There is a boyish quality to Chicago magazine editor Richard Babcock that belies his 47 years and the hint of gray at his temples.
He has this toothy smile and a charming way about him. He is gracious but self-contained. Cautious but easy to be with. It’s a persona that’s served him well in moving through life and moving up in life.
And it probably has something to do with his father and namesake: a brilliant, high-powered, large-egoed lawyer, nationally recognized as an expert on zoning. Here was a man who loved to argue and debate-and compete. He even competed with nature, blazing trails back and forth across the 25-plus acres of woods and fields surrounding the family home in McHenry County, almost daring the abundant flora of the area to reclaim the paths.
Babcock, the son, is also highly competitive, but not in such a direct fashion.
“You wouldn’t be with my father for 30 seconds before you would identify him as a lawyer. He could spot issues, and he liked to talk about them, and he wanted to know your opinion about them.
“I wasn’t like that at all.”
Babcock is talking about being a teenager and what it was like trying to decide how much to follow in his father’s footsteps, and how much not to. The father was witty and clever and exploding with strong views. The son is mild and self-deprecating.
“Yeah, I played football,” he says, “but I had a terrible career. I hurt my knee before my first game freshman year. I’d be at a scrimmage and I’d get banged, and it would swell up like a grapefruit. So I had a miserable career.
“I was quarterback. I was supposed to be a fairly good passer, but I never ever got to shine.”
And swimming? Wasn’t he also on the swimming team at Woodstock High School? “That I did OK on-the sprints, 50 yards, 100 yards. But, by today’s standards, I was really poky.”
Yet when it comes to Chicago, the magazine Babcock has directed since April 1991, the self-deprecation disappears. He remains affable, but the tone is different. A self-confidence is allowed to emerge. It could almost be called cockiness if it weren’t so filled with solid certainty. And the message is clear: In this world, he will brook no opposition. Not only that: He won’t even recognize opposition.
“The people who were there when he came made his life miserable,” says one writer still affiliated with the magazine. “I sat in a meeting with him and another editor, and I thought: If I were Dick, I’d pull out a knife. She was so hostile-and for petty, 5-year-old kind of reasons.”
Babcock dismisses such talk. “Clearly, there were people here who were unhappy. But they certainly didn’t make my life miserable,” he says.
A month and a half after Babcock arrived, Michael Miner, the media critic of the Chicago Reader, wrote a piece describing the anger of many Chicago staffers over the new editor’s management style. They complained that he ignored their ideas and gratuitously insulted them.
Babcock, who was interviewed about staff dissatisfaction for the Miner story, was nonetheless surprised at the depth of feeling expressed by those quoted in the piece. But not, he says, upset.
“I didn’t realize how unhappy some people were,” he says. “I just wanted to produce the best possible magazine I could. It had nothing to do with personalities. If some people didn’t want to work as hard as I thought they should, didn’t want to try to bolster the magazine, well, that was their problem, not mine.”
Cash cow no longer
“Chicago,” Babcock says, “is an important magazine to the city, and it’s been a successful magazine for a long time.”
Indeed, the magazine, which began in 1952 as a program guide for the classical music radio station WFMT, evolved from modest beginnings into a wildly prosperous publication in the early 1970s-an era when city magazines across the nation were new and fresh and filled with potential.
In December 1970, the magazine, then called Chicago Guide, was expanded to its present full-size format, and, in January 1975, two decades ago, its name was changed to simply Chicago.
But if Chicago was a cash cow in its boom years, it’s a different magazine today.
Circulation, which peaked at 204,228 in December, 1988, has been pared to 166,412 as of last June 30, by eliminating those subscribers who were receiving the magazine as a Channel 11 membership premium.
More troublesome has been a drop in ad lineage, a problem plaguing most U.S. magazines. In 1978, Chicago had 1,888.4 pages of advertising. In 1994, there were just 858.2 pages.
This has been the result of a revolution in advertising, particularly among department stores. Hundreds of full-page ads have been lost as advertisers have opted for other methods-such as catalogs and newspaper inserts-to get their message across.
Meanwhile, Chicago and similar publications in other cities found themselves embattled on a second front as competing news media, including newspapers, television and even new magazines, started providing the journalistic products that the city magazines used to offer exclusively: extensive listings of restaurants and events, guides to the 10 best of this and the 25 cheapest of that, and long, lively news and feature articles.
“There was a time when city magazines were a license to print money,” says Patrick Clinton, a journalism professor at Northwestern University and a former editor at Chicago. “It’s getting to be a tougher game in any city, but it may be harder in Chicago (because of stiffer competition). You end up with this magazine, and it has to fight harder to survive.”
Life in Spring Hollow
The man who was hired four years ago to play a major role in ensuring the survival-and success-of the magazine that carries Chicago’s name hadn’t lived in the city since he was 2 years old.
Born Feb. 26, 1947, Richard Babcock-the second child and eldest son of Richard and Elizabeth Babcock, both originally of Winnetka-has memories of playing in an enclosed alley behind his family’s apartment building at 5233 S. Greenwood Ave. in Hyde Park.
But most of Babcock’s childhood was spent at Spring Hollow, the family’s rambling, frequently enlarged (as the number of children grew to six), rustic-looking home and the more than 25 heavily-wooded acres surrounding it near Woodstock. Neighbors call it Babcock Woods and describe it as one of the most beautiful spots in McHenry County.
