Word: yorkerism
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...Gottlieb a rich settlement and allowed him to step down under cover of a plausible (and largely true) statement citing "conceptual differences that ((Si and I)) have been unable to resolve." But there was no mistaking the boldness of Newhouse's double gamble. Besides matching Brown with the New Yorker, he entrusted Vanity Fair to Graydon Carter, 42, former editor of the weekly New York Observer and a founding editor of Spy magazine, who professed himself to be "modestly confident and modestly terrified...
There was also no mistaking the feverish, often mordant speculation about what Brown would do to shake up the New Yorker. When Brown announced her departure to a devoted Vanity Fair staff, she dissolved in tears; but as she prepared to travel the three blocks to the New Yorker offices to meet her new editing cadre, she fretted privately, "They're going to hate me." She did what she could to reassure them, pledging that "the New Yorker will not be Vanity Fair...
...every third or fourth issue" -- Brown says it "will be cerebral but more relevant, timely. I want it to have an edge, to be irreverent at times. And I hope to encourage wit." Brown insists, however, that the magazine's characteristic musing, whimsical streak will not disappear. "The New Yorker must always have the ruminative, the eccentric piece." How about photography, that heresy to true New Yorker believers? Yes, occasionally -- but not as illustration; and no color. (For what it is worth, before the week was out Brown had met with celebrated photographer Richard Avedon...
Brown is keenly aware that her boss brings more than a bottom-line interest to her new assignment. Newhouse "always has been a passionate reader" of the New Yorker, she says. "It bothers him when he asks people if they've read a piece and they say no. He feels, 'Why haven't they read it?' I think what concerns him is the notion that perhaps another generation won't read...
Meanwhile, what concerns old hands at the New Yorker is whether another generation will recognize it. "In the past five years," maintains a key editor, "we have simply witnessed the twitching of the corpse. Now the body is really dead." The staff's waggish valedictory for the magazine as they have known it -- "Si-yonara" -- shows a clear awareness of who is really shaping the changes that lie ahead. As one of them says, "What we've learned is that when you're as rich and powerful as Si Newhouse, you can do exactly what you want...