William Shawn

SOURCE: "The Talk of the Town: Notes and Comment," in The New Yorker, Vol. LXI, No. 9, April 22, 1985, pp. 35-6.

[An American editor, Shawn joined the staff of the New Yorker in 1933 as a reporter for the magazine's "Talk of the Town" section. In 1952 he succeeded Harold Ross as editor of the magazine. In the following excerpt, which appeared as an unsigned "Talk of the Town "feature in anticipation of a merger between the New Yorker Magazine, Inc., and Advance Publications, Inc., the editors of the New Yorker reaffirm the magazine's long-standing policy of "editorial independence. 'I

In 1925, when the magazine was founded, by Harold Ross (its first editor-in-chief) and Raoul Fleischmann (its first publisher), The New Yorker, like any new publication, had to fumble its way toward its natural character. We, the editorial people, knew by instinct that to be able to make The New Yorker the magazine we wanted it to be we had to separate ourselves from the business side of the venture. We felt that editorial independence was total or was nothing, that the line had to be drawn firmly and with finality. We therefore asserted our editorial independence. We did not write anything down; we just made the point in the course of a number of brief conversations. In this impromptu manner we claimed our independence, and, since we realized that it was a privilege, we determined not to take it for granted but to guard it carefully. Raoul Fleischmann, obeying some happy instinct of his own, acknowledged it and scrupulously respected it as long as he lived. When he died, in 1969, he was succeeded by his son, Peter Fleischmann, who, with wisdom and courage, followed his father's example to the letter. In sixty years, neither man ever made an editorial suggestion, ever commented favorably or unfavorably on anything we published or on any editorial direction the magazine was taking, ever permitted the advertising or circulation or accounting people to bring any pressure to bear on us. The Fleischmanns seemed to find satisfaction enough in providing a business framework within which we could get out the best magazine that we were capable of creating. There may have been occasions when both men were displeased or perplexed by what they found in the magazine, but, if so, they acted with restraint and self-discipline: they said nothing. The result was an absolute editorial independence rare in publishing history.

In a week or two, the stockholders of The New Yorker Magazine, Inc., will be asked to vote on a merger with Advance Publications, Inc. Advance belongs to S. I. Newhouse, Jr., and Donald Newhouse, who are brothers. Their company is a conglomerate that owns nine Conde Nast magazines, twenty-nine newspapers, a cable-television network, and a book-publishing company, Random House. Donald Newhouse mainly looks after the newspapers and the cable system, and S. I. Newhouse mainly looks after the magazines and the book publishing, but the brothers make all major decisions together. In the merger agreement between The New Yorker Magazine, Inc., and Advance Publications, Inc., we have been assured that The New Yorker "will be operated on a standalone basis as a separate company." In addition, Advance has said in the agreement that it wishes to maintain The New Yorker's "personnel and their operating practices and traditions, including the tradition of complete editorial independence: the editors having total control of the magazine's editorial character, policies, procedures, and content." As we approach the beginning of a new phase, we reassert our editorial independence. We reassert it with these few formal words. We feel certain that the Newhouses will respect it as rigorously as the Fleischmanns did.

But what does this editorial independence mean? What is it, actually? It is simply freedom. It frees us to say what we believe to be true, to report what we believe to be true, to write what we want to write, to draw what we want to draw—to publish what we want to publish—with no outside intervention, without fear, without constraints, in defiance of commercial pressures or any other pressures beyond those of our own conscience and sense of responsibility. It also frees us to be open to experiment and innovation, to new forms and styles, whether journalistic or literary. The freedom that the editorial office enjoys includes the freedom of every staff writer and every staff artist and every editor (and every non-staff contributor) to follow his or her own impulses, inclinations, aspirations, passionate interests. No writer or artist or editor is ever given an order. When a journalistic writer undertakes a new project, it is always done in full agreement with the editor; the two have to bring to it the same enthusiasm. And no editing is ever imposed on a writer; every editorial suggestion is presented in the form of a question, and is settled by agreement between writer and editor. The artists are similarly free. And our editors edit only what they are willing to edit.

We edit The New Yorker as a magazine for readers, not as an advertising medium. We regard our readers as readers, not as consumers or as a "market." Just as advertising is an essential part of our country's life, it is an essential part of The New Yorker's life. But it must not be linked to the editorial content of the magazine. They belong in separate realms, and the two realms must remain separate, must remain cordially apart. In this atmosphere of freedom, we have never published anything in order to sell magazines, to cause a sensation, to be controversial, to be popular or fashionable, to be "successful." We have published only what we thought had merit of one kind or another.

