The Mike Geffner Phenomenon!

Vote for me!

http://www.news3online.com/index.php?code=75G172oHi607If8d9Ryc

Click here

Edward Murrow played by David Strathairn in Good Night And Good Luck

Looking for a Writing Job?: My (Hopefully) Definitive Online Sites List

Looking for a Writing Job?

Check out these sites:

http://www.mediabistro.com/joblistings

http://www.pw.org/joblistings

http://careers.poynter.org/search/results/

http://www.ed2010.com/jobs/whisperjobs

http://www.writingcareer.com/writingjobs/index.php

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PayingWriterJobs

http://www.sunoasis.com

http://www.writerfind.com/freelance_jobs

http://www.freelancewritinggigs.com

http://www.tjobs.com/new/writers.shtml

http://www.online-writing-jobs.com/

http://www.thefreelancewriterslounge.blogspot.com/

http://jobs.mediageneral.com/

http://www.writejobs.com

http://www.aasfe.org/jobs/index.php

http://journalism.berkeley.edu/jobs/listings.php?view=job

http://aboutfreelancewriting.com

http://www.creativehotlist.com/index.asp

http://www.gofreelance.com/?AID=10414556&PID=2398750

http://jobs.problogger.net

http://jobs.freelanceswitch.com/categories/3

http://www.blogher.com/forums/blogher-news-forums/job-listings-and-gigs-0

http://www.poewar.com/jobs-by-category/jobs/

http://www.indeed.com

http://www.writersweekly.com

http://www.bloggerjobs.biz

http://www.mediajobmarket.com/jobs/index.jsp

http://allfreelancewritingjobs.com/

http://www.jeffqaulin.com

http://authorlink.monster.com

http://www.writingjobroll.com/

http://www.newsjobs.net/

http://www.simplyhired.com/a/jobs/list/o-27304

http://www.freelancedaily.net/

http://www.wahm.com/jobs.html

http://www.journalismnet.com/jobs/

http://www.elance.com/p/landing/buyerwriting.html

http://www.guru.com/index.aspx

http://www.allfreelancework.com/

http://www.journalismjobs.com

(Disclaimer: I only recommend these sites as interesting ones to check out. If you decide to purchase any products or services, or become a paid member of a site or apply for a posted job, you do so at your own risk. Please use your discretion and common sense.)

If you know of any other sites, please email me at:

mgeffy@gmail.com

Writing Fiction Lesson 101 Video

Hosting a One-Day Writers Workshop in New York City/Aug. 10th!

One-Day Writers Workshop in New York City

If you're interested, please email me at:

mgeffy@gmail.com

I'm conducting a four-hour event on Sunday, August 10th.

Date: Sunday, Aug. 10th
Time: 1-5PM
Cost: $75
Topic: Builiding the Professional Writing Life: Advanced
Strategies and Straight Talk
Site: A restaurant in Forest Hills, Queens
PayPal available for pre-payment.

Look forward to meeting all of you,

Mike

H.L. Mencken

H.L. Mencken was a Baltimore journalist who wrote with wit and passion about the encroaching monopoly state, the suffocation of American liberty under the smothering breasts of Big Mother. In this clip from Inherit the Wind, Gene Kelly, as E.K. Hornbeck, gives a charming portrayal of Mencken.

Chris Pash's The Last Whale

THE LAST WHALE
Creative nonfiction book to be published October 2008 by Fremantle Press.

The true story, written by Chris Pash, gets inside the heads of Australia's last whalers and a group of people who planned and executed a campaign to stop them. The campaign was Greenpeace's first direct action in Australia.

Contact: chris@thelastwhale.com.au

http://www.thelastwhale.com.au
Click here
http://thelastwhale.blogspot.com
Click here

The Spotlight Interview: Julia Cameron

The Spotlight Interview

Julia Cameron, Author/Teacher



Julia Cameron, 60, is a giant not only among writers but all kinds of artists.

With her ground-breaking best-seller, The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, in 1992—a “tool box” of mind-expanding exercises she perfected over many years of hosting writing workshops—Ms. Cameron engaged, liberated and inspired a whole generation of creative people.

