Oz Elliott, father of ‘new’ Newsweek, dies at 83

Osborn Elliott, the courtly editor who revitalized Newsweek in the 1960s, died at his Manhattan...

Osborn Elliott, the courtly editor who revitalized Newsweek in the 1960s, died at his Manhattan home on Sunday, of complications arising out of cancer, his daughter Dorinda Elliott said. He was 83.

When Elliott became Newsweek’s managing editor in 1959, the magazine lagged appreciably behind its chief competitor, Time, in circulation and advertising, and aped the sort of terse and idiosyncratic writing that Time had introduced. But Elliott, who rose to editor in 1961, was willing to experiment with formula and take a more ambitious journalistic path for Newsweek. The magazine began shunning the backward-running sentences that Time and its founder, Henry R. Luce, favoured, and it started giving reporters bylines, breaking a long news magazine practice of anonymous writing.

More substantively, it began producing in-depth polling on national issues. In cover articles, often to attract a younger readership, it examined the war in Vietnam and the mounting opposition to it, the civil rights movement, racial unrest in the cities, popular culture, and the counterculture. On November 20, 1967, Newsweek junked its traditional neutrality for open advocacy with a 23-page section titled The Negro in America: What Must Be Done.

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During Elliott’s tenure, Newsweek’s circulation, which stood at almost 1.5 million in 1961, rose to more than 2.7 million by 1976, the year he left, to become New York’s $1-a-year first deputy mayor for economic development.

Elliott, also known as Oz, was born on October 25, 1924. He started his journalism career as a reporter at The New York Journal of Commerce, and became business editor of Newsweek in 1955.

“I was hooked on journalism,” he wrote. “Impressed by its demands for compression and clarity. Enchanted — mostly— by its practitioners and their often feigned cynicism… Humbled, sort of, by its power.”

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