Adam Moss’s decision to step down after 15 years as editor in chief of New York sent ripples through the magazine world. The New York Times spoke with peers and colleagues about his career and influence. Their remarks have been edited for length and clarity.

Graydon Carter

Former editor, Vanity Fair

“Adam was, and is, one of the giants. He had the instincts for a good story. He found and kept a great staff. And he knew that magazines had to surprise you visually on top of everything else.”

Janice Min

Former editor, Us Weekly and The Hollywood Reporter

“I found him to be a really good example of what an editor can be, which is to try not to turn into a celebrity himself. I had lunch with him and — I always laugh about this — we were talking about people who go out too much, and I said, ‘Do you just not go out?’ He said, very dryly: ‘The closer I get to death, the less I want to hang out with people I can’t stand.’ I just thought, ‘I’m adopting that for the rest of my life.’ Every time I turn down something, I think about that quote. Life becomes much clearer if you abide by that.”

Frank Rich

Writer at large, New York; former Op-Ed columnist and theater critic, The New York Times

“I’m sitting in my office in the mid-1980s and someone who I didn’t know calls me, says: ‘I’m an editor at Esquire. I want to talk to you about a piece.’ He said, ‘Can I buy you a drink at Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle hotel?’ As I later learned from him, he’d never been there before in his life. He was 29. I was halfway into my 10 years as drama critic. I eventually wrote a 10,000-word piece for him when I had a full-time demanding job — that’s how persuasive he was and creative as an editor. It planted the idea at The Times of me becoming an Op-Ed columnist. It completely changed my career.”

Selected New York magazine covers from the Moss era:

Max Frankel

Former executive editor, The New York Times

“He had published that terrific little sheet called 7 Days. It was terrific. It had a great sense of both service and a feel for the city. And that was exactly the sensibility we wanted. We brought him in to help advise us on various projects, we got to know him, and we hired him.”

Lynn Hirschberg

Editor at large, W; former contributor, The New York Times Magazine

“One of the things people don’t say enough about him is what a great teacher he is. He would suggest something completely impossible, and I would say, ‘Sure, Adam, I will do that completely impossible thing you have in mind, because I want you to be happy.’ He has a gift for setting the bar very, very high and making you work over the level you thought you were capable of. He invests so much time in the process that you feel you have to live up to that investment.”

“I’m happy for my friend, but I’m very sad for journalism, and I’m very sad especially for magazines, because I feel like it’s very much the end of something. He’s the best, he’s the best, he’s the best.”

Olivia Nuzzi

Washington correspondent, New York

“More than anything else, what Adam’s taught me — and I’m not sure he knows he taught me this — is how simple it should be to tell a story. It should be simple even if the story seems complicated. A few months ago, I was reporting on some palace intrigue in the West Wing, and Trump pulled me into the Oval Office to try to dissuade me from writing about it. Over the course of 20 minutes, we were joined by the vice president, the secretary of state and the president’s chief of staff. I was agonizing about how to explain in writing what had happened; I didn’t know where to even start. But Adam had the obvious answer: You just start where the story starts, and you tell it honestly, just as it happened and as you experienced it. Once I understood that, saw what he meant, it was easy.”

Vanessa Grigoriadis

Contributor, The New York Times Magazine and Vanity Fair; former contributing editor, New York

“Most of us didn’t know Adam when he came to New York. We knew The New York Times Magazine was incredible and that he had put Ecstasy on the cover, which we all thought was really cool.”

“He’s hands-on; I think everybody will tell you that. He just seems to know everything. In the old New York magazine, there was this idea that the more moguls you knew, the more important you were to the magazine. He really got rid of that. It became really about how smart you are, how quick you are and how much you can identify the zeitgeist. He’s a workaholic, menschy, wry person. I wrote this story about Martha Stewart and her comeback from prison, and he said, ‘You are some kind of genius.’ And I said, ‘I feel like the emphasis was just on some, not genius, but I’ll take it.’ He doesn’t have a good poker face. You know exactly what he thinks of your story. Sometimes you think, ‘Jeez, I didn’t need to know that.’ It feels like graduate school. We’re all learning under this professor, and we want to impress him. He’s the sensei, or something like that.”

Donald J. Trump

Twitter.com, March 28, 2013

“Adam Moss, editor in chief of @NYMag is quickly losing his reputation in that @NYMag has become so boring and so irrelevant.”

Michael M. Grynbaum is a media correspondent covering the intersection of business, culture and politics. @grynbaum

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