Diane Straus, publisher who turned from society magazines to progressive journals, dies

Diane Straus, a media executive who oversaw high-society glossies in New York until an interest in progressive politics led her to serve as publisher of the nonprofit American Prospect and Washington Monthly, liberal policy magazines whose ambitions far exceeded their circulation, has died at her home in Washington. She was 66.

The cause was complications from colon cancer, said a sister, Jeanne Straus.

Straus — her first name was pronounced Dee-Ann — was a scion of a wealthy family that built an innovative radio empire in Manhattan, where her father’s station WMCA was credited with helping to popularize rock-and-roll in the United States and with broadcasting some of the first on-air editorials and political endorsements.

Like her father, Straus mixed business and politics, although for years she focused primarily on the former. She ran a catering company out of her 18th-century home in Bedford, New York, serving chutneys and bacon-wrapped watermelon rinds to the cocktail party set in Westchester County; was publisher of her husband’s New York-area newspaper chain, Trader Publications; and edited a high-end gossip magazine called the Westchester Wag.

“John Cheever would have railed against it,” a reporter for the New York Times wrote in 1999, shortly after the publication’s founding, “but probably would have studied the party pictures first.”

Meanwhile, Straus developed an unusual talent in platform tennis, a cross between squash and tennis in which players volley on a raised platform surrounded by chicken-wire walls. She won 29 national championships, including several seniors titles in her 60s, and was inducted into the Platform Tennis Hall of Fame in 2004.

That year marked the beginning of a new professional focus for Straus. She left her job as group publisher of Manhattan Media, a chain of New York glossies, to work for the man she called “the Gov” — presidential candidate Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor and a close friend from their days at Yale University.