InDigestible: The decline of a great magazine.

There's probably no agreeing on precisely when Reader's Digest took a turn for the worse. There was the move last year to stick a celebrity photograph on the cover of every issue, rather than the picture of an ordinary American whose story of heroism would inspire readers. Two years earlier, there was the magazine's redesign, which elevated graphics and visuals to a place of importance that previously had been reserved for the power of the written word. Around the same time, the magazine dropped its familiar slogan promising "Thirty-one articles each month . . . Each article of enduring value and interest." There aren't 31 articles each month anymore-the February 2002 issue has only 15-and most of those that remain sure aren't of enduring value and interest, either.

It's a saddening transformation, and one that must especially upset conservatives, who seem able to do little more than sit by the bed of a good friend in the throes of a terminal illness. Reader's Digest was not only the greatest and most popular magazine of the 20th century, it was also a steady ally. Monthly celebrations of traditional American values, staunch anti-Communism during the Cold War, and an optimistic philosophy of moral and personal aspiration made it stand out in the lowest-common-denominator world of magazine publishing. In an unwitting tribute to the Digest's success and influence, the Left loathed it. Conservatives of all stripes-and perhaps most importantly, the unpoliticized, small-c conservatives of the heartland-cherished it. The Digest was the quintessential magazine of "red-state" America-those broad swaths of the country colored red for George W. Bush on 2000 Election Night maps, as opposed to blue for Al Gore.

Reader's Digest remained an outstanding magazine well into the 1990s, but much has changed in just the last three or four years. Editorial quality was sacrificed to a mix of poor personnel decisions and cost- cutting maneuvers. The Digest simply isn't what it used to be. There are still occasional flashes of the old excellence, but now these increasingly rare moments double as disturbing reminders of how much has been lost.

Founded in 1922 by DeWitt and Lila Wallace, Reader's Digest became what the Wall Street Journal was to call "the greatest publishing success since the Bible." The Wallaces printed only 5,000 copies of their first issue, but their circulation soon skyrocketed. By the 1930s, they owned the most popular magazine in the United States and were beginning to reach around the globe. Today the Digest claims 12.5 million subscribers in this country-down from an all-time high of 18 million in the 1970s, but still an industry leader-and a grand total of 95 million readers who see one of its 48 editions published in 19 different languages.

The Digest was special for a number of reasons. Just as today's Internet users rely on search engines to mine the best sources of information on the web, subscribers to Reader's Digest could count on the Wallaces and their team to locate the best articles in a sea of periodicals and reproduce them in condensed form. Eventually, about half the magazine consisted of original material. The Digest displayed great variety and range; each issue had something in it for everybody, from a mother seeking health tips to a father interested in tax cuts to a teenager thrilled by real-life adventure stories. Behind the whole enterprise was a typically American belief in self-improvement that managed to find an audience not just in the U.S., but everywhere. Reader's Digest honored individuals and their achievements-usually ordinary people who did extraordinary things.

During the Cold War, the Digest played a vital role in educating the American public about Communism. Friedrich Hayek once said the success of his landmark book The Road to Serfdom came from the fact that DeWitt Wallace decided to publish a condensed version in the magazine. In the 1970s and '80s, intrepid reporter John Barron broke one story after another about Soviet malfeasance around the globe. Defectors often told their tales first in the pages of the Digest. This infuriated the anti- anti-Communists, but even some of them had to acknowledge the Digest's achievement. In 1982, Susan Sontag sparked a bristling controversy on the left with this confession: "Imagine, if you will, someone who read only Reader's Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only The Nation or The New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?"

The magazine also served more broadly as a platform for conservative ideas. It published articles in favor of small government and missile defense and opposed to union corruption and welfare dependency. Much of its work in these areas was groundbreaking. In 1995, the Digest commissioned a poll showing that majorities of people from all walks of life-even self-identified liberal Democrats-believed nobody's total tax burden should exceed 25 percent of his income. Great magazines often find themselves ahead of the news cycle, and in 1998 Kenneth Timmerman wrote a prescient story called "This Man Wants You Dead." The subject was Osama bin Laden, and it hit the newsstands right before the fatal embassy bombings in Africa.

