Profile of Charles Peters, Founder and Editor of Washington Monthly – a Muckraking Force in Washington D.C.

pasted type and pasted up what was sent to us,” a former Washington Monthly staffer told The Post in 1988. “Everything was done by hand. The magazine was so small it could be done so cheaply and so shoddily. And even then we were pretty much guaranteed to lose money.”Mr. Peters, who sought to keep the magazine’s budget down, especially with respect to the editorial side of the business, once proudly told a potential graduate school intern that his personal finances meant the intern would be the staffer paid least in the whole operation.Mr. Rockefeller, in an interview, credited Mr. Peters with creating a national audience for a magazine “which addressed the real issues and asked the right questions.”“For those of us here who knew him well, we knew that while he might have been obsessed with the Washington Monthly, he was equally a fanatic about the Redskins,” Rockefeller said, referring to Washington’s National Football League team. “He was a very good and loyal friend to have, and a worthy and demanding opponent at the push-up contest fundraiser at the guy’s club.”After 25 years as editor of the Washington Monthly, Peters left the job in 2001. At his death, the magazine he founded was still being published, and more than 50 of his acolytes went on to run and staff their own periodicals, consultancies and journalism schools.