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Notable New     Yorkers
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Andrew HeiskellAndrew Heiskell
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this country. Before Fortune, it was all pat--newspapers just printed handouts, and printed them verbatim. Now, you not only have the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Business Week, and practically a local business magazine in every city, but the business sections of all the newspapers have improved enormously. Business is both the victim and beneficiary of this in that people take it more seriously, but also business is being critiqued much more severely than it ever was before. I think Fortune deserves at least credit for having started that whole movement. Maybe it would have happened anyway.

Q:

Okay. What about Sports Illustrated?

Heiskell:

It seems totally improbable that this character Harry Luce, who in those days may have played a little tennis and croquet, and other than that pursued intellectual interests--political- intellectual interests--should have been taken by the bug of a sports magazine. But, he was. In the early 1950s, he began discussing this with various people. We dummied up magazines to create a weekly sports magazine. Very ambitious--I think we were going to have a circulation of 400,000 in the second year, and 2,500 pages, and go into the black in the second year. Well as happened so often in the magazine business, you don't really don't know what you're doing, and you have to feel your way along. You have to make a lot of mistakes in the learning process. Sports Illustrated was my first experience at seeing people make all the mistakes you could probably make in launching a magazine.

The original idea encompassed a great deal of participatory





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