She has written for television and the big screen, poetry and plays, short stories and novels, and nearly two dozen books, including another best-seller, The Vein of Gold: A Journey to Your Creative Heart, and a candid memoir, Floor Sample, in which she recounts her alcoholism, psychosis, recovery, and self-styled spiritual path that led to The Artist’s Way. She’s also been an award-winning journalist, publishing in such notable places as The New York Times, LA Times, Rolling Stone, Chicago Tribune, The Village Voice, New West, New York, American Film Magazine, Vogue, Mademoiselle, Redbook, Ladies Home Journal, Savvy, and Cosmopolitan.

In 1975, she married before-he-was-famous director Martin Scorcese, whom she met while interviewing him for Playboy; a year later, they produced a daughter named Domenica; and during their short-lived union collaborated on three major films—Taxi Driver; New York, New York; and The Last Waltz.

Living in New York City full-time now, she teaches workshops at the Open Center, does frequent readings in Barnes & Noble, and of course, continues to be creative dynamo.

Please check out her Web site at:

http://theartistsway.com/

And go look in bookstores everywhere for her most recent book, The Writing Diet: Write Yourself Right-Size.

The following is my exclusive interview with Ms. Cameron:

Mike: What’s the most prevalent, if not the most pernicious problem you encounter in your workshops?

Cameron: I think people have a great fear of risk. And that until they examine it, they have a subconscious foreboding that if they dare move out in the direction that they would love to, something horrid would happen. They have this idea, “I’d love to do this, but I might lose my family. I’d love to pursue my dreams, but if I did I’d go broke.

We have a lot mythology in our culture that’s very negative to creativity. We tend to believe that artists are broke, tormented, neurotic, and lonely. If people don’t bring those beliefs up to the surface and examine them, they constitute a pretty powerful block.

Mike: So how does one counteract that?

Cameron: Well, you can’t fight it all at once and defeat it overnight. You start with small steps, something like the morning pages that I write about in my books, where you allow yourself the freedom at the beginning of your writing day to write three pages non-stop and only in longhand and about wherever your mind takes you at that moment. Free association—it doesn’t matter what you write or how it reads, as long as you fill those pages. It’s a wonderful way of facing your problems head-on and ventilating fears, especially irrational ones. “I’m awake and I’m blue,” you say to yourself, “and I don’t know why I’m blue.” Well, explore that in your morning pages. It’s an effective way to moving out of doubts and taking risks.

Morning pages are a form of meditation and they tend to create optimism and realism. Virginia Wolfe said that all artists needed a room of their own, and I always think, "Fine, if you can afford it," but morning pages are a sort of portable room of your own. No one else reads them except for you.

Another thing you can do is move out of your comfort zone once a week and take an expedition on behalf of your artist self. If you like things French, you might go to a French cooking class, you might go to a French movie.

One more thing is something so simple that many people overlook it: walking. It’s very difficult to walk and stay blocked simultaneously. There’s something about the rhythm of walking that moves people onto the page.

In my 12-week workshop, one non-negotiable tool I preach is taking a good walk once a week. I have found in my experience that as people walk they have breakthroughs, inspirations of new directions to go. I call them alpha ideas, and they don’t usually come from that worrying place but a place much loftier.

I have found that if people walk—I’d say 20 minutes a day—they’ll enter an altered state where they have an expanded sense of self and connection. It is at once very large and very particular. It is often on walks that you will integrate a problem, or if you are a writer and you have a tangled plot line, you will suddenly see a new solution.

Walking is such an enormously potent tool that I can’t say enough about it. When you walk, you are able to hear more cleanly and more keenly. When we walk, we begin to be able to hear with the ears in our hearts.

Mike: What other problems do you hear a lot?

Cameron: Sometimes people say, “I don’t have time to write,” so I tell them to buy five postcards for their friends and write on them. Suddenly, they have time for that.

