Jeffrey Bruce Klein, one of the four journalists who founded the magazine Mother Jones in 1976, rooted it in the crusading left politics of the 1960s, and who returned in 1992 as editor -in -chief to reborn it for younger, more digital readers, died on 13 March in his house in Menlo Park, Calif. He was 77.
His sons, Jacob and Jonah, said that the cause was complications of a nerve disease.
Mr Klein was a transplant on the east coast to the Bay Area, in the mid-1960s against the counterculture by the possibility that the anti-establishment character of the era could continue to stimulate the lively left-wing journalism of the region.
In 1974 he joined Adam Hochschild, Paul Jacobs and Richard Parker, all editors at the Progressive Magazine Ramparts, to plan a publication that would expand the focus of the left on the government velfeasance with meracle of companies and the role of money in politics.
They called it mother Jones, in honor of the fiery Labor leader Mary Harris Jones. Working from a tight office above a McDonald's in San Francisco, they produced their first song in 1976.
Mr Klein was officially the literary editor of the magazine, although in practice he commissioned all types of writers.
“He has come up with every writer he could think of with phone calls and letters,” said Mr. Hochschild in an interview.
One of his first finds was a short memoirs by the Chinese writer Li-Li Ch'en, who ran in the inaugural song and won a National Magazine Award in 1977.
Mr. Klein also contributed his own functions, including one about the complicated relationship between the basketball player Bill Walton and Portland, Ore., Where he played professionally for the trail blazers. Another article showed that Richard V. Allen, the first national security adviser of Ronald Reagan, had not announced connections with the fugitive financier Robert Vesco – a revelation that contributed to Mr Allen's dismissal in 1982.
In 1981, Mr. Klein left to become editor -in -chief of the San Francisco magazine. A few years later he founded West, the Sunday Magazine of the San Jose Mercury News, where he cultivated an army of young journalists.
“He had this unlimited enthusiasm about what we wanted to work on,” said one of those journalists, Susan Faludi, in an interview. She added that he ordered her to write stories that became the basis of her first book, “Backlash: The Undelared War Against American Women” (1991).
By the beginning of the nineties, mother Jones had fallen into the eyes, in the eyes of many readers, diatribes in the grind of predictable left. It once had no fewer than 238,000 subscriptions; That number had fallen by half.
Mr Klein returned to the magazine in 1992, this time as editor -in -chief. He brought a technically skilled sensitivity to the coverage of the research, with functions about Silicon Valley and the internet tree of the 1990s. In 1998 he started a market research campaign of $ 3.5 million and a complete redesign. Subscriptions came back by 25 percent during the five years after he arrived.
Mother Jones was the first magazine General-Interest that had a substantial website. In 1994, Mr Klein published an online database of political donors from companies, referred with their recipients.
His criticism was two -fold: although he took joy to go after Newt Gingrich, the Republican chairman of the house from 1995 to 1999, he was almost as fierce in his attacks on Bill Clinton, which he described as a “stunningly disappointing president.”
With a view to attracting new readers, Mr Klein also ran articles that pushed against liberal orthodoxies, such as one that was critical of confirming action, and about things outside the core interests of the magazine, such as spirituality.
Such articles caused a gap between Mr. Small and different members of the Mother Jones Board, who wanted to chop closer to the progressive line. He resigned in 1998.
Jeffrey Bruce Klein was born on January 15, 1948 in Scranton, Pa. His father, Harold, was a doctor, and his mother, Helen (Blum) small, managed the house.
He studied psychology at Columbia University and graduated in 1969; Despite his left politics, he did not participate in the protests that the school fluctuated as he was there.
However, he studied among the famous literary scholar Lionel vibration, an experience he later mentioned as crucial for his decision to become a writer.
After graduating, such as countless idealistic young people at the time, he packed his Volkswagen Beetle and drove to California. He would live there for the rest of his life.
He studied education at Stanford, where he met Judith Weinstein. They married in 1971. She died in 1996. A second marriage, with Judi Cohen, ended in divorce.
He married Claudia Brooks in 2020. Together with his sons, both from his first marriage, she survives him, just like four grandchildren; His sister, Carol White; And his brother, Ken.
After leaving mother Jones in 1998, Mr. Klein taught journalism at Stanford and worked as a producer for “PBS Newshour” with Jim Lehrer. One of his “newshour” programs, about the Chinese economy, won a Gerald Loeb Award in 2006.
Between the editing of investigative journalism he wrote a science fiction thriller, “The Black Hole Affair” (1991).
And while his pragmatism annoyed some of his friends on the left, he saw politics differently.
“There is clearly a left and right dimension, but I think the more critical dimension is outsider and insider,” he told the New York Times in 1993. “I think that's where the real political fights are.”