The business ownership of The New Yorker may change hands, but the idea of The New Yorker—the tradition of The New Yorker, the spirit of The New Yorker—has never been owned by anyone and never will be owned by anyone. It cannot be bought or sold. It exists in the minds of a group of writers, artists, editors, and editorial assistants who have been drawn together by literary, journalistic, aesthetic, and ethical principles they share, and by a shared outlook on the world. Whatever else may happen, it will endure. We need not name or define our principles or standards, for they are implicit in what we publish in our pages each week. Yet this may be the moment to say that if The New Yorker could be everything we want it to be it would unfailingly combine thorough, accurate, fresh, inspired reporting with fiction that runs deep and says something that hasn't been said before; it would be funny as frequently as possible; it would contribute something of worth to the national discourse; it would cast light; it would be well-wishing; and it would be human. In an age when television screens are too often bright with nothing, we value substance. Amid a chaos of images, we value coherence. We believe in the printed word. And we believe in clarity. And in immaculate syntax. And in the beauty of the English language. We believe that the truth can turn up in a cartoon, in one of the magazine's covers, in a poem, in a short story, in an essay, in an editorial comment, in a humor piece, in a critical piece, in a reporting piece. And if any single principle transcends all the others and informs all the others it is to try to tell the truth. The New Yorker will continue to change, as it has changed through the years, but our basic principles and standards will remain exactly what they have been. With that knowledge, and with the assurances that we freely asked our prospective publishers to give us and that they freely gave, we are confident that we will preserve The New Yorker—not merely a magazine that bears its name but this magazine: The New Yorker itself.

Edwin Diamond

SOURCE: "The Talk of 'The New Yorker'," in New York Magazine, Vol. XVIII, No. 12, March 25, 1985, pp. 14, 16, 18.

[An American journalist, Diamond has worked as an editor for several prominent American publications, including New York magazine and Esquire. He has also written several book-length studies of American television and Jimmy Carter: A Character Portrait (1980). In the following essay, he reflects on the editorial character of the New Yorker under William Shawn and speculates on the changes pending in the magazine's policy following its purchase by Advance Publications.]

The men and women of The New Yorker have long existed on a plane apart from workers at other magazines. The intellectual standing of their magazine, the generous pay, the university-like tenure, the absence of deadlines for many staffers, the respect accorded their work (it's always "the artists" at the magazine, never "the cartoonists"), and above all, the magnanimous, moral, nurturing figure of the editor, William Shawn, Mister Shawn—all this makes The New Yorker a self-enclosed universe unique in American journalism.

Over the years, people at the magazine have offered various metaphors to convey to outsiders the rarefied quality of life on the inside. One of the more vivid images came last week from Hendrik Hertzberg, a New Yorker staff writer for seven years and, until recently, editor of The New Republic. "Under the cold sea of the world is this warm flow of water with its own ecology," he says. "That's The New Yorker, where strange creatures develop and flourish. The source of that warmth, the sustaining jet, is, of course, Mr. Shawn."

With the announcement that S. I. Newhouse Jr., whose family already owns the Conde Nast magazine group and Random House, among other properties, was buying The New Yorker, the clever images have taken on a certain pained reality. The magazine's delicate ecology is about to change.

The New Yorker, which a few weeks ago marked its sixtieth anniversary, has had but one family owner and two editors, Harold Ross from 1925 to 1951, and William Shawn since then. If the stock-holders accept Newhouse's offer (already approved by the board of directors) when it is presented to them formally this month, then the Fleischmann family—Peter Fleischmann, son of founder Raoul, and Peter's son Stephen—will be gone, replaced by strangers. More to the point, the way many of the men and women of The New Yorker tell it, William Shawn, the nourishing source of the magazine, will himself be at risk, and with him The New Yorker's special place in magazine journalism.

Naturally, not everyone at the magazine thinks in such apocalyptic terms. The reactions to the sale, says the writer Calvin Trillin, "depend on your feelings about the Fleischmanns, about Newhouse, and about The New Yorker." Trillin reports a spectrum of opinions, ranging from "Good, now we're in the hands of people who know how to publish magazines" to "The Huns are at the gates."

The Fleischmanns, as a family, stir no real animosity among the staff. They and the board of directors behaved as good capitalists are supposed to, taking $200 a share for stock that sold at $130 before Newhouse put his money on the table. Peter Fleischmann, 63 and not in good health, had to be thinking of his own retirement, while Stephen, 31, who works for the magazine's president, has shown little interest in running the business side. "We've had a benign ownership for 60 years," says Trillin. "Perhaps Ross insisted on it, perhaps the Fleischmanns didn't want to know what went on. Whatever the reason, they left us alone, which is what writers and artists want." If anyone asked the staff today who it would like as owner, Trillin adds, "the answer would be 'the Fleischmanns in perpetuity.'"

Si Newhouse, as an individual, doesn't agitate the staff very much, either. Rather, the New Yorker people seem upset at the idea of their magazine's even being associated with the Conde Nast magazines, a group made up of Vogue, Glamour, Mademoiselle, Gentlemen's Quarterly, Gourmet, House & Garden, Self ; Bride's, and Vanity Fair. "If you surveyed the New Yorker staff with one of those word-reaction tests," says Trillin, "and the choices were 'Newhouse' and 'Conde Nast,' then 'Newhouse' would come out way ahead." In the eyes of The New Yorker's artists and writers, Conde Nast represents flash, fashion, and, in the case of Vanity Fair, the faltering of a less than grand ambition. "Those magazines are in every way opposite to the image of The New Yorker," says one staff writer at The New Yorker.

