Revamping the Review

As editor and onetime owner of the Saturday Review (circ. 662,000), Norman Cousins was for 31 years the undisputed boss of his profitable, determinedly middle-brow magazine. Cousins, 56, agonized last summer (TIME, July 19) when the Review was sold by Norton Simon, Inc., to a pair of young publishing entrepreneurs, Nicolas Charney and John Veronis, who had made a success of Psychology Today. Cousins eventually decided that he could get along with the new owners; last week, though, they revealed plans to revamp the Review and use it as a springboard to something Cousins may have trouble recognizing, let alone running.

Starting next year, the Saturday Review will become a five-sided magazine enterprise--a weekly and four separate monthlies. The weekly's current special sections will be expanded in size and realigned topically to cover education, the arts, science and "the society," a catch-all description of politics, business and what Charney calls "the system." The new sections will run on a rotating basis in the weekly along with the magazine's usual editorial mix. Each special section will also serve as core for one of the specialized monthlies.

New Name. The weekly will be sold by subscription only, and its title will change from week to week according to the special section it carries--Saturday Review of Science, for example, or Saturday Review of Education. The monthlies will be sold both by subscription and on newsstands. The editorial budget for the five Reviews will be beefed up by $4,000,000, and some of the magazine's operations will be moved from Manhattan to San Francisco. Says Charney of the new setup: "We did not get involved with the Saturday Review in order to get into a traditional magazine operation." He expects the total number of Review subscribers to reach 1,750,000 by the end of next year, and predicts that Saturday Review Industries, as the company is now known, will be grossing $85 million a year by 1976.

New Divisions. The magazines are only part of the new cultural conglomerate Charney and Veronis are putting together. Saturday Review Industries already has a consumer division, with a book-publishing branch and the Saturday Review Book Club, which enrolled an amazing 11,200 members in its first two weeks.

The periodical division includes not only the Review itself and its four planned offspring, but also the theatrical programs distributed at New York's Lincoln Center and Washington's John F. Kennedy Center. Charney and Veronis have plans for a Saturday Review book series (first subject: culture, featuring volumes on ballet, opera, etc.) and Saturday Review Special Projects, offering subscribers book and record packages, sculpture, lithographs and, as the supersalesmen say, other "items of high quality offering a particularly good value."

Cousins is free to stay on as editor of S.R.I., but Charney and Veronis are currently seeking an executive editor to serve as what they call his "strong right arm." Cousins sounded last week as though he was undergoing another crisis of conscience: "I've told Nick and John I will stay around as long as I feel I'm genuinely useful--and not one second longer."

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