Highbrow, Lowbrow, NoBrow: A Recent History of the New Yorker by John Seabrook March 1, 1999 As a young reader I got my idea of what culture was like from the pages of the New Yorker, which sat on my parents' coffee table along with other magazines like Holiday, Life, and Look. Culture was sophisticated and witty. Culture was elite, but it was also decent and quaint. Culture was high, something to aspire to. The New Yorker's famous editorial "we" suggested that there was a center to the culture, a perspective from which one could see all the useful things, and what one couldn't see was not so important. We cared passionately about the traditional arts‹ballet, classical music, drama, literature, painting and sculpture. We were quite interested in jazz, and we had learned to appreciate movies, thanks to Pauline Kael, but we were not much concerned with rock and roll, street style, or youth culture, per se‹and we certainly weren't interested in gangsta rap. Preserving the authority of that "we"‹the implicit claim that the kinds of distinctions and judgments practiced by the New Yorker were universal, and not narrowly elitist‹forced the magazine, over time, to keep an ever-greater share of popular culture out of its pages. We might not like rap, but as rap entered mainstream culture, we weren't able to comment knowledgeably on it, and we ended up seeming pretty out of it. In the old New Yorker a sentence was a sentence, and each took no more than a polite, passing interest in its neighbors. Facts were presented one after another, with an almost self-conscious lack of ornament. Fancy leads, precious writing, sociological jargon, academic theory, anything that was obviously intended to attract attention or to start an argument‹all were scrupulously scrubbed from the New Yorker's photograph-free text. Most important of all, in no way did the sentences attempt anything that might be called hype. The New Yorker subscriber could count on coming home and opening the magazine with at least something of the same privilege with which the rich man sauntered into his gentleman's club, knowing he was leaving the world of getting and spending at the door. For several generations, this was how the business of social advancement had worked in America: You made some money in one commercial enterprise or another, and then to solidify your position and distinguish yourself from the more recently wealthy, you cultivated a distaste for commercial culture. William Shawn's New Yorker had been almost perfectly in sync with this attitude, and this was partly what made the magazine so appealing to advertisers. Just as the Cadillac offered the quietest of rides to drivers, just as the Rolex watch was the ultimate in understated luxury, so the New Yorker offered a tasteful, discrete, elegant take on the affairs of the world, blissfully free from bawling, hollering pop culture outside its covers. There was some blarney involved in this attitude -- the New Yorker was after all a commercial cultural enterprise itself. But it wasn't all blarney. Resisting the dumbing down of American culture through tacky popular entertainments, and keeping the culture that the magazine provided to its readers free of hype or buzz was a primary source of the old New Yorker's moral authority. That authority was derived from William Shawn, the editor of the New Yorker from 1952 to 1986. Shawn's editorial philosophy was later expressed in the April 22, 1985, Comment he wrote after S.I. Newhouse bought the New Yorker for $168 million from Peter Fleischmann, whose father, Raoul, had started the magazine with Harold Ross in 1925. "We have never published anything in order to sell magazines," he wrote, "to cause a sensation, to be controversial, to be popular or fashionable, to be 'successful.'" Shawn's words‹barely a decade old‹seemed incredible now. How could one possibly run a magazine that way? And a very "successful" magazine at that? In 1987, after five years of writing reviews and journalism for other magazines, I sent a couple of pieces to Robert Gottlieb, then the editor of the New Yorker. About a week later, to my shock, Gottlieb called me and asked me to come see him at his office. The memory of this meeting, which took place in the old New Yorker building, across 43rd Street from the present offices, remained in my mind like a cherished postcard from a time that now seems as vanished as the world of medieval courtly love. On the basis of two clippings and a one-page letter I had sent him proposing to write a story on a modern gold-mining bonanza taking place in a small Nevada town, Gottlieb offered to fund me to go out west for as long as I thought necessary, and take a crack at writing the piece I wanted to write, for which he would pay me regardless of whether the magazine published it. "About how long a piece?" I managed to ask. "Any length you'd like," Gottlieb said. "Whatever you think the piece needs to be successful journalism." Gottlieb, formerly the editor-in-chief of Alfred A. Knopf, had been hired by S.I. Newhouse to replace Shawn­­two years after Newhouse pledged he would keep Shawn as editor for as long as Shawn wanted to remain. Gottlieb had the difficult job of somehow caretending Shawn's saint-like courtesy toward writers while, at the same time, making the magazine his own. He paid homage to Shawn's famous disdain for prop