Whatever Si Newhouse may think of such hauteur, he has moved quickly to offer his assurances that, as a statement issued by The New Yorker's board put it, the magazine will be allowed to "operate on a stand-alone basis as a separate company." The statement also pledged that no changes would be made in the staff or in the "practices and traditions" of the magazine.

That, of course, is pure acquisition-ese. The fact is, changes in people and practices are inevitable at The New Yorker. That's what much of the apprehension is about, on the part of people at the magazine and readers who value the at times maddening ways of The New Yorker. It can be, at once, important, boring, provocative, stale, original, and repetitive. Like the game of baseball, the magazine often manages to cram twenty minutes of excitement into three hours.

The talk of the New Yorker staff is about change, and specifically about the Succession Question—who will be the next editor? William Shawn is 77 years old, a reality that many people in the ecosystem try to shut out. With a childlike faith that defies actuarial tables, staff people marvel at how vigorous Shawn appears. "Oh yes, he looks tired from all this business," one writer told me last week. "But he's still so bright, so effective, so sane. … He looks like a man in his fifties." Like others in the New Yorker family, this writer wants everything to stay the same: "Our hopes seem to be that Mr. Newhouse and Mr. Shawn will hit it off." It's as if the revered editor will live forever, and the designation of a new editor for the post-Shawn era will be postponed forever.

Shawn himself has intermittently struggled to loosen the filial cords that bind him and his staff-family. In 1977-78, The New Yorker endured its first Great Succession Crisis. Back then, it appeared that Shawn had designated Jonathan Schell, a staff writer, as the next editor of The New Yorker. Various staff people at various times let Shawn know of their objections to Schell—that he wasn't a good pencil man; that he lacked humor, breadth, and the other skills of a Great Editor; that he wasn't, in short, William Shawn. So ended the first Schell game; Schell relinquished the editing duties he had been given and returned to his writer's work. In 1982, the same thing happened again: Schell probe, staff reaction, Shawn retreat.

Nothing much else was said about succession until last year. In November, Shawn appointed two staff editors, John Bennet and Charles McGrath, as co-managing editors, Bennet for nonfiction, McGrath for fiction. Neither man is regarded as a serious heir to the Great Editor tradition of Ross or Shawn, but the fact that both men are under 40 suggests a certain managerial shrewdness: Lacking the qualities to take charge themselves, Bennet and McGrath are presumably young and malleable enough to carry on the New Yorker traditions under non-Shawn leadership.

Shawn, it seems, has been more willing to look unblinkingly into the future than have some of his staff. When Newhouse initially said he would acquire 17 percent of the New Yorker stock last November, Shawn started meeting with small, ad hoc groups of his staff. Writers who attended these meetings recall them as part informational and part therapeutic—"Shawn let people have their say, and then he had his say." Next, Shawn appointed a group of twelve staff people to go beyond free-form group sessions. Like Youngstown steel unionists or any other blue-collar stiffs about to be merged or purged or conglomeratized, the artists and writers formed a workers' committee (variously known as Mr. Shawn's Council or the Editorial Group). The committee is chaired by Shawn and includes John Bennet and such New Yorker staff people as Paul Brodeur, John Brooks, and Thomas Whiteside.

One committee member, who spoke only on the condition that he not be identified, said the committee's goal was a "meeting of the minds with Mr. Newhouse" in order to get "guarantees of editorial independence with legal standing." To do that, Shawn and the committee have engaged lawyer Peter Ryan of Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson. But since this committee member acknowledges the group is powerless to prevent the sale even if it wanted to, and since Newhouse has already pledged corporate independence from Conde Nast for The New Yorker, there can be only one guarantee on anyone's mind: the "right" to continue the New Yorker traditions, and the "right," reserved either for Shawn or for some other editorial entity, to name the next editor.

But whether Newhouse will surrender that basic prerogative of ownership seems problematic at best—at least to an outsider. Shawn himself told the Times last week that he didn't think a legal document was needed—though he acknowledged that some staff people wanted one. Instead, he said, he would try "man to man … [to] work things out" with Newhouse. Some of the staff put a Pangloss on events—in the best of all worlds, all that's required is for Shawn and Newhouse to get together—following Shawn's lead. Others maintain that they need a written document. And still others regard the committee as posturing. "Do you think people will actually walk out of here?" one star writer asks.

