Dead Celebrity Alert

October 2, 1925 - July 1, 2008

Clay Felker was a pioneering editor whose New York magazine became a template for what became known as the “new journalism” adopted by urban weeklies in America. A sometimes bitchy but always stylish glossy that included Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin and Gloria Steinem in its stable of writers, New York reported on the mixture of ambition, money, culture and fashion that obsessed the city then and now. …

New York had begun life as a supplement to the New York Herald Tribune newspaper. Felker and the graphic designer Milton Glaser reintroduced it as a separate publication in 1968 several years after the closure of its parent paper. …

In 1984 he married his third wife, the journalist Gail Sheehy, author of Passages and other well-received books. … Read full obituary

December 29, 1953 - June 17, 2008

Mark Sacks, the founding editor of the European Journal of Philosophy (EJP), was one of the leading philosophers of his generation, and played an important role in changing the shape of philosophy in Britain. He was an integral figure in a group of young philosophers, many of them trained at Cambridge in the 1980s, who were determined to broaden the range of philosophical discourse in Britain by engaging across the divide between continental European philosophy and the analytic tradition that predominated in the English-speaking world during the 20th century. … Read full obituary

Comic-strip publisher who championed Hergé and made Tintin a household name worldwide

Across Europe, the aftermath of the Second World War saw elation replaced by frustration as austerity measures continued to bite. For youngsters, in particular, there was little entertainment to be had, something that the Belgian businessman Raymond Leblanc saw as a social challenge and a commercial opportunity. The outcome was the birth of one of the powerhouses of comic-strip publishing, and the establishment internationally of Tintin as a household name. … Read full obituary

NEW YORK (AP) — William F. Buckley Jr., the erudite Ivy Leaguer and conservative herald who showered huge and scornful words on liberalism as he observed, abetted and cheered on the right’s post-World War II rise from the fringes to the White House, died Wednesday. He was 82.

His assistant Linda Bridges said Buckley was found dead by his cook at his home in Stamford, Conn. The cause of death was unknown, but he had been ill with emphysema, she said. …

“For people of my generation, Bill Buckley was pretty much the first intelligent, witty, well-educated conservative one saw on television,” fellow conservative William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, said at the time the show ended. “He legitimized conservatism as an intellectual movement and therefore as a political movement.” …

Buckley founded the biweekly magazine National Review in 1955… Not only did he help revive conservative ideology, especially unbending anti-Communism and free market economics, his persona was a dynamic break from such dour right-wing predecessors as Sen. Robert Taft. … Read full obituary

NEW YORK — Steven T. Florio, former chief executive officer of Condé Nast Publications Inc., died Thursday due to complications from a heart attack. He was 58. …

Credited with growing Condé Nast and shaping its culture as a personality-driven star system, Florio stepped aside as CEO in January 2004, but remained under contract as vice chairman until last January. … Read full obituary

DETROIT — Neal Shine, who began as a copy boy for Detroit Free Press and worked his way up to become its managing editor and later its publisher, died Tuesday of respiratory failure after a recent illness. He was 76.

Shine was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer in 1993 and overcame it, but recent tests found it had returned. He also had a case of pneumonia, the newspaper reported in a story on its Web site. He died surrounded by his family at a hospital. …

First hired at the Free Press in 1950, Shine was city editor when the paper won the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the 1967 Detroit riot. As a reporter, he exposed the mishandling of cases in the Macomb County juvenile courts. …

Shine also was an impassioned civic activist and Detroit booster… Read full obituary

Robert E. Petersen, the publishing magnate whose Hot Rod and Motor Trend magazines helped shape America’s car culture and who gave millions to a museum dedicated to his passion, has died. He was 80.

Petersen died Friday of complications from neuroendocrine cancer at St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, said Dick Messer, director of the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles. …

Petersen, the son of an auto mechanic, founded Hot Rod magazine in 1948 while trying to promote the custom-designed car show at the Los Angeles Armory. The following year, he launched Motor Trend for automobile enthusiasts.

A dozen other specialty consumer magazines followed, including Guns & Ammo, Sport, Motorcyclist, Hunting, Mountain Biker, Photographic, Teen and Sassy. … Read full obituary

Robert K. Hoffman, one of three founders of the irreverent National Lampoon magazine, has died. He was 59.

Hoffman, a noted Dallas philanthropist, died Sunday at an area hospital. He had been suffering from leukemia since December, according to his family.

He was a co-founder and managing editor of the humorous National Lampoon, spawned from the Harvard Lampoon, created while he was a student at the university. …

“National Lampoon never would have happened, and none of the things that came out of it would have happened, without Robert,” Henry Beard, one of the other co-founders of the magazine, said in Tuesday’s editions of The Dallas Morning News. “He had an exceptional pair of talents — he was extremely smart, and utterly fearless.”

The third founder, Doug Kenney, died in the early 1980s. … Read full obituary

Jim Seymour, an early and influential technical writer who explained the benefits and headaches of personal computers for two decades in enthusiasts’ periodicals like PC Week and PC Magazine, died on Tuesday in Austin, Tex., where he lived. He was 60.

The cause was complications from gall bladder surgery, said his wife, Nora.

Like most people pulled into the personal computer industry in the early years, Mr. Seymour was a self-taught expert. A native Texan, Rogers James Seymour graduated from the University of Texas, then worked for a few years as a jazz musician and freelance photographer for magazines like Life and Time. …

It was Mr. Seymour who introduced a young Michael Dell, who began his direct-mail computer company in his University of Texas dormitory room, to Lee Walker, who became Dell Computer’s first president. …

Mr. Seymour was also the founding editor in chief of PC Computing magazine in 1988… Read full obituary