George was a glossy politics-as-lifestyle monthly magazine co-founded
by John F. Kennedy, Jr. and Michael J. Berman with publisher Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. in New York City in September, 1995. Its tagline was "Not Just Politics as Usual". It was published from 1995 until 2001.
The debut issue featured a cover which received a great deal of attention for its photograph of Cindy Crawford dressed as George Washington.
George departed from the format of traditional political publications, whose audience was made up primarily of people
in or around the political world. The general template for George was similar to magazines such as Esquire or Vanity Fair. The consistent underlying theme was to marry the themes of celebrity and media with the subject of politics in such
a way that the general public would find political news and discourse about politics more interesting to read.
When it first appeared, George attracted great interest, and for a brief period had the largest circulation of any
political magazine in the nation, partly due to the celebrity status of Kennedy, but it soon began losing
money. Kennedy later complained that the magazine was not taken seriously in the publishing world.
George earned infamy in the conspiracy cyberculture, when an article slated
to run in the October 1998 "Conspiracy Issue" on the top conspiracy writers was killed at the last minute
by George editors. Titled "Princes of Paranoia," it would have highlighted writers and websites
that were popular in the field of conspiracy theory and given their work exposure to a wider
audience.
After Kennedy's death in 1999, the magazine was bought out by Hachette Filipacchi Magazines[1] and continued for over a year, with Frank Lalli as editor-in-chief. With falling advertising sales,[1] the magazine folded in early 2001.[2]
Critics called George "the political magazine for people who don't understand politics", assailing
it for "stripping any and all discussion of political issues from its coverage of politics". In a feature in its final issue,
Spy magazine asserted that the magazine's premise was flawed; there was no real convergence of politics and celebrity lifestyles.
On October 11, 2005, Harvard University, via their Kennedy School of Government, held a panel discussion entitled "Not Just Politics as Usual", which commemorated the tenth anniversary
of the magazine's launch. The panel was moderated by Tom Brokaw and featured appearances by other journalists.