Landon “Lanny” Jones ’66, a writer and former editor of PAW and People magazine, died Saturday, Aug. 17, with his wife Sarah and their three children by his side.
Raised in St. Louis, Missouri, Jones told TAPinto Princeton that he found a love for reading early on, encouraged by one of his elementary school teachers. At Princeton Jones majored in English, but in a 2015 PAW interview, he joked that he really “majored in The Daily Princetonian,” where he served as an associate editor and co-editorial chair.
After graduating from Princeton, Jones wrote for Time and Life but returned to Princeton as PAW editor from September 1969 through October 1974. In an interview with the Prince after the announcement of his new role at PAW, Jones said he wanted PAW “‘to reflect more the concerns of the student body,” he said. “‘I’m excited about telling them the way Princeton is now.’”
Jones suffered from significant hearing loss following a case of mumps as a child and learned to read lips. But hearing loss didn’t stop Jones from becoming an accomplished journalist. During his tenure at PAW, Jones oversaw coverage of the beginning of coeducation, protests of the Vietnam war, and tension between alumni, the administration, and the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).
“‘Activism … needs intelligent discussion,’” he told the Prince in 1969.
Jones returned to Time in 1974 and helped oversee the launch of People, which initially struggled to find an audience.
“The first 17 issues of People all failed,” Jones told CBC in 2023. “But then we put a TV star on the cover for the first time, and his name was Telly Savalas from a show called Kojak. And he was shirtless. It sold gangbusters and the women all wrote in and said, ‘Well, what about the rest of him?’ And that told us something about celebrity and the name recognition and face recognition and in his case, chest recognition.”
Jones was editor of Money from 1984 to 1989, and he returned to People as managing editor from 1989 to 1997. During his time at People, Jones led the magazine to the top of the print market. He continued to edit at Time Inc. and served in a strategic planning role there after he left People. Time Inc. honored him with the 2015 Lifetime Achievement award for his decades of work at the company.
“The great thing about journalism is that it lets us indulge all of our curiosities,” he said last year. “I have been quite lucky with my jobs in that I loved them all.”
Jones’ work also included the 1980 book Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation, which popularized the term “baby boomer” to describe the generation born after World War II, and two books about Lewis and Clark.
In his 2023 book, Celebrity Nation, Jones criticized the idolatry of fame and celebrity in the United States. In an interview with PAW last year, he said that the book was something of a “mea culpa,” for the role that publications such as People have played in fixating on celebrity culture. Jones worked on the book during ongoing health struggles over the past several years, but illness didn’t stop him from coming up with book and story ideas.
“He was so optimistic and always had ideas he wanted to work on, or, like, right when he got back from the hospital, writing letters to The New York Times,” his daughter Cassie Jones told PAW.
Jones was married to his wife, Sarah, for 54 years. During his job at Time, Jones had to spend at least one night in New York City every week on deadline day, sometimes missing out on family dinners at his home in Princeton. Sarah was his biggest supporter, taking care of their three children — Landon ’97, Cassie, and Rebecca Urciuoli ’93.
“She has been integral to his success, professionally and also personally,” said son Landon. “And they were a real partnership, and he loved her very much, and she loves him very much.”
Despite his demanding schedule, Jones coached daughter Cassie’s soccer team every Saturday. Later in life, he found joy in being an enthusiastic grandfather to six grandchildren.
The family told PAW that a memorial service will be held in Princeton later this fall.