Hard-news stories such as these were not always the magazine's most popular features, according to the detailed reader surveys the Digest studied every month. Yet they had a distinct following and lent ballast to the whole enterprise. "Sometimes a magazine must lead," says William Schulz, the longtime Washington bureau chief responsible for so many of these noteworthy articles. "We never pandered to people based on what a focus group told us to do."

From its headquarters north of New York City (the address is Pleasantville, but it's really in Chappaqua, present home of the Clintons), Reader's Digest remained distant from the fads and trends of the general publishing world. Astonishing commercial success unrivalled by anything else in the business also helped it stand apart. The Wallaces lived well, but grew embarrassed by the vast riches they accumulated. They had no children of their own, and until their deaths in the early 1980s, they lavished parental devotion on the people who worked for them. The Digest became famous for cushy jobs full of perks, from free turkeys at Thanksgiving to rides home in a limousine for employees who weren't feeling well. The positions were well paid, too; the Digest never crimped on expenses.

Yet one of the Digest's great strengths-its isolation from the buzz of Manhattan-was simultaneously a weakness. It often didn't get the credit it deserved for its journalism. "I can't tell you how many times I've seen our work appear on television or elsewhere without attribution," says deputy editor William P. Beamon. The Digest simply wasn't hip, cool, or glamorous. "For decades, the intellectuals have looked down on the masses," says Schulz. "They've viewed Reader's Digest as lowbrow."

The parent company of Reader's Digest-called the Reader's Digest Association-owed everything to the magazine, but the magazine was not in fact the company's primary cash cow. A subscription simply served as a gateway to a wide range of other Reader's Digest products, such as books and records. The magazine itself was expensive to produce, with its blank-check reporting and close editorial attention. It functioned as a kind of loss leader for everything else.

This model worked well for a long time, but the company began to falter in the 1990s as it faced new challenges from competitors using sophisticated targeting software to boost their own mail-order businesses. Reader's Digest started to lose ground technologically, and the problem was compounded by a legislative crackdown on sweepstakes, the main device by which the magazine had attracted new subscribers. (The practice bordered on deception, as it tricked many people into believing that buying a subscription would increase their odds of winning a prize.) Profitability sank, leading to intense pressure to cut costs throughout the company. The magazine's free-spending ways came under severe scrutiny. There was an additional concern, which in some quarters verged on an obsession, that the Digest's readers were too old-a demographic dead-end in a society increasingly dominated by boomers. The rise of niche media also took a toll, as general-interest magazines such as Life died off. The Digest has survived, but continues to be battered.

Every magazine changes over time, and Reader's Digest clearly needed to improve its economic performance. Yet the company burned through four CEOs in the mid 1990s, creating turmoil that badly damaged the magazine's editorial side. The talented editor Kenneth Tomlinson quit in 1996. Many consider him the magazine's last great editor. "He really understood what the Digest is all about," says one former staffer. Most of the magazine's top editors had been Tomlinson hires, and virtually all of them were, like Tomlinson himself, political conservatives.

Christopher Willcox, also a conservative, replaced Tomlinson-but he was immediately forced into a round of belt-tightening. The editorial staff was reduced, much of it by way of natural attrition and forced retirements. Morale dropped sharply. Today there is a vigorous debate among current and former Digest employees (some two dozen of whom were consulted for this article) about Willcox's role in the magazine's decline. Some say it began on his watch, while others describe him as a last-ditch defender of the Digest's tried-and-true ways. Whatever the truth, Willcox set in motion a series of significant editorial changes. He moved the table of contents off its familiar place on the front cover and boosted the magazine's visual impact. The overall number of Digest stories began to drop, with the expensive hard-news stories among the first to go. "If there were three political articles in every issue, Willcox took it down to two," complains one former editor. "He cared more about look than content. He didn't do much to maintain standards."

Willcox was more responsive to the marketers' demographic hand-wringing than Tomlinson had been, but the corporate side of the magazine never took to him-and especially not Thomas O. Ryder, an American Express executive who became CEO in 1998. In January 2000, Ryder finally moved against Willcox by creating a brand-new position at Reader's Digest: editor-in-chief of the Reader's Digest Association-i.e., the whole company-which outranked Willcox's job as editor-in-chief of the magazine. Ryder hired Eric Schrier from Time's health-publications division to fill it, and Willcox resigned less than two months later. Schrier effectively served as the magazine's top editor for the next year and a half.

