During the first week of classes at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, I was standing near the door of a crowded elevator in the J-school building. I decided to tell my roommate a silly joke: How many editors does it take to change a light bulb? Just then, a magisterial baritone boomed from the back: "No, how many editors does it take?"
Since Oz had just spoken during an orientation session, I knew exactly who was asking. I feared that I was about to offend one of the most important figures in American journalism -- and classes hadn't even started.
I continued with the punchline: "A hundred. One to put it in, one to take it out, one to put it in..."
He laughed louder than anybody else in the elevator and I realized I hadn't sabotaged my nascent career.
His vision, talent, class and sense of humor stand as examples for all of us.
Edmund Tijerina
San Antonio, Texas
Columbia '91
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Osborn Elliott, 1924-2008
Remembering the legendary editor of NEWSWEEK
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Osborn Elliott, a giant of American journalism and a tireless crusader for revitalizing America's cities, died on Sunday in New York City. He was 83.
The cause was complications from cancer, his family said.
As NEWSWEEK's top editor in the 1960s and 1970s, Elliott transformed a magazine that had been a faint rival of Time into a nimble competitor. While Time was slow to evolve from the conservative path laid down by its founder Henry Luce, NEWSWEEK under Elliott pursued an ambitious, liberal agenda that gave the magazine a sharper identity and sense of mission. For those accomplishments, Elliott, known to his friends as "Oz," was among the first to be voted into the American Society of Magazine Editors' Hall of Fame. He also received the Frederick Douglass Award from the New York Urban League for his work in civil rights.
"Oz transformed the weekly newsmagazine concept and had an enormous impact on American public and political life," said Richard Holbrooke, the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, who knew Elliott for several decades. "He was also a deeply moral man who was concerned with social issues, and he made a difference."
Elliott was born in New York City in 1924. His father, John Elliott, lost his Wall Street job and much of his savings during the Great Depression. After that, Elliott's mother, Audrey Osborn Elliott, who had been an early activist for women's suffrage, entered real estate and became a powerhouse broker in New York City, keeping the family solvent.
When he was eight, Elliott started a home newspaper that reported on school events; his parents paid him a nickel a copy. He attended the Browning School in New York City, graduated from St. Paul's School in Concord, N.H., and was accelerated through Harvard by the Navy, earning his degree in two years.
Like many of his generation, Elliott came suddenly of age during World War II. He saw action in the Pacific as an ensign aboard the heavy cruiser U.S.S. Boston.
After the war, Elliott got his start in journalism in 1946 as a cub reporter at the New York Journal of Commerce, making $35 a week. In 1949, he joined Time magazine as a business writer, profiling many of America's business leaders. Elliott was hired by NEWSWEEK as business editor in 1955 and within four years became managing editor, the third-ranking job. When the newsweekly was put up for sale in 1960, Elliott and Ben Bradlee, then in NEWSWEEK's Washington bureau, conspired to persuade Philip Graham, president of the Washington Post Co., to make an offer for the magazine. Graham outbid the competition and installed Elliott as NEWSWEEK's editor. He was 36. (Bradlee would eventually become the Post's top editor.)
Elliott was an innovative force. He introduced bylines in the magazine in the mid-1960s over objections that it would diminish the magazine's voice of authority and brought a range of columnists into the fold, including Milton Friedman, Meg Greenfield, Stewart Alsop and Paul Samuelson.
"Oz was a remarkable editor and an even more remarkable man," said Richard Smith, NEWSWEEK's chairman. "He was to the manor born, but with a twinkle in his eye, a generous heart and a finger-tip feel for popular and political trends." Said Bradlee: "Oz made NEWSWEEK a successful, ambitious, first-class publication."
Elliott's NEWSWEEK was a reflection of a tumultuous time, and it was the magazine's groundbreaking coverage of the civil rights movement that solidified his reputation as a journalistic star. In 1963, the magazine produced a remarkably detailed study of black life and attitudes in the U.S., dispatching 40 researchers to conduct 1,250 interviews for a special issue titled simply: "The Negro in America." With that, NEWSWEEK burst its way into national attention. The issue won widespread praise from political leaders as well as the magazine's competitors. In 1967, NEWSWEEK produced another special report, "The Negro in America: What Must Be Done."
"To deal with the racial crisis effectively, there must be a mobilization of the nation's moral, spiritual and physical resources, and a commitment on the part of all segments of U.S. society," Elliott wrote in a editorial accompanying the project.
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