culture by emulating it to a certain degree, but brought he brought to this attitude the style of camp -- that ingenious solution to the problem of status in a world of no accepted hierarchy. Camp was a way having it both ways: hierarchy and no hierarchy, bringing a highbrow connoisseurship to such lowbrow pleasures as Hollywood divas, Miami Beach, and women's handbags, all of which Gottlieb devoted the same kind of attention that he brought to his more conventional highbrow love of the ballet. Gottlieb's way of pronouncing the word journalism, for example‹"journalism"‹had a note of nostalgie de la boue in it, as though one were doing something deliciously lowbrow in even discussing journalism. I suggested that 40,000 words might be necessary to convey the complete gold mining story in all its complexity and flesh out the many quirky characters I was apt to meet in my eccentric travels. "Great, that would be a two-part article," Gottlieb responded cheerfully. I asked about the deadline. At the other places I had been writing, deadlines were very much on editors' minds. "Oh, we don't have deadlines around here," Gottlieb said, frowning slightly, as if a faux pas had been committed, although his camp manner made it hard to tell if he was being serious. "Work on it until you feel it's finished," he went on, "then we'll take a look." Risking an even greater faux pas, I asked, "And how much will I get paid?" "A lot," Gottlieb said. He didn't say how much: just "a lot." If I needed money before I finished the piece I was to call the managing editor, Sheilah McGrath. "It's spelled McGrath but it's said 'mac-graw.'" Vague on all the usually important matters, Gottlieb was very precise on this point. And that was all. I went away, struggled, despaired, and missed my self- imposed deadline. Finally, I wrote Gottlieb a letter explaining myself and asking for more time and money, which was swiftly answered with a phone call from Bob who told me to call Sheilah McGrath. ("Now remember, it's spelled McGrath but pronounced. . . .") Eventually I produced a 20,000-word piece, and in less than a week Gottlieb called to accept it. In good time it was set up in type, meticulously fact-checked, beautifully edited, and published at something like 18,000 words. It all happened just the way it was supposed to happen at the New Yorker. And that was the last time it ever happened that way for me. In fact I had arrived at the magazine just in time to see the remains of the old New Yorker literally packed into boxes and carried past my office door and out into the street. The old New Yorker proved to be an unmarketable commodity. It had begun losing money in the last year of Shawn's editorship, and those losses had grown worse under Gottlieb. The reason why the New Yorker no longer made money was the subject of much debate, inside and outside the editorial offices. The editors and writers tended to blame it on the business people, who worked on a different floor. Some of the older writers, Shawn loyalists, felt that the magazine began losing money because it started trying to make money‹ that the New Yorker's financial woes were the fault of its new owner, S.I. Newhouse, the publisher of such highly successful magazines as Vogue, GQ, and Vanity Fair. Certainly Newhouse had brought a much more aggressive style of doing business to the magazine. His strategy for "growing the brand," implemented by Steve Florio, the former publisher of GQ and now the president of Newhouse's magazine company, Advance Publications, was to raise the magazine's circulation base from 300,000 to 800,000 through expensive mailings, cheap subscription rates, and energetic publicity. Once the circulation went up, the magazine raised the rates it charged advertisers. This strategy had made GQ a success, but it did not prove successful for the New Yorker. The smaller advertisers, no longer able to afford the rates that Florio's big-circulation magazine now commanded, dropped out, while the big advertisers had trouble understanding how the New Yorker could help sell their Cadillacs and Rolexs any better than GQ or Fortune or Vanity Fair. The old New Yorker had also traded on its New York-based cachet. The same reason people like my parents traveled to New York to shop at Saks or Bloomingdale's made them "take" the New Yorker: it offered the kind of merchandise you couldn't get anywhere else. But in the eighties and nineties, many of those formerly exclusive New York brands became nationwide‹today one can go to a Saks in the local mall. As that happened, the New Yorker's regional appeal to those old advertisers diminished. The obvious solution was to make the New Yorker a nationwide brand too‹a magazine of "quality," that advertisers who wanted to project an image of quality should want to invest in. But that hadn't happened, yet. It appeared that what the writers and editors meant by quality and what Bloomingdale's meant by quality were not the same thing. But the magazine's problems went beyond the business strategy and increased competition from other media, and the fact that the younger readers, the ones the advertisers wanted to reach, didn't read long articles about foreign affairs, bees or geology, and if they did they were part of the "churn," while the old loyalists were alienated by the magazine's effort to reach the twenty-nine-year-old smart