. Worse, the heads of various departments, where the stories would ultimately be placed, were not part of the story development process (though they were kept informed of ideas in the works). "There was huge infighting," says Mundy. "Everybody was trying to get Papa Mort's attention, and we ended up literally caught in a pissing contest. You'd come home from work and your clothes were yellow and everything smelled."

A piece on TRW, an aerospace and defense contractor whose credit reporting subsidiary was selling private credit records to the highest bidder, typified the process. An editor involved says the story had been "superbly reported," but was "almost impossible" to place in the magazine because of the infighting. The article finally appeared months later buried in the back of the business section.

The unit disbanded after less than a year of a series of similar experiences. But Zuckerman's version of events illustrates how grudges can affect one's judgment. After leaving the magazine Mundy slashed Zuckerman in a nasty Gentleman's Quarterly profile. Returning the favor with a comment, which in mid-sentence he declares off the record, Zuckerman then says the unit failed because "not all the people were good enough, and it just didn't work with respect to the rest of the staff."

Ruby, however, says the problem lay elsewhere. "Mort's initial conception was that [the investigative unit] would work entirely outside the magazine. It's well and good to talk about that, but it's very difficult, if not impossible, to make it work in an enterprise that is otherwise supposed to be collegial. It was turf wars. I don't think it had much to do with the quality of the personnel."

To his credit, Zuckerman has acknowledged the fault lines the unit had been built on, and supported the creation of a smaller investigative group that is now operating more collegially and effectively. "This time the unit is plugged into all the section editors who need to cooperate," McLoughlin says. And as one reporter puts it, "All the trains are running on time."

Greater Credibility

U.S. News is now a magazine with not only more stability, but more credibility as well. True, Zuckerman may have inherited some of the problems with the latter (founder David Lawrence often granted editing rights to Q&A inter-viewees). But with Depth, Zuckerman had certainly hurt the magazine's reputation: One U.S. News reporter who traveled to the Middle East to check out a bogus Depth story had warned that "a number of leading Arab officials and Western diplomats have been convinced since [the Iran hostage] cover story that our Jerusalem operation is a front for Mossad disinformation."

There's been no trouble since the Iran hostage cover, save for one murky incident last winter. The January 20 issue reported that prior to the Persian Gulf War, U.S. intelligence agents secretly installed a disabling virus in Iraqi air defense computers. A computer specialist, Winn Schwartau, disputed the piece, saying no such virus could be transmitted as described. Brian Duffy, the story's principal author, says that sources reconfirmed almost everything. Kathy Bushkin, director of editorial administration, says that after publishing the article the magazine spoke to Schwartau, who "admitted to have issued [his challenge] in order to get publicity for a book he published."

"I never said that!" Schwartau says. "They explained to me where they had gotten the story, and as far as I'm concerned it totally supported my position that aside from being technologically impossible, the whole story was nuts." Schwartau insists that the U.S. News piece originated from an April Fool's Day story that appeared in a publication called InfoWorld in April 1991. Duffy and the magazine, however, still stand by the story.

As for the turmoil, some could be attributed to the disruption that comes with change. Prior to Zuckerman's arrival, U.S. News was pretty much a reflection of David Lawrence, a former AP reporter and syndicated columnist. In 1933, Lawrence founded United States News as a weekly newspaper covering the government. In 1946, he started a magazine called World Report. Two years later he merged the two into a straightforward, just-the-facts magazine in which fashion, sports, lifestyle features, reviews of any kind – even color artwork – were regarded as frivolous. And the magazine, which published red-baiting and anti-civil rights articles in the 1950s and 1960s, was still conservative in its politics.

Some veteran staffers maintain that the magazine's reputation for archconservatism was undeserved. Although Lawrence wrote conservative columns, says a retired editor from the Lawrence era, "we weren't 'arch' anything. We were just trying to get the story right. As a result we were considered dull as dishwater."

By all accounts, the old hands looked forward to the kind of polish Zuckerman could bring, but some say his approach had a nasty edge.