Already a couple of Outsider names have been floated as possible successors to Shawn. One is Robert Silvers, 55, who just sold his interest in The New York Review of Books but is continuing as editor. Another is Robert Gottlieb, 53, editor-in-chief at Knopf. Gottlieb last week gave out a statement of the kind we have come to recognize as a nondenial denial. ("It's very flattering … [but] I have a great job.… The New Yorker has a great editor.") Both men have proven intellectual records. Gottlieb, in addition, has enough stuff-of-legends eccentricities to qualify him for Great Editor.

The New Yorker staff's reactions to these reports range from hard-line ("If Newhouse doesn't give the guarantees, then there will be mass resignations") to ambivalent ("We don't know Newhouse's character," says another member of the committee, "so we shouldn't assume that he won't do everything we want, but we also don't know that he will do what we want").

At times, though, it seems that the New Yorker staff is not so much hawkish or dovish as ostrichlike. Last week, one of the magazine's bigger stars worried that any imminent appointment of someone like Gottlieb would be too great a leap for The New Yorker to take. But, the writer said, if Si Newhouse left the magazine's editorial side completely alone, and if Shawn continued in charge into the mid-future—another five to eight years, say—and if the editor designate were to hang around quietly and observe, then maybe there would be no problems of succession.

A strange world, indeed. But perhaps only The New Yorker, yes, The New Yorker, could make it work.

Eric Utne

SOURCE: "Tina's New Yorker," in Columbia Journalism Review, Vol. XXXI, No. 6, March-April, 1993, pp. 31-6.

[In the following essay, Utne reports on changes in the New Yorker under the editorship of Tina Brown.]

In a speech to current and prospective New Yorker advertisers at the Rainbow Room late last year, Tina Brown proclaimed that "substance is back in style.… In the era we enter I sense that politics and process will be intensely interesting to people again. Seriousness will be sexy again."

She went on to describe some of the changes she has wrought at The New Yorker, which she said were to "preserve the identity of the magazine while recognizing that too many good pieces were going unread." Among the changes: she has reduced the frequency of the "daunting big read" (her phrase for 20,000-or-so word articles); added a number of shorter columns between "Talk of the Town" and the features well; increased the paper weight by 20 percent "to showcase the artwork and the advertising"; restored the original Caslon body typeface; introduced an expanded table of contents, running folio heads, and bylines at the top of articles; added loads of color illustrations and more color cartoons; dropped in the occasional black-and-white photo, including regular portraits by Richard Avedon; and begun running many more ads for the kinds of things that rarely, if ever, appeared in the pre-Newhouse New Yorker, like blue jean and underwear ads featuring half-nude models, and scratch-and-sniff perfume inserts (since dropped).

She also introduced a host of new contributors, including executive editor Rick Hertzberg, who edited The New Republic for seven of the last twelve years. Hertzberg presides over and sometimes writes the newly positioned leadoff political think piece, "Comment." Other new blood includes Harvard's Afro-American Studies chairman Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; cartoonists Jules Feiffer (who'd never been in The New Yorker before) and Art Spiegelman (creator of Maus); author Ken Auletta, whose first offering in his new column called "Annals of Communications" covered the David Letterman and Jay Leno flap; Den of Thieves author James Stewart; and Washington correspondent and former New Republic writer Sidney Blumenthal, who replaces Elizabeth Drew.

Although Brown told her audience that "the culture our readers are interested in now is international. Our horizon today ought to be global," she failed to mention that she wasn't renewing the contracts of longtime foreign correspondents Raymond Bonner and Stan Sesser, and has reportedly told colleagues that she wants to reduce the number of "situationers" (longish profiles of foreign countries).

Brown concluded her remarks by promising her advertisers that the new New Yorker would be "more relevant and more timely without being a slave to the week's headlines or the culture hype." This approach, she said, would "capture a new era and a new generation," which the advertisers no doubt heard to mean that Brown would deliver them thirtysomething readers instead of the fortysomething median age of the current readership.

When invited to write a review of the new New Yorker, I inquired, "Why me?" "You're the perfect person to do it," I was assured. "No," I pressed. "Why really?" The response: "Because no one else will touch it."

I must confess I'm not one of the faithful who read every issue of the old New Yorker. Though I'm a magazine junkie, and started Utne Reader to indulge my habit, The New Yorker has never been on my must-read list. The way I read the old New Yorker was to let the issues pile up (at my father's house) until someone told me there was something I just had to read—usually by Paul Brodeur, Bill McKibben, Pauline Kael, or John McPhee. I was content to wait for that happy confluence of truly stunning, important ideas and brilliant exposition, like Jonathan Schell's Fate of the Earth. I'd pass on the five-part series on grain or the articles about "somebody's childhood in Pakistan," as Dorothy Parker once quipped about William Shawn's New Yorker of the'60s.

So while I was surprised to be asked to write the review, I was too curious, or perhaps foolhardy, to decline. What is it about Queen Tina that commands such underwhelming public loquacity among the usually quick-to-shoot pundits of American journalism? Is it the long shadow that the Newhouse media empire (Knopf, Random House, twenty-nine newspapers, fourteen magazines, cable TV, etc.) casts over the publishing landscape? Or is there something about Herself? To find out, I visited The New Yorker's offices at 20 West 43rd Street.