We really need to dismantle our seriousness, to write simply for the joy of writing, what I call laying track. Most people can get half-way through a project laying track, and then they'll hit a wall, where the ego says, "My god, I'm going to finish this. Someone's going to judge this. This better be good." The critic comes rearing up like Godzilla and people typically try to sort of muscle their way over the wall, with phrases like, “I am good enough. I am smart enough. I am writing well enough.” That absolutely doesn't work. When you reach the wall in your writing, instead of trying to convince yourself you're brilliant, you have to say, “I’m willing to write badly.” The minute you have surrendered enough to be willing to write badly, you can finish your work. And when you're willing to write badly, you very often write very well.

Mike: What else liberates the writing mind?

Cameron: I like for my students to start with a written cue. For example, a wish list: “I wish that…” And fill in the blank. You may do that 20 times if you want. By the end, people are often very surprised what they wish for.

I also like making collages, designing creativity dolls or masks that take on the creative monsters looming in our subconscious, a totem figure that we’ve never been able to break from, such as the teacher that said, “Did you plagiarize this?” or “With spelling like that, you'll never be able to write.” We need to isolate the things in our past that crushed us.

Mike: What are your own writing habits?

Cameron: I get up in the morning and do my morning pages (at least three pages and possibly more), then I take a long walk and during the afternoon I write. Sometimes I write at night, but not often. When I write at night, it means that I didn’t write well during the day, so it spills over.

I do my writing often on an old IBM electric, believe it or not. Typewriters are enticing to me. That little click keeps you company as you write. The computer is not quite as user friendly, at least for me.

I write every day, and enough to keep me comfortable. “It’s your journalism background that keeps you writing so freely,” is what my editor always tells me.

Mike: Is writing more difficult now than when you were younger?

Cameron: No. You see, I’m a sober alcoholic. Before I got sober (in 1978), my writing was purely ego driven. I just wanted to be brilliant. Once I got sober, I started writing out of the spirit of trying to be of service, with brilliance sort of parked on the side. What happened, my writing really became untangled, more user friendly, less ego driven. And the funny thing is, probably more people would say that I’m brilliant now than before, when I was so self-consciously trying to be brilliant.

Mike: When did you know that you were an artist?

Cameron: I always knew, because I came from an entire family of artists. So it never occurred to any of us to do anything else. My mom and dad are both writers and musicians, and so it never occurred to them to tell us that we couldn’t make a living at it. My oldest sister is a writer. My next sister is a portrait artist. My older brothers are musicians. And the two youngest are writers. All seven of us live by our wits.

I was so lucky growing up, in that I had an environment that was incredibly supportive. I was encouraged for my writing and also for my painting. I was writing short stories when I was 12, my first novel when I was 21.

Mike: What was the key part of your creative growth?

Cameron: I started reading theology in high school and that became the groundwork for my creativity books much later. I was particularly drawn to people like Paul Tillich, the German-American theologian and Christian existentialist philosopher who talks about the “ground of being,” or what can sustain finite beings is being itself.

But while I was reading all these theologians, I was also reading Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Lillian Hellman.

Surprising, I never read any writing books, never did, at least not until I had been a writer for 20 years, around the time I was writing the Artist’s Way. It was then that I read Brenda Ueland’s If You Want to Write and Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer and Peter Elbow. I found them reassuring. I never knew that anybody else did anything resembling morning writing. I discovered it entirely by the seat of my pants.

Mike: What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever gotten?

Cameron: It came from the famous Playboy editor, Arthur Kretchmer, who said, “Don’t try to write for your common reader, because you’re never going to meet him or her. Write for your ideal reader, the person who will get everything you have to say.”

I found that advice very helpful and for years I wrote with Arthur in my head.

Mike: What’s the best advice you can now give to others?

Cameron: I tell people in my workshops to be like the Nike ad: Just do it. I don’t really want to hear why people are blocked. Just get up and write.

Mike: What do you think about self-publishing?

Cameron: I do believe in it. I self published my first two books, The Artist’s Way and Money Drunk, Money Sober. I did it, however, in a very rudimentary form, by simply Xeroxing the pages and mailing them out to people.

