What Price Glory?

By Richard Lacayo

Under the round, silent shadow of William Shawn, editor in chief for 35 years, the New Yorker was urbane, literate and indifferent to the philistines. In short, it was intelligent. But by the time Shawn stepped down in 1987, two years after the magazine was purchased by media billionaire S.I. Newhouse, a good many of its pages were also subdued to the point of immobile. It was an atmosphere that Shawn's successor, Robert Gottlieb, did not do much to relieve. When Newhouse moved Tina Brown into the editor's job in 1992, it was for the plain purpose of making noise in the sanctuary.

Brown quickly refashioned the New Yorker in her own image--brainy, Anglophilic, profane and more than a little starstruck--which was probably a good match for most of the readers she was after. As former editor of Vanity Fair, she was schooled in the ways of Conde Nast Publications, the Newhouse family's high-luster group of magazines, which also include Vogue and GQ. She also understood that the New Yorker was different. Watching her try to blend the sacred and profane was one of the great journalistic pastimes of recent years. Her brain was a table-of-contents mosh pit: a place where a literary memoir mixed with a dispatch from Hollywood, followed by another from Paris--Adam Gopnik on French health clubs, for instance; then some Washington pages in which, say, Al Gore was pried open by Joe Klein; plus a hair-raising investigative piece on some wiggly strain of hepatitis; a dry, subtle poem by Louise Gluck; and a very readable short story--ideally one with a good shot of sex or a British name attached.

Granted, she put it all together in the service of buzz, the all-important chatter of readers, especially the ones in the New York-West Coast-Washington circuit. Yet Brown preserved in every issue a large core of thoughtful material. She brought on some conspicuously gifted writers, including David Remnick, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Anthony Lane and Steve Martin (yes, that Steve Martin). And the photographs that caused so much uproar when she first dropped them in, those big gray boulders of portraiture, hit the pages like dark meteors. Attention must be paid.

She also made the magazine unblushing about sex. Don't tell the Disney people now colonizing 42nd Street (the ones for whom Brown will soon be working), but that's New York, the city of bright, cogitating mammals. In some respects the sex also made the magazine more genuinely literary. It introduced the same erotic preoccupations and four-letter words that serious books had discovered decades ago. It may have helped that they were placed within a New Yorker that never took its eyes off London. British topics and bylines were everywhere. One of the most clucked-over pieces in any recent issue, a profile of a dominatrix, was the work of a distinguished British resident, Paul Theroux. Maybe sex just seems more estimable in English surroundings.

But in its very obsession with glamour and celebrity, Brown's magazine was also surprisingly square. The old New Yorker prided itself on resisting hype. Brown, whose mother was once Laurence Olivier's press agent, loves the Next Big Thing without reservation. Her New Yorker took a place at the overcrowded table of weeklies and monthlies already chewing over the same movies and celebrities and titans of industry.

All the same, Tina Brown got the thing talked about. Newsstand sales doubled during her years there. The trouble was that ad revenue didn't follow. In 1984, the year before Newhouse bought the New Yorker for $168 million, the magazine earned a modest but respectable $8 million. Circulation has climbed from 500,000 to more than 800,000 since then. But according to press reports, including a coolly murderous dissection in FORTUNE (owned by Time Inc.), Conde Nast (which is privately held, and so does not report its numbers) has lost around $175 million on the New Yorker since Newhouse took it on.

"The thing that's so distressing about this is, if Tina Brown can't make the New Yorker work, who can?" says Charles McGrath, editor of the New York Times Book Review. Is the red ink proof that there's no place in this world for a large-circulation magazine with a literary dimension? Even one that drops its pants? Or does it just mean that Conde Nast marketers didn't know what to do with their hot book? A lot of magazine industry analysts fault an ad-sales strategy that worked this way: boost circulation with rock-bottom subscriptions, then charge advertisers higher rates. But the jump in ad rates drove out some of the smaller advertisers that once filled the New Yorker's pages. And it hastened the migration of many advertisers to more specialized publications--magazines devoted to fashion, interior design, cigars, movies--where their ads could be targeted more directly to the readers likely to be interested in their products.

To make a long story short--something Tina Brown did often at the New Yorker--the magazine, which used to have an independent life within the Newhouse empire, is now to be absorbed within it, its ads sold alongside those of Vogue and Glamour. "The editor's job is to create a brilliant magazine," Brown said last week. "It's the publisher's job to sell advertising." The short story: I make the buzz; you make the bucks.

--With reporting by Harriet Barovick/New York

With reporting by Harriet Barovick/New York