Landon Jones
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Landon Y. (Lanny) Jones is a journalist and author of William Clark and the Shaping of the West, published by Hill and Wang (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) in May 2004. It is the first biography of the famous explorer and Indian agent. Jones is also the author of Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation, which coined the phrase “baby boomer” and was nominated for an American Book Award in 1981. He is the editor of The Essential Lewis and Clark, an edition of the explorers’ journals published by Ecco/HarperCollins in 2000.
During his thirty-year career at Time Inc. in New York, Jones served as the managing editor of Money, the leading personal-finance magazine, and People, the most successful weekly publication in the world. In addition, Jones directed the editorial planning and launching of four new magazines within the People division: Who Weekly (1992), the magazine’s first international edition in Australia; In Style (1994), the successful celebrity lifestyle monthly; People en Espanol (1996), the first general-interest magazine published for the U.S. Hispanic market, and Teen People (1998), now the leading title in the teenage market.
A native of St. Louis, Missouri, Jones graduated with high honors from Princeton University in 1966 and joined Time Inc. a month later as an editorial trainee. With the exception of serving as editor of the Princeton Alumni Weekly in 1969-74, he worked at Time Inc. for his entire career. In 1967 he was a member of a special Life investigation of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy that received the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Public Service. He became Managing Editor of Money in 1984 and, during his five-year editorship, the financial monthly won three consecutive National Magazine Awards, including one for General Excellence, the top honor in the field. As editor of People in 1989-97, he expanded the reporting staff, supervised the magazine’s conversion to color photography, and published ground-breaking covers on timely social issues ranging from teenage pregnancy to racism in Hollywood. During his editorship, the magazine recorded all-time highs in profits and circulation.
Jones retired from Time Inc. in April 2000 after three years as Vice President for Strategic Planning. In that time Jones was charged with identifying and developing new ventures of significant scale for the company.
He has taught nonfiction writing at Princeton University and was writer in residence at Northwestern University in the fall of 2006. He has published articles in many national magazines, including Smithsonian, Time and Readers Digest. He and his wife Sarah live in Princeton, New Jersey and Bozeman, Montana.