“For a child, it was unimaginably wonderful,” Babcock says. “My brothers and sisters and I used to be let out each day like ponies, and it was like, `just come back for feeding time.’ “
Each weekday morning, Babcock’s father would be up at 6, and on the train to downtown Chicago by 6:30, part of a small cadre of professionals and office workers willing to trade the commute of 50 miles or so for a chance to live in the country.
The elder Babcock loved the woods, the outdoors, and he loved the city as well. “There was something about a city for him that I have too,” the son says. “Your adrenalin flows. There’s something wonderful about the adventure of a city, the people you can meet and the things you’re going to see around the next corner, the sense of opportunity and possibility.”
John Anderson, Babcock’s closest friend growing up and now the manager of several McHenry County video stores, remembers, “He was just fun to talk to. He was a smart kid, but certainly no nerd. One of the reasons I had such a good childhood was because of Dick.”
Anderson says Dick was his father’s protege. But it wasn’t that simple, according to Babcock. “He pulled both ways. On the one hand, he was a wonderful, admirable person. On the other hand, here I was, the oldest son, and I wanted to flex my own muscles a little bit.”
`Old-fashioned modesty’
Babcock, who graduated from Dartmouth College in 1969 with a bachelor’s degree in history, glided through the 1970s, trying on several career possibilities.
He spent two years as an elementary school teacher in Baltimore, but that was to avoid the draft and the Vietnam War which he opposed.
In 1971, he entered the University of Michigan Law School, but it wasn’t to follow in his father’s footsteps. Where the elder Babcock had known since he was 10 that he wanted to be a lawyer, his son says he “ended up at law school basically as a continuation of a liberal arts education.”
After working for a year as a law clerk for a judge in Washington, D.C., Babcock landed a job as a reporter in 1975 at The Record of Bergen County, N.J. Three years later, he left to help a friend establish the National Law Journal, where he worked as managing editor until 1980.
That was the year Edward Kosner, then-editor of New York magazine, hired Babcock as an articles editor and started him on his career in city magazine journalism. It was also the year Babcock married Gioia Diliberto, a former editor at People magazine and, in recent years, author of biographies of Hadley Richardson, the first wife of Ernest Hemingway, and socialite Brenda Frazier. The couple have an 8-year-old son, Joe.
“The single most telling thing I remember about Dick,” Kosner says, “was, one day, he came in and said: `I have good news. My novel is being published by Random House.’ I said, `What novel?’ He had never mentioned to any person at the office that he was working on this book. Everybody else is always gassing about what they’re doing. I thought that was such an example of old-fashioned modesty.”
The novel, “Martha Calhoun,” published in 1988, was greeted by mixed reviews, albeit in such prominent publications as the New York Times, People magazine and New York magazine itself.
Although set in a thinly veiled version of Babcock’s hometown of Woodstock, it’s far from autobiographical. The central character is a 16-year-old girl from a broken family from the wrong side of the tracks whose life and that of her mother are damaged by a sort of social determinism-a strong and surprisingly unmodern echo of English novelist Thomas Hardy.
The story is so much unlike Babcock’s own life that Kosner describes the book as “a true, true act of imagination-and beautifully done.”
Babcock himself isn’t sure why this is the story he told.
“I wanted to do some writing,” he says. “I’d been fussing around, and this image came to me, and I just sat down and started writing this initial scene, and it felt comfortable.”
The power and influence beat
Like his novel, Babcock’s tenure as editor at Chicago has drawn mixed reviews.
Some journalists complain that the magazine is a fluffier publication under Babcock, more apt to do formula stories, less apt to do “serious journalism.”
Others, however, notice a sharper edge to the magazine’s stories. Profiles are less fawning, they say, and the guides are more practical.
“Lately, it’s gotten better. It’s redesigned itself as a sort of local Vanity Fair,” said Miner, the Reader media critic. “I think it’s good in that it’s something. The magazine has had so little definition for so long.”
William Berry, a journalism professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a former editor at Ebony magazine, says, “Today, it’s almost a news magazine about Chicago. The articles are shorter and crisper.”
The shortness and crispness are due, in large part, to the economic realities that Babcock and the Chicago staff have had to face. The huge drop in ad lineage has forced tough decisions on what to keep and what to drop.
Gone are the monthly book review and the monthly art column. Even the restaurant reviews, the bedrock of the magazine, have been scaled back. In October 1990, the magazine listed 181 restaurants on 12 pages. Four years later, it was 136 restaurants on 7 pages.
Not only are there fewer restaurants reviewed, but the reviews themselves are shorter by nearly a quarter: 18.5 lines in 1990, to 14.4 lines in 1994.
In addition to tightening, Babcock has shifted the focus of the magazine, emphasizing profiles and guides-two mainstays of city magazines-even more than in the past. Arts coverage is down while stories about politics and the wealthy have increased.
“What Dick likes most are stories about rich people, feuds and the North Shore,” says one writer still with the magazine.
Babcock doesn’t disagree, exactly.
“The operable words,” he says, “are not `rich people’ and `North Shore.’ The words I’d be more likely to use would be: `powerful’ and `influential.’
“One of the real jobs we have as a magazine is to explore the people who have power and influence, the major players, in and around Chicago.”
But Babcock says that’s not all he wants to cover.
“I’m looking for issues that are important to the city, that are important to the way we live our lives here, that tell us something about ourselves, tell us something about each other. There is such a thing as general interest magazine journalism.
“I’m just interested in good stories.”
