Next Tuesday, in a fashionable restaurant in downtown Manhattan, a gathering of staff and long-time contributors will take place to celebrate the centenary of The New Yorker. Over the past 100 years, and under the guidance of a mere five editors, the magazine has occupied an exalted position not just in the life of the city whose name it bears but also in the broader universe of English-language fiction, poetry, journalism and essays. It’s also, of course, famed for its cartoons, culture criticism and incredibly pernickety fact-checkers.
All of these are worthy of celebration, and next week’s party forms only one small part of that. The current edition – the magazine’s 5,057th – comes with four different covers, each an interpretation of the image of Eustace Tilley, a monocle-wearing dandy, that adorned the very first cover and has been a recurring motif ever since.
New York Public Library is holding an exhibition. A season of films is based on pieces that originally appeared on the magazine’s pages, from In Cold Blood to Brokeback Mountain. A Netflix documentary is in mid-production and will be released in the autumn.
There’s quite a history for that documentary to tell. What began as a “15-cent comic paper”, as Harold Ross, its founding editor, described it, with a focus on fiction, criticism, cartoons and humour in jazz-age New York, grew, particularly in the years after the second World War, to become what is now called a platform for the flowering of late-20th-century American literature – Philip Roth, John Updike, JD Salinger and many, many more – as well as successive generations of international greats, many of them Irish, John McGahern, Seamus Heaney and Anne Enright among them.
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Normally, all this evocation of historic glories would be followed by a lament for the august title’s sad decline in the age of the internet. Not a bit of it. The New Yorker is in rude financial health. It is, in fact, in much better shape commercially than it was for most of its existence, during which it was generally viewed by its owners as an adornment rather than a cash cow.
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Like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, The New Yorker is still big, but the landscape of magazines surrounding it has shrunk alarmingly in the 21st century. That decline has been acutely felt by the title’s owner, the once-great publishing empire Condé Nast, which has been engaged in a long, painful, tactical retreat as its stable of fashion and lifestyle glossies see their circulations and ad sales crumble away.
The New Yorker, by contrast, has built a loyal print and digital audience of 1.24 million paying subscribers. It has dabbled enthusiastically in new-media ventures, including podcasts, audio, radio, film and the very popular New Yorker Festival. Its digital archive is a trove of dazzling treasures. But it retains its commitment to the primacy of the written word and to elegant design that remains rooted in the principles and traditions of print.
There is surely a lesson there. The New Yorker’s success has been matched by other high-end, subscription-driven titles, such as the Atlantic and New York Review of Books in the United States and by the Economist and Spectator in the UK. Unfortunately, publishers in smaller markets such as Ireland can only dream of achieving similar scale or revenue, which is why we are unlikely to see the trend replicated here. Still, it is heartening that the predictions of so many media doomers that there would be no viable market for in-depth, high-quality writing and deep reporting have been proved wrong.
What may end up being a problem for The New Yorker is the turmoil at its parent company seeping down into its own operations. In a sympathetic profile piece for the similarly named but entirely separate New York Magazine, Charlotte Klein describes nervousness among staff after redundancies and page reductions last year. There are whispers about who might succeed David Remnick, the 66-year-old editor who has been in situ for more than a quarter of the magazine’s 100 years; its writers Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Say Nothing, and Evan Osnos, biographer of Joe Biden, are tipped as possible front runners.
In an article in the current edition surveying The New Yorker’s history, cheerfully headlined “Onward and Upward”, Remnick commits to continuing Ross’s original intention of publishing a comic weekly. “But we are particularly committed to the far richer publication that emerged over time,” he writes, “a journal of record and imagination, reportage and poetry, words and art, commentary on the moment and reflections on the age.”
We should all raise a glass to that.
