The New Yorker
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| Editor | David Remnick |
|---|---|
| Categories | |
| Frequency | 47 per year |
| Format | 77⁄8 by 103⁄4 inches (200 mm × 273 mm)[3] |
| Publisher | Condé Nast |
| Total circulation (December 2019) | 1,231,715[4] |
| First issue | February 21, 1925 |
| Company | Advance Publications |
| Country | United States |
| Based in | New York City, New York, US |
| Website | NewYorker.com |
| ISSN | 0028-792X |
| OCLC | 320541675 |
The New Yorker is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Started as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is now published 47 times annually, with five of these issues covering two-week spans. Although its reviews and events listings often focus on the cultural life of New York City, The New Yorker has a wide audience outside New York and is read internationally. It is well known for its illustrated and often topical covers,[5] its commentaries on popular culture and eccentric Americana, its attention to modern fiction by the inclusion of short stories and literary reviews, its rigorous fact checking and copy editing,[6][7] its journalism on politics and social issues, and its single-panel cartoons sprinkled throughout each issue.
The New Yorker was founded by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a New York Times reporter, and debuted on February 21, 1925. Ross wanted to create a sophisticated humor magazine that would be different from perceivably "corny" humor publications such as Judge, where he had worked, or the old Life. Ross partnered with entrepreneur Raoul H. Fleischmann (who founded the General Baking Company[8]) to establish the F-R Publishing Company. The magazine's first offices were at 25 West 45th Street in Manhattan. Ross edited the magazine until his death in 1951. During the early, occasionally precarious years of its existence, the magazine prided itself on its cosmopolitan sophistication. Ross famously declared in a 1925 prospectus for the magazine: "It has announced that it is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque."[9]
Although the magazine never lost its touches of humor, it soon established itself as a pre-eminent forum for serious fiction, essays and journalism. Shortly after the end of World War II, John Hersey's essay Hiroshima filled an entire issue. In subsequent decades the magazine published short stories by many of the most respected writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including Ann Beattie, Sally Benson, Truman Capote, John Cheever, Roald Dahl, Mavis Gallant, Geoffrey Hellman, Ruth McKenney, John McNulty, Joseph Mitchell, Alice Munro, Haruki Murakami, Vladimir Nabokov, John O'Hara, Dorothy Parker, S.J. Perelman, Philip Roth, J. D. Salinger, Irwin Shaw, James Thurber, John Updike, Eudora Welty, Stephen King, and E. B. White. Publication of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" drew more mail than any other story in the magazine's history.[10]
In its early decades, the magazine sometimes published two or even three short stories a week, but in recent years the pace has remained steady at one story per issue. While some styles and themes recur more often than others in its fiction, the stories are marked less by uniformity than by variety, and they have ranged from Updike's introspective domestic narratives to the surrealism of Donald Barthelme, and from parochial accounts of the lives of neurotic New Yorkers to stories set in a wide range of locations and eras and translated from many languages.[citation needed] Kurt Vonnegut said that The New Yorker has been an effective instrument for getting a large audience to appreciate modern literature. Vonnegut's 1974 interview with Joe David Bellamy and John Casey contained a discussion of The New Yorker's influence:
The non-fiction feature articles (which usually make up the bulk of the magazine's content) cover an eclectic array of topics. Recent[when?] subjects have included eccentric evangelist Creflo Dollar, the different ways in which humans perceive the passage of time, and Münchausen syndrome by proxy.