Arriving for a 5 P.M. appointment with executive editor Rick Hertzberg, I was told to wait in the reception area, which is a stark space much like any other New York reception area, except this one was devoid of reading material. There wasn't even a copy of The New Yorker. The receptionist offered me a cup of coffee, then directed me down the corridor to the lunchroom to retrieve it. Like the rest of The New Yorker's office space, the lunchroom-kitchen area has off-white walls and linoleum floors. It, too, was without reading matter, except for a wall rack that carried dozens of copies of the last three issues of a newsletter titled Work and Family Life: Balancing Job and Personal Responsibilities.

At 5:22 P.M. the clickity click of two-inch pumps caught my attention. Looking up, I recognized Herself, led by a little woman hurrying backwards, just ahead of Tina Brown, talking non-stop. Brown looked surprisingly tall (or was the talking woman exceedingly short?). Brown's camel-colored wrap was shapeless and limp. She gripped three bags: a big, black, Gucci-like handbag with an oversized gold chain-link shoulder strap, and two big shopping bags. The little woman, who turned out to be The New Yorker's first-ever director of public relations, Maurie Perl, never stopped talking until the elevator door closed between them. Brown had not said a word.

Hertzberg arrived a few minutes later, returning from the funeral of the abstract impressionist painter Richard Pousette-Dart, who was his childhood neighbor in Westchester. Hertzberg's mood was somber but cordial. He smoked Salems. He wore a pin-striped, gray-flannel suit, blue shirt, and conservative tie. Throughout the nearly hour-and-a-half tour that followed, every person we visited or met in the halls, including writers David Remnick and Veronica Geng, considered his attire worthy of comment.

The New Yorker's offices, designed under the regime of Tina Brown's predecessor, Robert Gottlieb, are not laid out to encourage intra-office schmoozing. The hallways are so stark that I expected a pair of the endless closed doors to burst open at any moment, orderlies rushing by with a patient on a stretcher. The one space that invites conviviality is the open stairway between the 16th and 17th floors and the nearby library tables.

My tour mostly consisted of a visit to Perl's office, where, at 6:30 P.M. Hertzberg's watch began beeping to let him know it was time to catch the evening news. Hertzberg channel-jumped on Perl's TV for a few minutes, then settled on Peter Jennings's report. After watching for ten minutes or so he switched off the set. "Slow news day." He and Perl then took a call from a freelance copywriter, whom they congratulated profusely for "terrific" recent publicity releases.

The tour ended in Hertzberg's tiny office, which at that time was next door to Brown's, adjacent to the long library tables used for page make-up and fact-checking. Passing by the hallowed, legendary fact-checking area reminded me of something I had noticed on the first page of the first issue I saw after Brown took over—two glaring typos. Almost apologetically, I asked Hertzberg if he had seen them, since they were in the "Comment" column that he edits. "Typos," he replied. "What typos?"

I mentioned that the column with the offending errors had something to do with the press's post-election mistreatment of Clinton. Hertzberg produced the November 23rd issue. I just happened to have a yellow highlighter in my pocket, so I marked the little intruders for him.

Hertzberg summoned his assistant, Josh, and we were quickly flanked by a half dozen proofreaders, fact-checkers, and interns, waving earlier versions of galley proofs that had escaped the typos. "This is awful," Josh moaned. "It must have been a computer glitch."

Brown met me the next day in her corner office. Pulling her chair around to my side of the desk, she leaned forward and graciously made me feel that I could take as much of her time as I wanted, so I did.

We talked about editorial philosophy: "I edit for what interests me basically, and I think it is the only way to edit. I don't think about who is going to be angered. I feel that if it interests me it interests the readership." Reader surveys: "No, I have never done that." The New Yorker legend: "I feel the weight of the mystique.… I want to try things, experiment with things, have a license to fail. I could do that when I was at The Tatler and Vanity Fair. Here we are in a strange situation where the mystique is really enormous but the commercial reality was very dire. But I'm not complaining. You have to get on and do a lively magazine. It's about today and you know our readers are about today."

Midway through our interview she got up and asked one of her assistants to dig out a copy of a scathing critique of William Shawn's New Yorker written some twenty-three years ago by one-time New Yorker contributor Seymour Krim. I later found it to include such lines as "The virility, adventurousness, (and) connection with the living tissue of your audience can only be restored by rebirth. This is not about to happen in the near future and could only occur after the present New Yorker trust fades away and twenty years hence stirs the fires of someone who buys the title and is then animated, directed, by the legend of a memorable past joined with a love of the living present."

She must have liked those lines.

I told her it didn't seem right that a magazine edited by Tina Brown would not carry photos by Annie Leibovitz and Helmut Newton. She replied by asking if I liked the Avedon photos, then went on to say, "I will use a photograph where it is appropriate.… I think that it's really working in the magazine. It doesn't feel like a violation of the magazine's traditions. I have had very positive feedback on that."

