The Press: The Last Look

They gathered in small groups, making a few wry jokes and drinking Bloody Marys provided by a sympathetic former associate. There were kisses and handshakes of farewell, a lot of forced laughter and a few tears. "I've been conditioned for this," admitted one Look editor. "I'm sorry but not surprised," said another. The news had been long rumored, but it still came as a shock last week when Gardner ("Mike") Cowles, Look's creator and editorial chairman, announced that the magazine would cease publication with its Oct. 19 issue.

"When it came time to make this decision," Cowles sadly told a press conference at the New York Hilton Hotel, "I thought back over Look's 35 years of constructive, responsible and award-winning journalism and my heart said 'Keep it going.' But my head said 'Suspend it,' and there was really no other way." Ironically, he added, reader response to subscription offers has recently been the best in Look's history. "Now, at the end," Cowles lamented, "we have the most interested and best educated audience we have ever had. We tried to be serious without being solemn, entertaining without being frivolous, angry without being bitter, and hopeful without being complacent. And generally, I believe, we succeeded."

Bad News. Though rising costs, a depressed economy and competition from television for consumer advertising all hurt, Cowles cited a planned second-class postal rate increase as the final crusher that forced him to fold the flagship of Cowles Communications Inc. The proposed new rates would more than double mailing costs for all U.S. magazines, and would have sent Look's postal bill rocketing from $4,000,000 to $10 million in five years. Cowles called the increase "unconscionably high and a complete reversal of U.S. postal policy since the days of Benjamin Franklin, who felt that the cost of transporting magazines and newspapers should always be kept low. The postal rate increases were the one thing that impelled us to act now."

Others agreed that magazines in general were threatened. Publisher William Attwood of Newsday, who served Look as a writer, correspondent and editor for 16 years, called the magazine's demise "a real tragedy" and declared that "the Government is making it harder and harder for magazines to survive." Said Board Chairman Andrew Heiskell of Time Inc.: "It is always bad news for this country when a responsible journal is forced to close down. It is particularly bad news when that development is in part engendered by an arm of the Government—in this case the postal service, which has already taken the first step in raising second-class mail rates to irresponsibly high levels."