The magazine is notable for its editorial traditions. Under the rubric Profiles, it publishes articles about notable people such as Ernest Hemingway, Henry R. Luce and Marlon Brando, Hollywood restaurateur Michael Romanoff, magician Ricky Jay and mathematicians David and Gregory Chudnovsky. Other enduring features have been "Goings on About Town", a listing of cultural and entertainment events in New York, and "The Talk of the Town", a miscellany of brief pieces—frequently humorous, whimsical or eccentric vignettes of life in New York—written in a breezily light style, or feuilleton, although in recent years the section often begins with a serious commentary. For many years, newspaper snippets containing amusing errors, unintended meanings or badly mixed metaphors ("Block That Metaphor") have been used as filler items, accompanied by a witty retort. There is no masthead listing the editors and staff. Despite some changes, the magazine has kept much of its traditional appearance over the decades in typography, layout, covers and artwork. The magazine was acquired by Advance Publications, the media company owned by Samuel Irving Newhouse Jr, in 1985,[12] for $200 million when it was earning less than $6 million a year.[13]
Ross was succeeded as editor by William Shawn (1951–87), followed by Robert Gottlieb (1987–92) and Tina Brown (1992–98). Among the important nonfiction authors who began writing for the magazine during Shawn's editorship were Dwight Macdonald, Kenneth Tynan, and Hannah Arendt; to a certain extent all three authors were controversial, Arendt the most obviously so[according to whom?] (her Eichmann in Jerusalem reportage appeared in the magazine before it was published as a book), but in each case Shawn proved an active champion.
Brown's nearly six-year tenure attracted more controversy than Gottlieb's or even Shawn's, thanks to her high profile (Shawn, by contrast, had been an extremely shy, introverted figure) and the changes which she made to a magazine that had retained a similar look and feel for the previous half-century. She introduced color to the editorial pages (several years before The New York Times) and photography, with less type on each page and a generally more modern layout. More substantively, she increased the coverage of current events and hot topics such as celebrities and business tycoons, and placed short pieces throughout "Goings on About Town", including a racy column about nightlife in Manhattan. A new letters-to-the-editor page and the addition of authors' bylines to their "Talk of the Town" pieces had the effect of making the magazine more personal. The current editor of The New Yorker is David Remnick, who succeeded Brown in July 1998.[14]
Tom Wolfe wrote about the magazine: "The New Yorker style was one of leisurely meandering understatement, droll when in the humorous mode, tautological and litotical when in the serious mode, constantly amplified, qualified, adumbrated upon, nuanced and renuanced, until the magazine's pale-gray pages became High Baroque triumphs of the relative clause and appository modifier".[15]
Joseph Rosenblum, reviewing Ben Yagoda's About Town, a history of the magazine from 1925 to 1985, wrote, "... The New Yorker did create its own universe. As one longtime reader wrote to Yagoda, this was a place 'where Peter DeVries ... [sic] was forever lifting a glass of Piesporter, where Niccolò Tucci (in a plum velvet dinner jacket) flirted in Italian with Muriel Spark, where Nabokov sipped tawny port from a prismatic goblet (while a Red Admirable perched on his pinky), and where John Updike tripped over the master's Swiss shoes, excusing himself charmingly'".[16]
As far back as the 1940s, the magazine's commitment to fact-checking was already well-known.[17] However, the magazine played a role in a literary scandal and defamation lawsuit over two articles written by Janet Malcolm in the 1990s, who wrote about Sigmund Freud's legacy. Questions were raised about the magazine's fact-checking process.[18] As of 2010, The New Yorker employs sixteen fact checkers.[19] In July 2011, the magazine was sued for defamation in United States district court for an article written by David Grann on July 12, 2010,[20][21] but the case was summarily dismissed.[22][23] Today, the magazine is often identified as the leading publication for rigorous fact checking.[24]
Since the late 1990s, The New Yorker has used the Internet to publish current and archived material, and maintains a website with some content from the current issue (plus exclusive web-only content). Subscribers have access to the full current issue online, as well as a complete archive of back issues viewable as they were originally printed. In addition, The New Yorker's cartoons are available for purchase online. A digital archive of back issues from 1925 to April 2008 (representing more than 4,000 issues and half a million pages) has also been issued on DVD-ROMs and on a small portable hard drive. More recently, an iPad version of the current issue of the magazine has been released.