I do believe that when we commit to our own work passionately enough to self-publish it that it can sometimes create a ripple effect.

In fact, I had a novel up for sale right and found that my name wasn’t in any way helping in selling it—I’ve been typecast as a nonfiction writer, I think—so I considered either going the small-press route or self-publishing it.

Mike: Do you show your work to other people before you send it out?

Cameron: Yes, I do. I have a little group of people—around a handful—that I’ve known for years, and I’ll send them some rough drafts. They’re very tough people whose aesthetics I trust.

I think when we start to share our work we become a little bit braver. And I feel that we all need what I call a “believing mirror,” which is somebody who’s committed to your creativity beside yourself. That’s very important. A person who’ll tell you to send it out one more time.

Mike: Could you talk about the progression of your writing career?

Cameron: My first real writing job was at the Washington Post, during the Watergate era. They didn’t really hire women back then, so I was a copy aide, opening letters and sorting mail but also writing stories all the time, mostly for the arts section. You’d think I was a staff writer, but I wasn’t.

I knew Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, and I got along with them very well.

Anyway, in my frustration, I quit in a huff one day and went to write for Rolling Stone magazine, and I even scooped Carl and Bob with a piece about E. Howard Hunt’s family. That piece became pretty famous (cited for excellence by Time magazine). It was the first one about Watergate behind the scenes.

I also wrote journalism for, among many other “hip” places, New West, Playboy, and The Village Voice, but then my career took an entirely different course.

I married Martin Scorcese. The marriage lasted only 2 1/2 years, but we were together off and on—before, during, and after our marriage—for around a decade—I was kinda like Marty’s live-in writer. I worked on Taxi Driver; New York, New York; and The Last Waltz.

In my book Floor Sample, I write all about my colorful, as well as tortured, experiences in Hollywood.

Mike: I know you live in Manhattan now, but how about Taos, New Mexico?

Cameron: A couple of years ago, I sold my house in Taos, New Mexico, where I lived for a decade.

Mike: You lived near Natalie Goldberg, right?

Cameron: Yes. In fact, we used to joke together that there was something in the Taos water.

Mike: You and Natalie are often paired together as the New Age gurus of writing books.

Cameron: That’s true, even though we have quite different styles and are grounded in very different senses of spirituality (I’ve been on a spiritual path for nearly 30 years that I cannot name).

What Natalie and I did, I think, was get people in the water, a whole new group involved in the world of art and creativity.

In fact, I love reading Natalie myself.

Mike: Natalie told me in an interview awhile back that, until recently, you were more hesitant to confront the dark side than she was. Do you agree?

Cameron: I’ve written about my three nervous breakdowns, so I’m well acquainted with the dark side. But I admit that on a daily basis, I work really hard to work in a brighter reality.

Mike: What was it like to get so much fame—nearly cult-like—after publishing The Artist’s Way?

Cameron: Success is difficult. Fame is difficult. It can keep people from seeing you as you are. You must go through that. I cure people of any reverential feeling by very quickly cursing in their presence (I think journalists are first-rate swearers and that the newsroom breeds colorful language).

I’m convinced that if you do your job properly that you’ll lower the pedestal level.

Mike: What do you hope to accomplish with your workshops?

Cameron: That the students will have their lives change and they’ll make things and develop projects.

Mike: Besides writing and, obviously, your friends and family, what are your loves in life?

Cameron: Pragmatism, solitude, teaching, and…solutions.

Meg Cabot on writing a novel

The Writers Network!

Click here

Clay Felker Remembered

Clay Felker Remembered

Tom Wolfe: I'll never forget being in the studio of Jacques Lowe, a photographer, and John F. Kennedy had just been assassinated ...And so everyone was either stunned or mourning or wondering, "God, can we go on," and next thing I hear is "clump-clump-clump-clump -clump-clump-clump" up the stairs. It was about a three-story walk-up, and it's Clay saying, "Jacques, Jacques, where are the pictures, where are the pictures?" Clay knew that Jacques Lowe had taken the only pictures of John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy talking to Lyndon Johnson, trying to persuade him to run as vice president. So Clay's already thinking ahead to Johnson's administration. He's not ringing his hands over Jack Kennedy. The news, suddenly, is really Lyndon Johnson, because he's going to be the new president.