The negative feedback I heard most often, I told her, is that the magazine has become insistently, overwhelmingly topical. Even her friends, like Village Voice editor Jonathan Larsen, say she's gone too far. "The magazine needed to become more topical, but she's made it relentlessly so at the expense of the serendipitous, leisurely pace of her predecessors. You can find the topical any where, but not the timeless."

"I want to be both topical and timeless," she said. "Timeless takes longer to create. Still, I don't think that it's become overwhelmingly topical.… My goal is to have one piece that really is of the moment and one piece that could be offbeat—a whole other rhythm. I wouldn't want to see the magazine ever won by one or the other strand.… You have to create a certain urgency in a magazine to compel people to buy it and read it. I think the decline in ads was brought about by people feeling that the magazine didn't really matter anymore. It was just, 'Oh well, I'll just get to it.'"

When I asked what would be her version of Saul Steinberg's famous New Yorker cover of Manhattan looking west, she said, "I think the whole idea of being a New Yorker is up for grabs.… The city is increasingly balkanized. What it's really about is race warfare and conflict. And that's one of the subjects the magazine will address very powerfully: What is it to be a New Yorker?.… This is an area that I think has been rather neglected in the magazine. Some of the foreign coverage has been great but some of the domestic coverage has been wanting—there hasn't been enough of it. I've tried to redress that. I've got Jane Kramer, who normally writes about Europe, writing an extraordinary piece about places in the Bronx. It's wonderful to see her eye turned to another area. And we have Susan Sheehan doing a fantastic two-part series about what it's like to live in welfare projects."

We talked about some of her favorite New Yorker profiles (Kenneth Tynan on Johnny Carson, George Trow on Ahmet Ertegun), and about readership. I asked if she sees her fortysomething readership getting younger. "Yes, I do," she said. "And I think, to put it bluntly, it could not get any older.… That's not to say that I want to lose the old readers, but … the magazine basically skipped a generation and we have to get that generation back."

She talked about improved newsstand sales. "They were down to 6,000 copies sold on the New York newsstands. Now we're selling in New York what the magazine was selling nationally and internationally earlier in the year."

The New Yorker's president and c.e.o., Steven Florio, later told me that the magazine's newsstand sales, which averaged 20,000 per issue worldwide last year, have increased to 20,000 in New York City alone, and are up to 40,000 worldwide on average and as many as 60,000 on some issues. He attributes the increase to "all the press" the magazine has been getting and the fact that "we're so much more topical now." He said the fact that the magazine's draw (number of copies put out on the newsstand) has gone from 65,000 copies per issue last year to as many as 120,000 does not mean the company has "flooded the marketplace with copies to artificially inflate the newsstand sale. That has not happened. Si Newhouse would never let us do that. First and foremost, this guy's a businessman."

According to a current staff writer, Brown's "unflagging preoccupation with being hot, snappy, and of-the-moment" has led to a precipitous increase in typos and to the recent charges that some "Talk of the Town" pieces have been inaccurate because Brown puts off decisions until the last moment, which means the pieces cannot be adequately fact-checked. She has killed a number of stories as late as Thursday night (the magazine prints on Saturday). A recent profile of Al Sharpton was rushed into print on short notice to beat a similar, and some say richer, story in The New York Times Magazine. The beleaguered proofreaders and fact-checkers have been known to resist Brown's capriciousness directly, but to no avail.

When I asked Brown if there had been any uprisings by current or former writers, I was unaware that she was in the midst of asking at least a dozen staff writers and editors from previous regimes to move out of their offices (which many have interpreted as dismissals, even though some may still have contracts in place). Among them were Michael Arlen, Burton Bernstein, Naomi Bliven and Bruce Bliven, Jr., Jane Boutwell, William Wertenbaker, Wallace White, and Cynthia Zarin. At least two, Henry S. F. Cooper and Ved Mehta, refused to go.

Brown claimed the transition was going smoothly. "They've been very supportive," she said. "What about Garrison Keillor's departure?" I asked. She said Keillor left because she hired James Wolcott, who had written a column about him in Vanity Fair that Keillor found very, very offensive. "I wrote saying that I'm sorry you went before we had a chance to meet. And he wrote back that he hopes to publish something one day. I don't think there's any particular acrimony. He's a good writer."

When I later asked Keillor if Brown's account of his departure was accurate, he told me, "Tina Brown has a lot of nerve explaining why I left The New Yorker when she never bothered to ask me in the first place. I left because I love The New Yorker and because she is the wrong person to edit it. I didn't want to be on the premises to watch it suffer under her hand."

Keillor says the magazine he wanted to write for "is gone now, bought by a billionaire … who has ended the long tradition of editorial independence there.

