Think small

By choosing David Remnick as his editor, Si Newhouse has a chance to return the New Yorker to its less-glitzy roots as a serious -- and maybe even profitable -- magazine

Don't Quote Me by Dan Kennedy

Don Imus's rumbly voice betrayed equal parts irritation and amusement, which is another way of saying he sounded pretty much like he always does. "You know what Tina Brown leaving the New Yorker means?" he sneeringly asked his seven million listeners on Monday morning. He paused a beat before answering his own question: "It means you can stop reading it."

No doubt the prospect of several hundred thousand readers' doing exactly that was what had driven the magazine's owner, S.I. Newhouse Jr., to offer Brown a new five-year contract. But Newhouse couldn't keep Brown, who's credited -- or blamed, depending on your perspective -- with transforming a sober journal of literature and reporting into a trendy, sexy buzz machine, a clichéd description that's nevertheless apt. But though Brown made the New Yorker the talk of publishing, the magazine's inept business side continued to run up multimillion-dollar losses.

By naming as Brown's successor staff writer David Remnick, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose eclectic interests range from the Russian peasantry to the boxing styles of Mike Tyson and Muhammad Ali, Newhouse has at least temporarily united the New Yorker's notoriously fractious staff. "It's the best possible outcome that can be imagined," says Chip McGrath, a New Yorker alumnus who is now editor of the New York Times Book Review. "David will know what of Tina's New Yorker is worth saving and what of the old New Yorker is worth saving. People in the New Yorker are cheering, literally." Remnick's endorsement by McGrath, who did much of the day-to-day running of the magazine when Brown first arrived in 1992, carries considerable weight with the old guard: according to Gigi Mahon's The Last Days of the New Yorker (McGraw-Hill, 1988), Newhouse fired legendary octogenarian editor William Shawn in 1987 in part because he disapproved of Shawn's choice of McGrath as his successor.

At 39, Remnick is a legitimate journalistic heavyweight, a Princeton graduate and a veteran of the Washington Post who draws rave reviews from the likes of retired Post editor Ben Bradlee and National Journal editor Michael Kelly, a former New Yorker colleague. In Slate this week, Vanity Fair's Marjorie Williams describes Remnick as an appealing combination of ambition and good humor. She writes: "He was best known, I believe, for codifying the concept of the Victory Lap, which was the casual way you circled the entire newsroom the day you had a big story in the paper, modestly jingling the change in your pockets and accepting the plaudits of your peers."

But though Remnick's ascension makes eminently good sense editorially, his selection is, on the face of it, a dicey move from a business point of view. Brown was -- is -- as much of a celebrity as the people she featured in her magazine. Which raises questions as to how the New Yorker, a famously expensive magazine to produce, can lower its losses, and perhaps turn a profit, without its star attraction.

Here's where some counterintuitive thinking comes in. In fact, Remnick may represent Newhouse's best chance to put the New Yorker on a solid financial footing -- if Newhouse is willing to learn from his mistakes. With a lower-profile but respected editor at the helm, Newhouse should go small, and attempt to return the New Yorker to what it was before he bought it: a modestly profitable magazine with an elite corps of loyal readers and advertisers and a distinct New York flavor. After all, Newhouse didn't have to spend $175 million building up the New Yorker; that was his choice, undertaken because of his misguided desire to turn it into a mass-circulation magazine that would eventually bring in the high profits he gets from his Condé Nast magazines, such as Vanity Fair, GQ, and Glamour. That strategy didn't work, nor is it likely ever to work.

As is made devastatingly clear in a recent Fortune magazine piece, Newhouse and his chief lieutenant, Steve Florio, transformed the New Yorker from a viable business into a money-burning black hole. Florio goosed the circulation from 450,000 to 800,000 by running expensive promotions and offering discount subscriptions. He jacked up ad rates, thereby driving away the small advertisers who were sustaining the New Yorker, while failing to attract the big accounts he coveted. The result: massive deficits, stretching as far as the eye can see. Despite her free-spending ways, Brown delivered the editorial product that was expected of her. Florio failed to take advantage of that. Not that Florio has suffered. He now runs Condé Nast, which will take the New Yorker into its chilly corporate embrace later this year.

After Brown quit, Newhouse reportedly offered the job to two of his other editors, Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter and GQ's Art Cooper. Newhouse also reached a tentative agreement with Slate editor Michael Kinsley and then retracted it, according to a hilariously nasty e-mail Kinsley sent to a cadre of intimates that's been widely distributed on the Internet. In a follow-up missive reported in Wednesday's New York Post, Kinsley calls Newhouse "a jerk," and seeks to assure Slate staffers that he's not looking to leave anytime soon: "Editor of the New Yorker is the only job I can think of that would tempt me to leave. So basically you're now stuck with me, since of 5 billion people on earth I may be the least likely ever to be offered that one, as of today."

If Carter or Cooper, buzzmeisters in the Brown mold, had signed on, Florio presumably would have had no choice but to continue his efforts to transform the New Yorker into a mass-circulation magazine. But Remnick's literary and intellectual credentials are such that long-time New Yorker readers who were put off by the excesses of the Brown years will likely stick around. And that raises the possibility of a different model.