Gloria Steinem: After Martin Luther King was murdered, I was in my living room walking around, feeling like a part of the world had come to an end. Clay called me up and said, "You call yourself a reporter! Get up to Harlem and report!" He always had his mind on the story. Clay accumulated writers; writers would follow Clay anywhere.

Shelley Zalaznick: I don't know anybody who understood the city better. Really. He always understood this was a city that could change your life. I don't know anyone with a finer appreciation of that terribly important function of the city.

Richard Goldstein on Clay Felker in 1977

From The Village Voice January 17, 1977, Richard Goldstein on the editorial genius of Clay Felker:

About Clay Felker

When I was a young writer subsisting on tuna casseroles on the Upper West Side, I received an invitation to lunch from the World Journal Tribune's Sunday magazine, which was called New York. We met The Player's club off Gramercy Park, took in an auction at the Parke Bernet, and ended up shopping for furniture at a store called Fabulous Fakes. He was a tall, sanguine man. I had trouble keeping up with his walk, not to mention his ideas. He wanted me to write about the pop culture of Saigon, to report on the songs the troops were playing in the fields. I had just convinced the army to exclude me from those hostilities, so I turned the assignment down. But I had learned something about Clay Felker that afternoon: He had the power to convince you there was nothing dangerous or absurd about a story on the 10 most powerful headhunters, and the drive to put you on a plane for New Guinea before you could think of way out.

When the paper folded, he vowed to start New York up on its own. I figured he'd have it out within a month, but it took him two years. In the thick of it, he lived in a sauna of uncertainty. When he came to dinner, I thought I'd impress him by lighting incense and turning up the stereo. But my wife sat him in our only comfortable chair and rubbed his neck until he relaxed. Starting a weekly magazine is pretty hard in any case (otherwise the newsstands would be groaning under the weight of the egos), but in those days there were no such thing as a city magazine. New York was the first and best and Clay Felker is the reason why.

People say he loved power and celebrity, and that is true enough; and people say he couched his instincts in demographics, and that is also true. But he was a great editor; he could spot a lead like bear pawing water for trout, and he could cut copy with the dispatch of a butcher trimming flank. He never told me what to write or how to write it, and he published my copy when his face turned beet red at the sight of it. Anyone who has written for what can be called the “corporate press” will appreciate my preference for Clay Felker's impulses—even when they were censorious—over the assassination-by-committee which is custom at the slicks.

To say his staff occasionally parted company with those impulses would be an understatement. The quarrels between Clay and the rest of the us at The Voice were legion during the two years he acted as publisher and editor-in-chief. More than once I thought we would end up slugging it out, but he never threatened me with more than apoplexy, as he never fired anyone who spoke out against him. In fact, he understood the value of his severest critics to be precisely their disloyalty.
He left the Voice a stronger, more unified newspaper than it was when he arrived. He left it with a sense of its own integrity which must be seen in part as a consequence of his restraint. I hope that doesn't sound too eulogistic, because I suspect that Clay Felker is out there raising money again. To which I offer the traditional salutation to people from Missouri who chose to make New York their home: Mazel tov. —Richard Goldstein

Visionary/Editor Clay Felker, Dead at 82

Clay Felker, 82; editor of New York magazine led New Journalism charge
By Dennis McLellan, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
July 2, 2008

Clay Felker, the innovative founding editor of New York magazine who was widely considered one of the great post-World War II magazine editors in the U.S. and a key figure in the emergence of New Journalism in the 1960s, died Tuesday. He was 82.

Felker, who had been married to bestselling author Gail Sheehy since 1984, died at his home in Manhattan after a long battle with throat cancer, said a spokeswoman for New York magazine.