"The New Yorker is a glorious and dear American institution," Keillor said, "but Ms. Brown, like so many Brits, seems most fascinated by the passing carnival and celebrity show in America. Fiction, serious reporting, the personal essay, criticism, all that made The New Yorker great, do not engage her interest apparently. She has redesigned it into a magazine that looks and reads an awful lot like a hundred other magazines. The best writing to appear in Ms. Brown's New Yorker, in fact, was the section of tributes to William Shawn, which read like an obituary for The New Yorker."

No one can accuse Brown of not paying her writers well. At Vanity Fair Brown paid her favorites upwards of $100,000 to write four or five pieces a year. One media source says that Alexander Chancellor, the former editor of the London Spectator whom Brown imported to edit "Talk of the Town," makes $140,000 a year and was given an apartment and a "no receipts" expense account. Since Brown has brought on many more people than she's let go, and still pays writers what Gottlieb did (about $30,000 for a 20,000 word piece), insiders at the magazine speculate that her budget must have increased dramatically.

But Brown said, "No, it's the same budget. It's a very complex thing.… Shawn hired everyone with different arrangements.… It's been very difficult to get inside of and understand how it works.… It doesn V work. I'm just proceeding in my own cautious way."

She cited similar factors when I asked if she'd considered running a masthead listing the magazine's approximately 140-person editorial staff. "That is one tradition I am very happy to be without," she replied. "This magazine is sort of a mare's-nest of strong hierarchies, yet it's nonhierarchical. Once you do a masthead you put one over another who never saw himself as over or under another. It's too complex, too weird. It would be a nightmare. It would only encourage the management to halve the staff, so I prefer not to do it."

Back in 1970, Krim complained that The New Yorker had lost its "subtle, enormous influence" on American culture as soon as it began to "scoop in sweet advertising money." Now Brown's mandate is to rescue the magazine from its current "dire commercial reality" by scooping in more advertising money. (The New Yorker reached its peak of 6,143 ad pages in 1966. In 1981 it sold 4,304 pages. By 1991 it had fallen to just 2,002 pages. For 1992, pages stayed flat, at 2,007.)

Under Brown, according to Jerry Brennan, a former research analyst in The New Yorker's marketing department who now sells ads for New York magazine, advertising has won the war with editorial. The evidence, he says, is at the front of the book, where many more fractional ads are now "braided into the editorial copy, and full-page ads get the preferred right-hand position opposite the new 'Comment.'" At the old New Yorker, the entire "Talk of the Town" section was kept free of ads.

Though the clustering of ads in the front may make the magazine appear to be fairly bursting with ads, perception is not reality. According to Steven Cohn, editor of the trade journal min (Media Industry Newsletter), which carries a running "box score" on weekly magazines' ad sales, advertising at The New Yorker was up only 2 percent for the three months under Brown in 1992. (Florio expects total ad pages to increase 5 percent in 1993.) When asked if he knew of any special efforts The New Yorker is now making to increase ad sales, Cohn replied, "I guess they're selling Tina, just as they did when she was at Vanity Fair."

And Brown seems a willing participant, co-hosting with Florio regular "roundtables" for advertisers, including a recent special luncheon, attended by Elton John and Lauren Hutton, to celebrate the unveiling of a new tenpage Gianni Versace ad spread in the February 8 issue. The ads feature fashion photographs by none other than staff photographer Richard Avedon. Brown's willingness to mix editorial with advertising would have been considered unseemly by Mr. Shawn, who took great pains to keep the editorial side independent from the business side.

Indeed, Brown seems to have become The New Yorker's primary selling point. The magazine's new direct mail subscription promotion is a two-panel postcard that offers subscriptions for just $16 per year. The card is similar to one the magazine used before Brown took over, only now Tina Brown's name is emblazoned all over it, with lines like, "First offer with Tina Brown as editor," and "For only 32 O an issue, The New Yorker brings you the best cartoons, humor, fiction, reporting, and Tina Brown … the best magazine editor in the country." Florio has been trumpeting the mailing to trade journals, saying that the two-million-piece campaign, which was mailed in the last week of December, got more responses after ten days than previous mailings did after twenty-five days. (Industry experts point out that the Tina Brown-as-product-benefit mailing was sent out via first class postage, whereas previous mailings always went out via third class, which delays delivery and therefore response rates.)

Patti Hagan, a fact-checker at The New Yorker under Shawn for fifteen years and now the gardening columnist for The Wall Street Journal, says, "I'm most turned off by Marky Mark having sex in Calvin Klein's ads at the front of the book, followed a few weeks later by a signed [Susan Orlean] 'Talk of the Town' interview with Marky Mark about his underwear ads. This would never happen at the old New Yorker."

Although William Shawn adamantly resisted public relations in all its forms, Brown is the reigning master-stoker of the star-hyping machine, and Maurie Perl, who flacked for Barbara Walters at ABC, is no slouch either.

