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The autocrat of the coffee table
By James Poniewozik
TV Guide, America's favorite coaster, becomes history in spite of itself
(08/05/98)

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BY ASHLEY CRADDOCK | "You're calling from where? Mother Goose?"

It's a question I heard often during the year I spent reporting for Mother Jones magazine. That was back in 1993, six months after current editor in chief Jeffrey Klein took over the left's most ardent glossy-wannabe.

Nowadays, when I mention Mother Jones, the response is different. People recognize the name. Sometimes, they are impressed. More often, they are deeply suspicious. "That's pretty politically extreme, isn't it?" they ask.

That name-brand recognition is emblematic of how much Klein, who last week told his staff he was leaving the magazine, has accomplished in his six-year tenure as editor. That the recognition is often tinged with a raised-eyebrow dubiousness indicates how thoroughly hamstrung he has been by a politically correct board of directors seeking to steer the magazine toward a once coherent left that now resembles nothing so much as a family of squabblers united by the accident of name.

And for all the good he has done (a fact unquestioned even by his harshest critics), Klein is leaving the newly elevated Mother Jones at a time when the magazine, in spite of a makeover, is struggling both editorially and financially. At the end of last year, Mother Jones had an unprecedented $300,000 deficit. A June 1998 board meeting questioned whether the magazine could meet payroll. Publisher Jay Harris says that he's "never been in a trickier financial situation."

Some history: Mother Jones blazed onto the national stage in the post-Watergate, pre-Reagan 1970s. A nonprofit institution funded by a board of dyed-in-the-wool leftists, the magazine pulled down three National Magazine Awards in its first four years. But over the next dozen years, it lost some of its investigative edge.

Circulation zoomed upwards, but much of the growth was the result of an aggressive sweepstakes-style promotion that attracted a fickle brand of reader. On the editorial side, Mother Jones was competing with an increasing number of glossier and better-funded publications.

At the same time, the editors who led the magazine during most of the 1980s, Deirdre English and her successor, Doug Foster, decided that the Mother Jones left was hungry for stories about gender, culture and Reagan's obsession with squashing Nicaragua's Sandinista regime. English and Foster also focused on publishing important new fiction writers, such as Louise Erdrich and David Leavitt. At its best, the result was a broadly focused magazine that uncovered the vibrant counterculture beneath the brittle sheen of Reaganite wealth.

But by 1992, the magazine, like much of the post-Cold War left, seemed adrift in a cultural and political backwater. Indeed, in the early '90s, the mainstream media tended to look at Mother Jones -- when they looked at it at all -- as a little red book for earnest tree huggers and granola-crunching sandalistas. "In the '80s, the reputation of Mother Jones in the media community -- which is where we have our influence -- had seriously waned," says publisher Harris.

But the birth of the Clinton era saw a sea change in the national political arena. Feeling mildly optimistic after 12 years of trying and failing to puncture the chimera of voodoo economics and Reaganite complacency, progressives felt a burst of energy. Looking for a way to increase the magazine's mainstream street cred, the board began searching for a new editor.

It eventually settled on Klein, one of Mother Jones' founders. Klein had worked with English in the first years of the magazine, but departed when the board passed him over for the top position. After his long self-exile, he came back bursting with ideas about how to explode the magazine's unmet potential. "I defined my mission at the magazine in three ways," Klein says. "My top priority was exposés of people in power. Second was rethinking progressivity. The third priority -- really a combination of the first two -- was to try and drag the magazine into the 21st century."

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