"Mort is a very charismatic man," a former senior editor says. "The first time he addressed the staff he had this warm look in his eye, and he was telling us how much he respected us and was hoping we'd all stay with him. It was a little shocking to start hearing a few weeks later he was planning to replace us all."

Distrust of the boss spread like an epidemic and peaked shortly after the departure of Coffey, who the staff thought was likable, even if his editing had not impressed them. Dick Thompson, Zuckerman's first hire as publisher, circulated a memo stating: "If Shelby were either a talented writer or the kind of editor who put his stamp on everything he touched, we might have to step back and take a breath before we continue on our path of significant product enhancement. But such is not the case."

Coffey declines to comment on the memo, saying only that "I have good relations with Mort now and I bear him no ill will." However, a former senior editor says the memo was "uncalled for." Particularly when Zuckerman was publicly declaring his admiration for Coffey at the time. The staff viewed the memo as a further warning that no one was immune from being stabbed in the back.

Zuckerman makes no apologies for having had to rebuild a staff that, he says with justification, now brings him enormous pride. "It is the single greatest achievement and it was not easy," he states. He vigorously disputes charges that he is two-faced. "I'm sure there are people who felt that way, but their version of history may be somewhat less than objective. I think everyone who left the magazine did so because we found they were inadequate to the very new standards we had set."

Zuckerman estimates that 75 percent of the staff either quit or were fired after he bought the magazine, although the true figure is probably closer to 85 percent. Nevertheless, he points out that even through the most tumultuous times, several key people – such as Executive Editor Peter Bernstein, Deputy Editor Christopher Ma and Co-editor Ruby – have stayed with him. That kind of stability has finally broadened, and it's paid off where it counts most. As one reporter says, "There's a sense of continuity and direction now."

Not that it was completely missing before. Indeed, despite the missteps and false starts there were clear signs that Zuckerman was onto something. The thorough facelift he had commissioned sharpened the book's image, and even amid the in-house carnage, U.S. News stories (one on AIDS in particular) were being picked up by other media. The problem was never quality, but consistency.

One current senior editor says the turning point came not long after Rosenblatt's departure in 1989, when turmoil as a way of life had become the dominant theme of articles about U.S. News. "Mort was tired of stories about meddling and firings," the editor says. "He learned he had to occasionally back off, and he saw that the people already here knew as much about the magazine business as all the 'experts' he'd been bringing in." In almost every sense he started to see that what he'd been searching for had more or less been there all along.

"News You Can Use," a little back-of-the-book section left over from the Lawrence era, had always been a hit with readers. But Zuckerman saw its potential. As before, service journalism would help distinguish the magazine from Time and Newsweek, continuing the magazine's no-nonsense image; the difference now was that "News You Can Use" would become the core around which all other editorial content would form, serving as a kind of touchstone even for the traditional hard news and forward-looking analysis Zuckerman wanted to keep publishing. As Ruby puts it, " 'News You Can Use' is a notion that permeates the entire magazine."

The result? The kind of consistency any magazine would love to have: solid run-downs on the best hospitals and colleges in the country; a cover story on Saddam Hussein ("The Most Dangerous Man in the World") two months before his invasion of Kuwait; some of the best up-to-the-week coverage and examination of the Persian Gulf War; a thoughtful essay on the aftermath of the Los Angeles riots; and an August 24 cover story on how President Bush's inability to bring about change is linked to his character. Not bad for a magazine that has 14 domestic and foreign correspondents, compared to Time's 58 and Newsweek's 65.

U.S. Snooze No More

How much of this success is due to Zuckerman, or in spite of him? Either way, none of it would have happened without him. Even one former reporter who can't stand his old boss admits, "He takes hits when things screw up, but you have to give him credit when things go well. Other people may have played the key roles, but he allowed it to happen."