"American journalism would not be what it is today without Clay Felker," Adam Moss, the magazine's current editor-in-chief, said in a statement. "He created a kind of magazine that had never been seen before, told a kind of story that had never been told."

As an editor, Felker was known for having what Newsweek magazine once described as "a Gatsbyesque drive, a zest for power and an uncanny knack for riding the trendy currents of Manhattan chic."

"He ranks with Henry Luce of Time, Harold Ross of the New Yorker and Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone in that these are all people that brought out magazines that had a new take on life in America," writer Tom Wolfe, a New York magazine alumnus, told The Times on Tuesday.

Describing Felker, Wolfe said, "He at first seemed very bluff and even could be gruff, but he created an atmosphere in which everybody wanted to do their very best for Clay.

"Everybody said he'd tell a writer he liked, 'I'm going to make you a star.' I never heard him say that, but that was the atmosphere he created in your mind."

Felker began his rise in the magazine industry as the enterprising features editor at Esquire, beginning in 1957, after several years as a writer and reporter for Life magazine.

"Clay was always widely enthusiastic about writers and ideas," John Berendt, a former editor at Esquire, told Marc Weingarten, author of "The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight," a 2006 book about the New Journalism revolution -- journalism whose practitioners used literary techniques to produce factually accurate stories that read like fiction.

Felker, Berendt said, "could sniff out a developing story before anyone else. He was always out, going to parties, schmoozing, trying to match the right writers to the right stories. He had his finger on the pulse of things, just an amazing sixth sense about trends."

After seeing singer Sammy Davis Jr. perform on "The Ed Sullivan Show" in 1959, for example, Felker suggested that writer Thomas B. Morgan spend time hanging out with the entertainer for what became an insightful profile, "What Makes Sammy Jr. Run?"

Felker also tapped novelist Norman Mailer -- and gave him free rein -- to cover the 1960 Democratic convention in Los Angeles, at which John F. Kennedy was nominated for president and Mailer produced a lengthy, thought-provoking piece of literary journalism, "Superman Comes to the Supermart."

And Felker gave Gloria Steinem, then a little-known freelancer, what she calls her "first serious assignment" as a writer: a report on the then-new contraceptive pill.

After researching and writing her story, Steinem recalled in a 2005 piece on Felker in California magazine, a publication for UC Berkeley alumni, "Clay blue-penciled my pages on the history of the pill, told me I had left people out, and made the memorable comment: 'You've performed the incredible feat of making sex dull.' "

Felker, Steinem wrote, then "sent me out to do interviews and a total rewrite. That was why I produced in 1962 an article on sexual politics and new science that prefigured the women's movement. I had a great editor."

After losing a battle for the editorship of Esquire to Harold Hayes, Felker left the magazine in 1962.

The next year, he was hired as a consultant at the New York Herald Tribune, where he helped remake Today's Living, the magazine supplement of the newspaper's Sunday edition.

Renamed New York -- and with Felker taking over as editor -- the revamped Sunday supplement became a weekly showcase for the talents of Wolfe and his Herald Tribune colleague, columnist Jimmy Breslin.

Within two years, the city-oriented New York was considered the hottest Sunday read in town.

Helping fuel New York's reputation were stories such as Wolfe's controversial 1965 send-up of the staid, in-house culture of the New Yorker magazine and the idiosyncrasies of the 40-year-old literary institution's low-profile editor, William Shawn: a two-part, more than 10,000-word piece written in what Wolfe has described as a "hyperbolic style."

The first installment ran under a blaring, tabloid-style headline, "TINY MUMMIES! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street's Land of the Walking Dead!" and featured an illustration of Eustace Tilley, the New Yorker's monocle-wearing Victorian dandy icon, wrapped up like a mummy.

In a 1997 interview, Felker described Wolfe's "incredible piece of reporting" as "the making of New York magazine."

When the Herald Tribune merged with the New York World Telegram & Sun and the New York Journal American in 1966 to become the New York World Journal Tribune, Felker was appointed the paper's associate editor, overseeing its Sunday literary supplement while continuing as editor of the Sunday magazine.

