Peter Kaplan, 1954–2013

Peter Kaplan probably could have been a top editor at any of the big, national magazines based in his native New York City. He chose instead to spend 15 of his best years editing The New York Observer, a small weekly produced in an aging Manhattan town house and printed, at a run of about 50,000 copies, on rose-colored newsprint. Once asked why he’d stayed put, he said editing the Observer was like “driving a two-seat MG. It was close to the ground, and there were no shocks. The wind was always in your face. Who wouldn’t love that?”

At the Observer Kaplan “wielded his editorial baton with the panache of Toscanini, the passion of Bernstein, and an intelligence all his own,” said the New York Post. He took over there in 1994, after getting an undergraduate degree from Harvard and working for The New York Times, the business magazine Manhattan, Inc., and Charlie Rose’s talk show on PBS. Very quickly Kaplan made the paper “a must-read dissection on the glitter of Gotham power players,” said Deadline.com. He hired a then-unknown freelancer, Candace Bushnell, to write a column called “Sex and the City,” which spawned a genre of television shows. BuzzFeed.com editor Ben Smith, Deadline.com founder Nikki Finke, and NationalMemo.com editor Joe Conason are among his many well-placed former staffers.

Kaplan “wanted writers to have the glory,” said Gawker.com. “He was going to be the Svengali who brought it out of them.” He expected deep reporting and a knowing tone, said NewYorker.com, and many Web journalists today revere him even though “his models were the publications of the 1930s and 1940s, and the New Journalism of the ’60s.”

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After leaving the Observer in 2009, Kaplan relaunched a men’s magazine, M, for Condé Nast and was editorial director of Fairchild Fashion Media, publisher of Women’s Wear Daily. Before cancer took its toll, Kaplan “talked about having one more big project in him,” said NYMag.com. He thought that “telling people’s stories in all the comic, tragic richness provides a crucial kind of cultural nourishment.” And he always “believed that the most exciting thing was the thing that was going to happen next.”