Press: A Cultured Voice Falls Silent: THE SATURDAY REVIEW

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Saturday Review, after 58 noteworthy years, ceases publication

For many years the logo of the Saturday Review was a mythical bird: the phoenix, rising reborn from its own ashes. The symbolism remained apt even after the logo was dropped in 1977. During much of its 58-year life span, the "magazine of ideas," as it called itself, has lost money; since 1971 it has been sold or refinanced five times. SR has been by turns a weekly, a biweekly, a monthly; at one point it was split into four separate magazines. Over the years it shifted focus from books to popular culture to politics and science and then, in its last incarnation, back to culture again. It built circulation from a few thousand shortly after its birth to a height of 660,000 in 1971; but since then it has repeatedly tried to shake off a doggedly loyal readership that an owner once dismissively described as "somebody's aunts," in order to improve its demographics and attract new advertising. Through all the changes of editorial focus, Saturday Review, as if emulating the mythology of its old emblem, refused to die.

Last week, however, the phoenix returned to ash, probably not to rise again. Owner Robert Weingarten, a former stockbroker and publisher of the investment journal Financial World, who had lost $3 million on SR since taking over in 1980, ordered a halt on the issues at the printers and dismissed the remaining two dozen members of an already reduced staff. His sad conclusion: SR was doomed without an unaffordable injection of at least $5 million for circulation and promotion. For months he had tried to merge with another magazine, to sell SR, or even to give it away. Potential buyers were at first intrigued about acquiring a magazine that had published T.S. Eliot, John Dos Passes, James Thurber and G.K. Chesterton, and that had been credited with helping secure passage in Congress of the 1963 nuclear-test-ban treaty. But upon analysis, would-be bidders deemed SR too risky. Admitted Weingarten: "Saturday Review has had a long and distinguished tradition. But we have invested all that we felt prudent to invest."

What finally brought Saturday Review down, despite its circulation, right up to the end, of nearly 500,000? One former SR editor argued that the magazine had failed to assimilate the social changes in America that began in the late 1960s, and had become outmoded. Another suggested that it had become so inextricably linked over the years with longtime Editor Norman Cousins that when he stepped down in 1978, SR lost much of its essential identity. But perhaps the fatal factor was, in Weingarten's phrase, "the cost of getting and maintaining a subscriber."