Landon Y. Jones, who was the top editor of People magazine in the 1990s, when its profits increased fourfold, and whose fascination with popular culture inspired him to write a 1980 book that helped popularize the term “baby boomer,” died on Aug. 17 in Plainsboro, N.J. He was 80.
His son, Landon Jones III, said the cause of his death, in a hospital near Princeton, N.J., where he had lived for more than 50 years, was complications of myelofibrosis.
An unapologetic champion of the newsworthiness of celebrities, Mr. Jones was perpetually eager to learn about the next famous person. As a writer for People, he interviewed a young Bill Gates in 1983 and brought along a colleague, one of the few he knew with a personal computer, to help him understand the Windows operating system.
During his stint as People’s managing editor, the top editorial job, from 1989 to 1997, Diana, Princess of Wales, appeared on the cover dozens of times. Mr. Jones would say that People, a publication of Time Inc., was about the “three D’s”: Diana, diet and death, specifically that of celebrities.
“There were other people at People who dreamed of being on the big book — on Time,” Jeff Jarvis, a colleague of Mr. Jones’s, said in an interview. “But I never sensed that Lanny was chagrined about being on People. It was the pathway that led to the things that fascinated him, like baby boomers and celebrity. He did it with pride.”
During Mr. Jones’s tenure, People introduced color printing; moved its newsstand date from Monday to Friday to capture weekend supermarket sales traffic; and made women its primary target audience.
The changes were instigated by People’s publisher at the time, Ann S. Moore, who said in an interview that Mr. Jones had been an enthusiastic partner in redirecting and fattening the corporate cash cow that was People.
“We were a great team,” said Ms. Moore, who went on to preside over Time Inc.’s entire magazine empire.
Although People market-tested the sales potential of celebrities before putting them on the cover — a decision that fell to Mr. Jones alone — he once called Ms. Moore and said, “Brace yourself for a million-dollar loss.”
He informed her that he had chosen a cover article about a day in the life of a pregnant teenager. Surprisingly, the issue, published in October 1994, flew off newsstands. It also, Ms. Moore said, inspired President Bill Clinton to convene a task force to address teenage pregnancy rates in the United States.
A 1966 graduate of Princeton, Mr. Young was precisely the type that Henry R. Luce, a founder of Time, liked to hire: an Ivy League male, with bonus points for being a Midwesterner and for exuding a patrician air. He was hired as a writer at Time magazine the month after he graduated with an English degree.
But he was no elitist. Former colleagues said he advanced many people’s careers and often showed compassion for co-workers. Hillie Pitzer, who was a colleague at People, recalled that he once paid for an administrative assistant who had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer to fly with her child to visit family in Israel.
Mr. Jones freely spent Time Inc.’s money in its world-bestriding heyday — trucking in sand for a Hawaiian-themed party in a conference room, or sending staff members to off-site retreats in California and Bermuda.
Although Time Inc. remained a bastion of “Mad Men” culture well into the 1980s, when the memory of cocktail carts being wheeled around on deadline nights was still fresh and women were relegated to lowly jobs, Mr. Jones was known for supporting women’s careers.
“Lanny championed me, as well as many others,” Martha Nelson, the founding editor of InStyle, a People spinoff, said in an email. She recalled that Mr. Jones recruited her to lead Project X, which became InStyle, in the summer of 1993.
“Creating a new magazine is a gamble and an experiment, watched by skeptics and critics,” said Ms. Nelson, who went on to become the first female editor in chief of Time Inc. in 2012. “Lanny was supportive, protective and understanding every step along the way.”
Landon Young Jones Jr. was born on Nov. 4, 1943, in Rome, Ga., and raised in St. Louis. He was the oldest of three sons born to Landon Y. Jones, an executive at a food products company, and Ellen (Edmondson) Jones.
He attended Saint Louis Country Day School. At Princeton, he found a home at The Daily Princetonian, the student newspaper, which set him on his career path.
“I was never a particularly good reporter,” he once said, “but I like to write, I like to put words together and I like to read.”
He was not strictly a Time Inc. lifer. He left his post-graduation job as a Time magazine writer after three years to edit Princeton Alumni Weekly. But he returned to the mothership in 1974, accepting a position as a People writer the year the magazine was spun off from a popular one-page chronicle of celebrities in Time.
“Everybody looked down on it at the company,” Mr. Jones later said of People. “We used to joke that we’d have to ride the freight elevators because people didn’t want to see us in the regular elevator. But People became this colossal success.”
Mr. Jones also served as the managing editor of Money, a personal finance magazine, from 1984 to 1989. During that time, the publication won three National Magazine Awards.
In 2015, Time Inc. gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award.
Besides his son, Mr. Jones is survived by his wife of 54 years, Sarah Brown Jones; their daughters, Rebecca Urciuoli and Catherine Jones; six grandchildren; and his brothers, Charles and Byron Jones.
In 1980, Mr. Jones wrote “Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation,” which took note of the inescapable cultural and political influence of the 75 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964.
Comparing the generation to a demographic pig swallowed by a python, and referring to its members as “baby boomers” — neither expression had yet gained wide currency — Mr. Jones established a template for decades of pop sociology about American birth cohorts.
He recalled in The Washington Post years later that he had proposed naming the book “The Baby Boomers.” “‘Oh, no,’ came my publisher’s quick answer,” he wrote. “‘No one knows what that means. It will confuse booksellers. They will shelve it under Child Care.’”
When Mr. Jones stepped down from People in 1997, a golden era in magazine publishing was waning with the rise of the internet. It was a slow decline that in 2018 led to the sale of Time Inc. to the Meredith Corporation, followed by mass layoffs and the sell-off of once-dominant magazine titles.
Mr. Jones remained a vice president for strategic planning at Time Inc. until 2000, when he retired at the relatively young age of 57. He told colleagues that after decades of working furiously and commuting to Princeton, he hoped to live a more rounded life.
In retirement, he wrote two books about the explorers Lewis and Clark: “The Essential Lewis and Clark” (2000) and “William Clark and the Shaping of the West” (2004). He worked on them at a second home outside Bozeman, Mont. His last book was “Celebrity Nation: How America Evolved Into a Culture of Fans and Followers” (2023).
Mr. Jones’s devotion to Princeton, as both his alma mater and his longtime residence, never flagged.
Once, when he was having computer trouble, he asked People’s technology aide to take a look at his Mac. Mr. Jones was out of the office when the aide, Eric Mischel, came by. Mr. Jones had not told Mr. Mischel his computer password. Looking around Mr. Jones’s office, Mr. Mischel recalled in an email, he saw all the Princeton memorabilia and took a guess: TIGER.
“I guessed right!” he said.
The post Landon Y. Jones, Who Made People a Star Among Magazines, Dies at 80 appeared first on New York Times.