If stats are any indication, Zuckerman has done more than just set a personal best. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulation's mid-1992 figures, the magazine's 2.3 million circulation is nearly a 10 percent increase since Zuckerman took over in 1984. In contrast, Time has dropped almost 10 percent in the same period (from 4.6 million to 4.15 million). Newsweek is up to about 3.2 million from 3 million, but the increase is less than 7 percent. U.S. News readers may tend to be a little older than those of Time or Newsweek, but median age has been coming down – 41.6 at the end of 1991, almost a full year lower than in 1989.

Moreover, from 1989 to the end of 1991, ad pages in Time dropped by 567, while Newsweek lost 543. U.S. News lost 30 but held on enough to nose out Newsweek last year – 2,023 to 1,952. And according to the Media Industry Newsletter, during the first eight months of this year U.S. News' 10 percent increase in ad pages over the same period in 1991 was the highest of the three newsweeklies (Time was up only 1.7 percent, while Newsweek was up nearly 7.7 percent).

Newsweek (the more vulnerable of the other two) says there's more than meets the eye. Peter Eldredge, the magazine's publisher and executive vice president, points out that U.S. News lost circulation in the last half of 1991 while Newsweek increased. The same was true for the first half of this year. Also, figures from Publishers Information Bureau showed Newsweek's 1991 ad revenues were still nearly one-third higher than U.S. News'. Not that Newsweek's rates are so much steeper. An important element, Eldredge says, is per inquiry advertising, which is taken on a commission basis (the advertiser pays the magazine a percentage of product sales). Newsweek does not have the same volume of per inquiry ads as U.S. News. In fact, Eldredge says a February Newsweek audit of per inquiry ads in the three newsweeklies shows that for 1991 U.S. News printed seven times as many as Newsweek.

Zuckerman acknowledges his magazine accepts per inquiry advertising. "But that doesn't account for the fact that Newsweek has had four bad years in a row and we're way up there, thank you very much," he adds.

Richard Smith, Newsweek's editor in chief, has argued that U.S. News' advance commitment to "News You Can Use" issues (15 this year) can pre-empt coverage of breaking events. But readers probably don't care, because the best-selling issues continue to be service-oriented. The career and finance-guide covers, for example, each sell more than 100,000 copies at the newsstand.

In fact, according to articles last spring in Advertising Age and Adweek, several industry hotshots believe that of the three newsweeklies, U.S. News may be the only one to survive the 1990s (yes, there's talk again that the newsweekly is doomed). Time's redesign looks like a magazine still searching; Newsweek, with its one-from-column-A or one-from-column-B subscriber options, doesn't look much better. At least Zuckerman's formula of looking at even the hardest news in terms of how it affects readers is clear.

Receding Byline

Though he keeps track of story lists when he's not in town ("If something puts a tic under his eye," Ruby says, "he calls"), and though he continues to suggest ideas (many of them good, editors say, even those speaking on background), Zuckerman now tends to be much more democratic than autocratic. Like his magazine, he appears to have found his niche.

Some staffers harbor no illusions about Zuckerman's apparent new management style. "Keeping his more onerous influences out of the magazine is probably more work for Mike [Ruby] and Mimi [McLoughlin] than many of us realize," says one reporter. Ruby admits to a few "95-decibel shouting matches," but says the relationship is working. Indeed, for the most part every staff member interviewed spoke highly and happily about morale.

Zuckerman now confines most of his views to his back page editorials. They've evolved from embarrassing to just uneven. The prose still plods, often tripping over its bombast, but, unlike before, many of the points are worth making. One standout was is an editorial last May about Secretary of State James Baker's uncanny ability to avoid responsibility for some of the administration's biggest failures. Another was last August's "The Cloud Over Desert Storm," which discussed the administration's obfuscation of its role in arming Iraq before the gulf war. Even so, the editor in chief's column is the one place where consistency remains elusive.

These days, though, Zuckerman has the kind of awareness that ought to ensure his magazine's very promising hold on the future. "I don't pretend everything we've done was letter-perfect. Inevitably you make mistakes – editorial mistakes, staffing mistakes, personal mistakes. It's hard to be specific because like anybody else, I block them out of my mind. [I have] a sense of trying to deny they took place, though I know they did... You want to talk about mistakes? How much time do you have?" l