Greatest money pit in magazine history

How David Remnick has reinvigorated the New Yorker? “There was no one thing, just a matter of paying attention to expenses, focusing on building real circulation instead of giving away copies, subtracting some writers, adding others.”

During a lunch interview with the Financial Times (UK) Remnick, an editor-in-chief who managed to grow the New Yorker’s readership and helped to move its balance sheet from red to black, shares his views:

• About building a dream team in his newsroom: “You find the players to put on the field [as the New York Yankees’ legendary former manager Joe Torre kept saying] and you put them there and let them do what they do best.”
• About “existential crisis” that American newspapers fell in and magazines escaped: “I’ve had dinner with newspaper editors of all ranks, and the conversations sometimes feel like a suicide watch. (…) The best way to read a magazine is still on paper, but, for those for whom it is second nature to read online, I want to be there. I’m unwilling to make idiotic predictions about what’s going to be in print and what’s not going to be in print, I just don’t know. But I’m damned if I’m not going to be there.”
• About considerations to extend the New Yorker brand overseas: “The question is to what degree is The New Yorker so sui generis and American that it won’t translate into a successful foreign product. I don’t know but it’s something I want to find out.”

David Remnick has been the editor of The New Yorker magazine since 1998. He started his career as a reporter for the Washington Post. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for his book Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. (According to Wikipedia)

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