But Brown may not be happy about all the ink she got recently for her very public tiff with authors John Le Carre and William Shawcross. She published a blistering review of Shawcross's new biography of media baron Rupert Murdoch, who had long ago hired and then fired Brown's husband, Harold Evans. She was then accused by Le Carre, who is a friend of Shawcross, of publishing "one of the ugliest pieces of partisan journalism that I have witnessed, [intended to] assure your readers that the unflattering portrait of Harold Evans provided in the book is mere Murdoch propaganda." Brown dismissed Le Carr6's charge as "sexist." Le Carre responded that "the ethics of the great magazine of which you are now editor [are at stake]. God protect The New Yorker from the English."

Brown seems to be using the "Talk of the Town" section in particular to ruffle feathers and gain attention. In the January 1I issue she ran an unsigned piece defending East German dictator Erich Honecker, written by Irene Dische, the wife of Honecker's defense lawyer. The next week she ran an unsigned piece by new staff writer Jeffrey Toobin that was critical of his ex-boss, Iran-contra special counsel Lawrence Walsh. Toobin had been taken to court by Walsh in an attempt to block his book about the Irancontra investigation.

"Now," says a New York media critic, "'Talk of the Town' reads like a media gossip column." Until Brown imported Chancellor, whose ruddy complexion and jovial personality inspired staffers to call him Admiral Stockdale, the section was edited by Chip McGrath, who maintained the magazine's traditional aversion to public relations hype in favor of the obscure, the odd, the eccentric, and the uncontroversial. As Shawn liked to say, "We avoid topicality at all costs."

At the old New Yorker, "Talk" pieces were never assigned. Writers proposed stories, and if they were approved, they pursued them. Now, in search of the right "mix," Brown and Chancellor regularly assign "hot and snappy" pieces to their staff writers, many of which the writers simply but politely reject. So concerned were some staffers about the new direction of "Talk of the Town" that at a rare New Yorker meeting some senior staff members pressed their concerns to Chancellor. Chancellor was "very open and agreeable," says one staff writer who attended the meeting, "but since then 'Talk of the Town' has gone on as before, driven primarily by public relations considerations."

Faced with similar financial realities, most reasonable people would probably do just as Brown has done, if they had the talent. Though nearly everyone I talked to has some quibble about the new New Yorker (to some of the old guard, any change, no matter how minor, would be a sacrilege), most people admitted that they're reading it more now. This, for a magazine that had become America's most-admired and least-read publication, is something of a turnaround.

So far, Brown seems to be accomplishing the goals she set for herself. She has made The New Yorker the most-talked-about magazine in America. She has given it a face lift without changing it beyond recognition. And, perhaps most important to her and her boss, she has raised newsstand and ad sales.

But she has attained these goals at a cost—the loss of the magazine's special role as the torchbearer for a uniquely American (and very unBritish) brand of civility and decency.

The New Yorker of old always seemed to me an exercise in defining and refining the ideas deemed permissible for admission to civilized discourse. It had the courage to disagree with the conventional wisdom even as it defined it, through genuine soul-searching rather than through politically correct polemic. In its coverage of the United States' involvement in Nicaragua, Grenada, and the Persian Gulf, the magazine asked tough questions that few other mainstream publications dared to ask, just as it had earlier about McCarthyism, civil rights, and the Vietnam War.

By allowing such radicals as Michael Harrington, James Baldwin, and Barry Commoner to fling their incendiary ideas from its pages, The New Yorker served notice to the American establishment that these untitled and unfamous authors deserved a hearing.

It's too early to tell whether Brown's New Yorker will be congenial to new and challenging ideas. If her editing of Vanity Fair is any indication, it may actually become hostile to them, not because Brown isn't interested in ideas, but because, as critic Geoffrey Stokes, sees it, she fears that "anything difficult or complex, and especially anything ambiguous," would be "boring" to her readers.

To her credit, Brown has published a number of powerful pieces that are certainly worthy of the old New Yorker, such as Richard Preston's article on rainforest viruses, Marshall Frady's profile of Malcolm X, and the memorial tribute to William Shawn.

Nonetheless, Brown has transformed The New Yorker and especially "Talk of the Town" into a kind of weekly epistle for America's new orthodoxy—the cult of personality. She rules as its high priestess. She's the one who decides whom to bless and whom to shun.

Will she allow The New Yorker to provide safe haven for America's heretofore silenced rebels and unseen minorities? (I'd like to see her use more writing by women, like Barbara Ehrenreich, Louise Erdrich, and Winona LaDuke.) Will she give voice to the blasphemies of its infidels? (How about working with some of Spy magazine's best writers, like Bruce Handy, Paul Rudnick, and Kurt Andersen? They are the true wits of our day.) Will she give a hearing to America's heretical visionaries and prophetic poets (Gary Snyder and Stephen Mitchell)?

Just how serious is Tina Brown when she says, "Seriousness will be sexy again"? Will it be sexy enough to survive in the new New Yorker? Or will seriousness prove too boring?