people that the advertisers wanted to reach. The very culture was changing. That serene, knowable middle ground staked out by the magazines on my parents' coffee table‹the culture that the New Yorker's editorial "we" kept watch over by night so that its subscribers could sleep soundly‹was disappearing, and in its place was a landscape of niches and categories. Because the New Yorker was not a men's magazine, nor a shelter magazine, nor a health magazine, nor a literary magazine, nor a news magazine, nor a sports magazine‹it was all those things‹it had a hard time fitting into this fragmented marketplace. The New Yorker was the last of the great middlebrow magazines left, but the middle had disappeared, and with it had gone whatever status being in the middle would get you. I heard readers say, "It's a great magazine, but I don't get it anymore, because it made me feel too guilty to see it sitting there and not read it." Thus, in striving to fulfill its old mission‹to report on the issues of the day with moral seriousness‹the New Yorker, instead of making people feel grateful or enlightened, made them feel guilty, because they didn't have the time or the interest to read it. By 1992, with the losses at the New Yorker mounting, Newhouse‹faced with the prospect of the magazine's drifting into oblivion‹replaced Gottlieb with Tina Brown, the well-known editor who had made a commercial success of Vanity Fair. Being British, Brown could be in the middle of the culture without appearing to be a middlebrow. Brown's challenge was somehow to let commercial culture into the magazine's pages, without diminishing the status satisfaction that the old New Yorker had offered its readers by keeping commercial culture out. Some of the old New Yorker writers predictably dismissed Brown as a lowbrow‹Jamaica Kincaid, William Shawn's daughter-in-law, called Brown a "trashpig" in the New York Observer. But while Brown tastes may have been low by Shawn's standards, she brought energy, zest, and argument to the magazine, and she banished cant and pretense from its pages. She was egalitarian in an way an American could not afford to be: in all the ways that a market-oriented system is more democratic than a standards-oriented system, so was Brown. Under the canopy of "synergy" she made the New Yorker part of the world movers and shakers in the 90's. She did away with pieces on the old cultural elite and replaced them with pieces on the new media elite. She broke decisively from the old New Yorker tradition of genteel commentary on out-of-the-way places and things, and dragged the magazine kicking and screaming into the yellow tornado light of fashion, money, power, sex, and celebrity that is the color of Buzz. Sometimes Brown seemed to go too far in remaking the old New Yorker. Stung by the snobbery she encountered from some old New Yorker writers (everyone knows the English can be fearful snobs about Americans, but one gets fewer opportunities to see how snobbish the Americans can be about the English) Brown published things in the magazine that seemed mainly calculated to shock her antagonists: gratuitous profanity, nudity (at one point the word processing department had a pool going to guess how many times a woman's nipple would appear in the magazine each week), and provocative covers, such as Art Spiegelman's drawing of a black woman and Hasidic man kissing during the Crown Heights crisis in Brooklyn, or his Easter Bunny crucified against an IRS form (although even Brown balked at publishing as a Christmas cover his street-corner Santa Claus urinating on the sidewalk). Articles became much shorter, their deadlines were firm, and their publication was pegged to other events within commercial culture. Doing stories that were topical, trying to get the public's attention, trying to sell magazines‹all of which Shawn had gone out of his way to avoid‹ became the norm. The virtue that Shawn had made of resisting the commercial culture was replaced by the virtue of buzz. At the old New Yorker, quirky was good because it defied categorization. At the new New Yorker quirky was bad for the same reason. Quirky was something that didn't fit a marketing category. In marketing terms, a quirky subject was a "tweener." It was fatally quirky. Shawn's auteur system, under which the writers appeared to have complete freedom, subject only to Shawn's own taste (which could be a lot more restrictive than it seemed), was replaced by a kind of Hollywood studio system, under which the writers worked in collaboration with the editors, who functioned more like producers‹middlemen between the creative and the commercial processes. As writers, we were free from any one individual's taste; or rather, we were subject to Brown's taste, but that was never fixed; it fluctuated in response to certain market forces. More than forty of the old New Yorker writers were dismissed from this new magazine. Some had burned out under Shawn and Gottlieb, others were still very good but could not adapt to the new studio system. I remained, and, with not enough remorse, moved into an old writer's now vacant office. Though I tried, I could not find the market-oriented strictures of the new New Yorker without literary benefit. The new focus‹the need to be specific and clear about what you were looking for, instead of ranging around until you found something that