April 26, 2024

Goodbye, New York. Adam Moss Is Leaving the Magazine He Has Edited for 15 Years.

Mr. Moss told Ms. Wasserstein in September that he would step down in six months. She declined to comment on the succession. Internal candidates could include Stella Bugbee, the editor in chief of The Cut, and Jared Hohlt, a senior Moss deputy who oversees the print magazine.

“I don’t want to manage. I don’t want to be a boss,” Mr. Moss said. “My basic hope is that I can find creative projects where I don’t have to run anything.”

Like the magazine auteurs who came before him, Mr. Moss was something of an outsider to New York. He was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Hewlett, N.Y., a town he called “‘Goodbye, Columbus’ nouveau riche.” His mother, a psychologist, tested Rorschach inkblots on Mr. Moss and his brother; the blots are now framed on the wall of the editor’s kitchen.

Did that have an effect? “Oh, my God, yes,” Mr. Moss said, laughing. “But we won’t go into all that.”

From age 12, he was spending weekend days in Manhattan, commuting 45 minutes by train. “I was in New York every single second I could,” he said.

After graduating from Oberlin College, he landed a job as a copy boy at The Times, where he ran errands for the executive editor, A. M. Rosenthal; a secretary instructed him to avoid eye contact. Determined to break into magazines, Mr. Moss took a night shift so that he could intern at Rolling Stone during the day. He would come home at 2 a.m.

“I didn’t want to sleep,” he recalled. “I was so happy.”

He became an editor at Esquire and was soon deemed a wunderkind, an image aided by his slight figure and long locks. Spy magazine would later call him “New York’s most huggable editor-for-hire.” In 1988, at age 30, he persuaded the owner of The Village Voice to hire him as the editor of a new weekly, 7 Days, where he published future stars like Joan Acocella, Jesse Green, Louis Menand and Peter Schjeldahl.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/15/business/media/new-york-magazine-adam-moss-resigns.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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