Reader's Digest generally had elevated its top editors from within the magazine. Both Tomlinson and Willcox had spent years working for the Digest before their promotions. They understood what several current and former Pleasantville insiders call "Reader's Digest values," in part because these values had shaped their professional careers. Schrier, however, was an outsider hired at a time when the magazine was letting go of some of its most seasoned editors. He was a competent magazine professional, but Reader's Digest had always wanted something more than technical skill; it wanted a particular worldview, plus an understanding and appreciation of why that worldview resonated with millions of people in the United States and abroad. "Schrier has no sense of the magazine's history," complains one former editor. The new editor was different in other ways, too. Each of his predecessors-going back before Tomlinson to the days of Ken Gilmore in the 1980s and founder DeWitt Wallace himself-was a known conservative. Yet Schrier is a political mystery. People who work with him daily don't know his views on fundamental issues. "My opinions are a private matter," he says.

If the overt conservatism of the traditional Digest began to recede under Willcox, it took a nosedive under Schrier. When Willcox introduced a new design for the magazine with the May 1998 issue, he divided the table of contents into different headings, with hard-news pieces tending to appear in a section labeled "Currents." That issue featured a piece by Michael Barone critical of bilingual education (right before California's crucial vote on Prop. 227), another by Trevor Armbrister on the unintended consequences of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and a blistering Michael Kelly column reprinted from the Washington Post on Bill Clinton's lies (this was during the Monica Lewinsky scandal). From a conservative reader's standpoint, this was pretty satisfying stuff. It didn't last. Exactly three years later-in the May 2001 issue-stories listed under "Currents" included "So Tiny, So Sweet . . . So Mean: Hummingbirds will do anything to get their next meal" and a consumer-tip piece headlined, "Should Your Next Camera Be Digital?" (There is now no "Currents" section at all.)

Editorial downsizing continued after Willcox's departure, but Schrier went on hiring more outsiders. Jacob Young, who is said by some to be openly hostile to Digest traditions, arrived from People and is now executive editor. Catherine Romano, a number-two editor at both Cosmopolitan and Maxim-magazines about half a step removed from soft porn-signed on as deputy editor. Schrier also created the new position of West Coast editor, whose job is to develop celebrity profiles. And in December, a new editor-in-chief of the magazine appeared on the masthead: Jacqueline Leo, another New York publishing professional with no previous connection to the Digest. In short, the magazine of red- state America is now run almost totally by blue-state Americans.

A few conservatives remain, most notably Schulz-though he recently stepped down as the Washington bureau chief and is now called editor- at-large. "The kind of politics Ken Tomlinson represented is abhorrent to the current leadership," says one editor no longer affiliated with the Digest. "There are a few genuine conservatives left behind, but they're hold-outs, like Japanese soldiers still fighting for the emperor at the end of 1945."

Personnel is policy, of course, and these dramatic staff changes have led to a shakeup in the magazine's content. The February 2002 issue, for instance, has a picture of Meg Ryan on the cover-and inside there's a ten-page interview with her, which can only be described as vacuous. ("How do you feel about turning 40?") The back cover features a photo of "Alaska's all-girl rescue squad," which links inside to an unspectacular story of low-grade feminism. A package of stories on terrorism breaks no new ground; they read like consumer-advice columns. (If a "nuclear suitcase device" goes off in your neighborhood, you are warned to "stay indoors.") There's a good story on a tough judge in Alabama-an old-school Digest piece-but it's short and lonely. "That's Outrageous," a popular feature that calls attention to bureaucratic abuse and cultural rot, has been reduced in size, and may not even exist in a couple of months, according to magazine insiders. Another semi-regular department, "Mugged by the Law," already has gone extinct. Instead of hard-news stories, there is a wealth of what the magazine professionals call "short commitment" pieces-mini articles that don't take much time to read or much thought to process.

Very little is special about the current issue, both in the sense that so much of its content is instantly forgettable and in the sense that it's not much different from other recent issues. The last time a celebrity didn't appear on the cover of the Digest, a magazine that once honored ordinary Americans in almost everything it did, was March 2001. Since then, the cover has been a parade ground for beautiful people, including Muhammad Ali, Tom Hanks, and Princess Diana. The Digest's distinct voice is falling silent; the once-mighty magazine is becoming indistinguishable from the swarm of other publications that genuflect to the stars of Hollywood, offer new diet recipes for women, and produce nothing of enduring value or interest.