After the World Journal Tribune folded in 1967, Felker acquired the magazine name New York for $6,575, lined up financial backers and relaunched New York as an independent magazine in 1968 -- with Wolfe, Breslin and other Herald Tribune vets joining him and innovative graphic designer Milton Glaser.

Targeting his new publication at educated and affluent or upwardly mobile New Yorkers, Felker stated that his mission was to produce a "weekly magazine that communicates the spirit and character of New York."

New York's hip and sophisticated blend of stories focusing on the city's culture, politics, business, and life and style -- along with its eye-catching illustrations -- spawned countless imitative city and regional magazines around the country.

"I call it an eternal magazine formula," Felker told the New York Times in 1995. "I used to compare it to what the conversation is at a round dinner table or a dinner party that well-informed people talk about."

Always, the emphasis was on good writing. And Felker, widely regarded as a "writer's editor," attracted many of the era's best, including Sheehy, Pete Hamill, Nora Ephron, Peter Maas and Aaron Latham.

As an editor, Felker recalled in the 1995 interview, "I had been experimenting along with several other editors in town with something that was then called the New Journalism and is now called Literary Journalism.

"These were people who could do that, using the traditional techniques of English literature in a different form -- which I have always felt communicates not only the facts but the emotions. And these people were those who connected emotionally with our particular kind of audience."

During his tenure at New York, Felker helped launch Steinem's feminist magazine Ms. by inserting a 30-page preview excerpt in a December 1971 issue of New York and funding the new magazine's first stand-alone issue.

In 1974, New York magazine's parent company bought the Village Voice, the Greenwich Village weekly newspaper, and Felker eventually named himself its editor-in-chief and publisher.

He also expanded to the West Coast, founding Los Angeles-based New West magazine in 1976 but displeased his company's board of directors by reportedly spending four times his original $1-million estimate to launch the new magazine.

In early 1977, Felker lost control of the New York Magazine Co. after a hostile takeover by media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

Embittered over having New York magazine "sold out from under me by money-grubbing little men" -- as he described the situation to Newsweek -- Felker made a comeback later that year by acquiring Esquire magazine with the financial backing of Vere Harmsworth, head of Britain's Associated Newspaper Group Ltd.

Felker vowed to restyle the ailing magazine to "appeal to the interest of sophisticated men."

But in 1979, with strained finances due to the expense of turning the magazine from a monthly to a biweekly and drops in advertising and circulation revenue, Associated Newspapers sold Esquire.

Among Felker's numerous post-Esquire ventures were stints as editor of an unsuccessful afternoon edition of the New York Daily News and the magazines Adweek, Manhattan, inc. and M.

"Journalism," Felker told Newsweek in 1977 after losing New York magazine, "has been my life."

Born Oct. 2, 1925, Felker grew up in Webster Groves, Mo., an affluent suburb of St. Louis.

Journalism was a natural career choice: His father was managing editor of the weekly newspaper the Sporting News and editor of Sporting Goods Dealer, a monthly trade publication; and his mother was a former newspaper women's section editor.

After graduating from high school in 1942, he went to Duke University in Durham, N.C., where he worked as a reporter on the school newspaper, the Chronicle.

A year later, he joined the Navy and became sports editor and a writer for the Navy newspaper, the Blue Jacket.

After graduating from Duke in 1951, Felker was hired as a sportswriter at Life magazine.

He later turned one of his Life features, a profile of baseball legend Casey Stengel, into the 1961 book "Casey Stengel's Secret."

"I enjoyed writing," Felker later told Weingarten, "but it wasn't my real ability."

In 1994, Felker began teaching a course called "How to Make a Magazine" at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, where the Felker Magazine Center was established the next year, with Felker as director.

Felker's first two marriages, to Leslie Aldrich and actress Pamela Tiffin, ended in divorce.

In addition to Sheehy, Felker is survived by his sister, Charlotte Gallagher; his daughter, Mohm Sheehy; his stepdaughter, Maura Sheehy Moss; and three step-grandchildren.

dennis.mclellan@latimes.com