struck your fancy‹was a useful discipline, like rhyme or meter, in which to harness your thoughts. An unearned note of nostalgia had crept easily into the work I did for the old New Yorker. At the new New Yorker, there was no time for nostalgia. The truth was, both the auteur and the studio systems had their relative freedoms and restraints. The situation at the new New Yorker was not unlike that in the old movie industry as described by Thomas Schatz, the author of The Genius of the System, a book that argues that movies made in the thirties and forties, when the artists were controlled by the suits, were just as good as the movies made in the later auteur period, when the artists had creative independence. The really essential question‹whether one was more or less independent as a writer under Brown's studio system than under Shawn's auteur system‹was not as simple as it appeared. On the one hand, the kind of stories I was doing now were much more dependent on market-oriented conditions and on a whole complex of tiny moral compromises that make up the space between culture and marketing. I had recently cashed the first of my monthly stipend checks, and although in theory I could refuse any one story (which helped me to preserve the idea of my "independence"), in practice I felt much more dependent than I would have had I not taken the money. But on the other hand, what Shawn called independence‹the church-and-state separation of culture and marketing‹was not necessarily real independence either. Real independence would involve controlling both the artistic and the commercial sides of the operation. Partly because Shawn had stayed so chaste of any business dealings at the old New Yorker, it was possible for Peter Fleischmann to sell the magazine to S.I. Newhouse without even consulting Shawn, as he did in 1985, and then for Newhouse, who had promised on buying the magazine to keep Shawn on as editor, to fire him in 1986. Brown proved herself to be a genius at getting attention for the New Yorker. She put out a Quality product for a mass audience -- the Frazier of the newsstands. But Brown could never make the advertisers pay enough for all the attention the magazine received. It was a curious thing: the circulation was way up, the newsstand sales were great, the buzz was great‹thick clouds of it settled on the editorial floors for days at a time‹but the ads still didn't sell. Had the magazine actually been a TV show like Frazier, its high ratings which would have translated more or less directly into ad revenues. But the magazine business doesn't work quite the same way. Advertisers buy image as well as circulation and newsstand sales. The old New Yorker' appeal to advertisers was heavily based on the distinction between elite and pop culture that the magazine promoted. Maintaining that distinction was also what mad the New Yorker unpopular. But the new New Yorker, in becoming popular, had lost that too-rich-to-care-about-money allure it held for advertisers. Brown tried to create a new elite, an elite of pop culture tastemakers, but she never quite succeeded. the new media elite did not get it back. Once you took that distinction away, the New Yorker became just another media buy. A brilliant editor in many ways-- her husband Harry Evans, the former head of Random House, once said she was as "cunning as a rat" -- Brown seemed to underestimate the degree to which Americans used the distinction between elite and pop culture promoted by the old New Yorker to help define their own status. Inviting Roseanne Barr to consult on a special women's issue of the magazine, for example, as Brown did in 1995, may or may not have been a good idea, but it confused a lot of readers who needed to keep the distinction between the New Yorker and Roseanne Barr straight in order to preserve their own place in the sociocultural hierarchy. Last July, frustrated with repeated meddling from the business side of the magazine, Brown quit to go to work for Miramax, maker of up-market commercial movies like The English Patient and Shakespeare in Love. From what I gather, she believed she will have more creative independence at a Disney-owned company­­where William Shawn's notions of independence have never been an issue, and where culture and marketing are as cozy as Mickey and Minnie. And so, whither the new new New Yorker? Can it ever be profitable again, or will it exist, if at all, as an act of patronage by Si Newhouse, its debts paid for by profitable magazines like Vogue and Vanity Fair? The Borders and Barnes and Nobles are full of readers; the universities are turning out more graduates than ever before; good books like Cold Mountain and Angela's Ashes top the bestseller lists -- surely the New Yorker can find readers from among these throngs? Or maybe not.... My ideal New Yorker is a synthesis of the old and new magazines. Now that the new New Yorker is more relevant to today's reader, maybe it can learn some integrity from the old New Yorker. Not a new editorial "we," but a new set of standards, and a sense that there are certain things the magazine won't do for attention. I hope you'll keep reading. Copyright 1999. John Seabrook. All rights reserved. The text above is an exerpt from a forthcoming book "NoBrow: The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture," to be published in February 2000 by Knopf.