• New York Magazine, Wednesday, July 2, 2008 9:19 AM

A columnist for New York offers an insider view of Clay Felker, the pioneering editor who founded that and other magazines,. Felker died Tuesday at the age of 82.

Kurt Andersen writes that Felker "conceived the city magazine as a kind of gleeful, fervid, useful weekly chronicle of social and cultural anthropology. His inspiration was to cover the scrum and spectacle of urban life as if it were sport of the most interesting possible kind."

A "hyperambitious" outsider, Felker deconstructed the city's life with clarity of vision and an unjaded shock and awe at the spectacle," says Anderson. One of the most influential journalists of his time, Felker was a media leader even though his seminal work happened years ago. "Practically every insidery, smart-ass [type of] Web journalism today carries bits of the Felker DNA," says Andersen.

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