Categories Politics magazine First issue September 1995 Country USA | Frequency Monthly Final issue 2001 | |
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Company Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. | ||
George was a glossy monthly magazine centered on the theme of politics-as-lifestyle founded by John F. Kennedy, Jr. and Michael J. Berman with publisher Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. in New York City in September 1995. Its tagline was "Not Just Politics as Usual". It was published from 1995 to 2001.
Contents
Overview
For the debut issue, creative director Matt Berman (no relation to co-founder Michael Berman) conceived a cover which received a great deal of attention for its image of Cindy Crawford dressed as George Washington photographed by Herb Ritts.
George departed from the format of traditional political publications, whose audience primarily comprised people in or around the political world. The general template for George was similar to magazines such as Rolling Stone, Esquire or Vanity Fair. The consistent underlying theme was to marry the themes of celebrity and media with the subject of politics in such a way that the general public would find political news and discourse about politics more interesting to read.
Notable contributors
Reception
When it first appeared, George attracted great interest, and for a brief period had the largest circulation of any political magazine in the nation, partly due to the celebrity status of Kennedy, but it soon began losing money. Kennedy and George occasionally courted controversy to boost sales, one notable example being the famous 1997 issue wherein Kennedy posed in the nude and in his editorial lambasted his cousins Michael Kennedy and Joe Kennedy II, whose marital scandals had recently made news, as "poster boys for bad behavior."
Kennedy later complained that the magazine was not taken seriously in the publishing world.
Critics called George "the political magazine for people who don't understand politics", assailing it for "stripping any and all discussion of political issues from its coverage of politics". In a feature in its final issue, Spy magazine asserted that the magazine's premise was flawed; there was no real convergence of politics and celebrity lifestyles.
Decline
After Kennedy was killed in an air crash with his wife and sister-in-law on July 16, 1999, the magazine was bought out by Hachette Filipacchi Magazines and continued for over a year, with Frank Lalli as editor-in-chief. With falling advertising sales, the magazine ceased publication in early 2001.
On October 11, 2005, Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government held a panel discussion titled "Not Just Politics as Usual", which commemorated the tenth anniversary of the magazine's launch. The panel was moderated by Tom Brokaw and featured appearances by other journalists.