Last week, on WBUR Radio's The Connection, social critic Todd Gitlin suggested that Newhouse could stop the runaway promotional spending and allow the circulation to return to its natural level of 400,000 or 500,000 high-minded readers who genuinely want a serious literary magazine. He also proposed a middle road between the ephemera that Brown frequently offered and the dense, nearly book-length pieces of the Shawn era. "There's a lot of room between the latest update on Linda Tripp and Silent Spring or The Fate of the Earth," Gitlin said, referring, respectively, to the 1962 piece by Rachel Carson that launched the environmental movement and the 1982 essay by Jonathan Schell that warned of nuclear annihilation. Gitlin made his remarks before Remnick was chosen, but Remnick would appear to be the ideal editor to craft such a formula.

Of course, there's no way of knowing whether that formula would bring the losses down to a level Newhouse would find acceptable. The Atlantic Monthly (circulation: 500,000) turns a small profit with such an approach, but, as a monthly, it has much lower expenses than the New Yorker. Atlantic editor William Whitworth, another New Yorker alumnus who had once been mentioned as a successor to Shawn, declined to discuss his old magazine when contacted this week. But Atlantic owner Mort Zuckerman, in an appearance on Charlie Rose last week, practically insisted that the New Yorker would have to abandon weekly publication in order to survive. (With all the themed double issues Brown unveiled during her tenure, it can already be said that the New Yorker isn't quite a weekly anymore. In 1997 Brown put out six such editions, which means the magazine came out just 49 times during the year.)

Yet going to a monthly or every-other-week schedule -- something Newhouse is reportedly giving serious thought to -- would undo Brown's greatest accomplishment: making the New Yorker a timely magazine immersed in the worlds of politics, media, and pop culture. Remnick has already announced the laudable goal of upgrading the New Yorker's coverage of the city, something that would be difficult to pull off credibly on anything less than a weekly basis. And here, too, Remnick's journalistic goals could mesh with Newhouse's business objectives if Newhouse allows himself to think creatively. After all, the New Yorker's founding editor, Harold Ross, originally proposed to make the magazine New York-centric so that he could attract local advertisers who wanted no part of a national magazine. Clearly the New Yorker isn't going to cease being a national magazine, but a stronger city presence -- in advertising as well as editorial -- could prove attractive not just to New Yorkers, but to spiritual Manhattanites everywhere.

Regardless of the path Remnick chooses, following Tina Brown isn't going to be easy. The nostalgic too readily ignore the ossification that gripped the New Yorker toward the end of Shawn's 35-year editorship, a situation Shawn's successor, Robert Gottlieb, did little to resolve. In Ved Mehta's new ode to his old boss, Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker (Overlook Press), Mehta tells an unintentionally revealing story of what happened when Jonathan Schell -- yet another of Shawn's designated heirs to the throne -- tried to make one of Mehta's interminable essays slightly more terminable. Mehta ran to Shawn, who returned the piece to its full, unexpurgated glory. To Mehta, the tale confirms Shawn's greatness. To anyone else, it shows why Brown was so necessary.

It's easy to criticize Brown. Under her, the New Yorker was occasionally shallow (particularly in "Talk of the Town," once a miniature literary world unto itself) and obsessed with celebrity. Her own slight contributions on Princess Diana and on Bill Clinton's sex appeal betrayed a sensibility antithetical to what the New Yorker should be about. The recent, much-criticized profile of a dominatrix was almost a parody of Brown's flaws: a trend piece about a trend that came and went several years ago, executed by two first-rate talents (writer Paul Theroux and photographer Helmut Newton) who, judging from the result, gave considerably less than a first-rate effort.

Yet there was plenty of substance in Brown's New Yorker. She brought in exceedingly good talent such as Remnick, legal-affairs correspondent Jeffrey Toobin, political writer Joe Klein, physician Jerome Groopman, and scandal-hunters Jane Mayer and James Stewart. She practically made Harvard's Henry Louis Gates Jr. a staff member, and he responded with insightful articles on the likes of Colin Powell and Hillary Clinton. She published important, difficult pieces about Rwanda, AIDS, and teenage violence. The New Yorker won 10 National Magazine Awards during her six years as editor -- an unprecedented achievement, according to Frank Lalli, a former managing editor of Money magazine and past president of the American Society of Magazine Editors, which administers the awards. "For somebody to do that year after year -- that's excellence, and it's excellence on a continuing basis," Lalli says. "There's no question in my mind that she's one of the best editors of this era, or any era."

Most important, Brown came to the New Yorker with years of editing experience, at Vanity Fair and at Britain's Tatler. Remnick has never been an editor, although Chip McGrath notes that Remnick acted as "consigliere" to Brown, helping her with a number of editing tasks. Observers say it's not clear what Newhouse wants from Remnick, but it's obvious that he's looking to cut his losses, and to date he has steadfastly refused to blame Florio for the New Yorker's deficits. Thus, Remnick's supporters fear his reign may prove to be a short one.

But all that's in the future. For now, there is optimism at a magazine that, since Newhouse swooped in 13 years ago, has too often been awash in gloom. As one knowledgeable observer puts it, Remnick's editorship is a signal that Si Newhouse wants to give the New Yorker one more try. For staffers who, a week ago, feared their magazine was about to become just another slick Condé Nast advertising vehicle, that's reason enough to celebrate.

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Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.shore.net/~dkennedy

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Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com

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Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here

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