3.13/The Lived Worlds/The Magazine

Print Journalism's Existential Crisis, 1989–2001

The Rate Base

Spy stopped publishing in the spring of 1994, eight years after it had made a business of mocking the people who owned New York. The magazine had launched in October 1986 under Kurt Andersen and Graydon Carter, with Thomas L. Phillips Jr. as its publisher, and it had done something no Manhattan monthly had tried: it took the city’s power culture as its subject rather than its audience.¹ Andersen supplied the prose — precise, aggressive, reported — and Carter the visual sense and the social map of who was worth puncturing. Its beat, in Andersen’s description, was “culture and politics and the media and the rich and powerful and unaccountable in New York and Hollywood,” and its house style was satirical but forensic: the jokes were backed by actual reporting, which was what made them land. The recurring features entered the language. “Separated at Birth” ran celebrity look-alikes side by side. A standing item pinned Donald Trump as a “short-fingered vulgarian” and tracked, issue by issue, his attempts to correct the record on the length of his fingers.

To be a Spy target in the late 1980s was a specific social injury. The magazine was not the tabloids; it was read and respected by the same sophisticated people it held in contempt, which made its contempt worse than any tabloid’s could be. Its subjects protested, and the protest became the next item. The feedback loop was part of the product.

Andersen and Carter sold the magazine in 1991 to the financier Johnny Pigozzi and the advertising executive Charles Saatchi.² Carter left the following year for Vanity Fair; Andersen left in early 1993. Without its founders the magazine lost the particular intelligence that had made its cruelty precise rather than merely mean. By early 1994 it was losing money and could not find a buyer; it suspended publication with the March–April issue, and though a new owner revived the title that summer and kept a diminished version alive until 1998, the magazine that had mattered was already over.¹ The business read the failure as a verdict on a model. Satirical intelligence could not hold an advertising base, because luxury brands would not buy pages in a magazine that mocked their customers; the sharpness that made the magazine had capped the revenue that might have kept it. The formula that had worked in the boom of the late 1980s did not survive the recession that followed. And a magazine’s identity, the failure suggested a second time, was inseparable from the specific people who made it — a lesson the decade repeated. Its former staff understood all of it at once.

The Appointment

The single editorial event the business discussed longest arrived on July 1, 1992, when Condé Nast named Tina Brown editor of The New Yorker.³ She was the fourth editor in the magazine’s sixty-seven-year history and the first woman to hold the position. The New Yorker had been made by Harold Ross and then by William Shawn into a magazine that was, by design, not a glossy: long pieces, drawn covers, unsigned cartoons, a relationship with its readers built on patience and a settled disdain for the commercial. Brown had spent the previous eight years turning Vanity Fair into the most glamorous magazine in America — celebrity-driven, visually spectacular, and profitable. Her predecessor, Robert Gottlieb, was asked to step aside by the owner, Si Newhouse, over what the company called “conceptual differences” about the magazine’s future.

The changes arrived within months. Brown put photographs on a cover that had carried only art; an Edward Sorel cover in the autumn of 1992 signaled the turn, and the Valentine’s issue of February 1993 ran an Art Spiegelman cover of a Hasidic man kissing a Black woman, a comment on the Crown Heights tensions, which produced the kind of national controversy that now functioned as strategy rather than accident.³ The long Shawn-era pieces were compressed. Popular culture, which the old New Yorker had held itself too high to cover directly, became fair material. Brown brought in David Remnick, Malcolm Gladwell, Anthony Lane, Jane Mayer, and Jeffrey Toobin, and she let some seventy-nine staff members go.

The reaction was vocal and, in places, permanent. George Trow, who had written for the magazine for nearly three decades, resigned in protest, accusing Brown of “kissing the ass of celebrity”; the phrase circulated through the business within the week. Brown, unmoved, replied that she was “notionally distraught” at a defection by a man who, as she noted, never actually wrote anything.³ The division the exchange named did not close. Newsstand sales rose steeply under Brown — by well over half — and the magazine collected National Magazine Awards and Overseas Press Club citations across her tenure. She left in 1998, and Remnick succeeded her. The argument she provoked outlasted her and attached itself to every prestige title in the city: whether she had saved the magazine, or saved it by destroying what it was, and whether those were, in the end, the same sentence.

The Monoculture

When Brown vacated Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter took it, in the same month of the same summer. He had been displaced from Spy by the 1991 sale and had passed briefly through the New York Observer before Newhouse handed him the title. Carter kept Brown’s formula — celebrity covers braced against serious investigative pieces — and ran it at a register of his own. He built the magazine’s Hollywood issue into the defining spring statement about the film business, and in 1994, after the death of the agent Irving Lazar, who had hosted the industry’s definitive Oscar-night dinner, Carter started the Vanity Fair Oscar party, which became the most exclusive event of the ceremony within two years.² Annie Leibovitz’s portraits set the magazine’s look. A recurring feature, the New Establishment, tracked the emerging technology and media money alongside the older cultural aristocracy.

The concentration behind the two titles was extraordinary. Newhouse’s Condé Nast held, at its 1990s peak, Vogue under Anna Wintour, Vanity Fair under Carter, The New Yorker under Brown and then Remnick, along with GQ, Glamour, Self, Allure, Architectural Digest, Bon Appétit, House & Garden, and Mademoiselle. Alexander Liberman, the editorial director who sat above them all, had held that chair for decades and outlasted every editor beneath him, the single aesthetic authority the titles shared. The economics were as concentrated as the mastheads. The company ran its prestige money-losers — The New Yorker most conspicuously — on the profits of its commercial performers, a cross-subsidy that required an owner with private wealth and a personal appetite for prestige, and competitors could not copy the model because they had no Newhouse behind it. When the company moved to 4 Times Square in 1999, the new building carried a cafeteria designed by Frank Gehry, and the editorial director maintained that its curved mirrors had been set to make the staff look thinner.³ For a general-interest magazine outside the empire, Condé Nast was a fixed point on the horizon — model, competitor, and caricature at once — against which its own decisions were measured constantly.

The Closures and the Invasion

The losses were not confined to the small and the satirical. New York Newsday had launched a city edition in 1985 as a deliberate third path: more liberal than the Times, more designed and more serious than the tabloids, cheaper than any of them, and stronger on the outer-borough stories the Times treated as foreign coverage.⁴ At its peak around 1990, when the Daily News strike sent readers looking for a substitute, its circulation reached roughly 300,000, and in ten years it won three Pulitzer Prizes. Its corporate parent, Times Mirror, wanted richer margins than it produced; the paper had cost the company something on the order of $100 million over its life, and its circulation had slipped toward 230,000 by the middle of 1995. On July 16, 1995, Times Mirror closed it, and roughly 750 people lost their jobs in a single announcement.⁴ In its exact niche — the serious, visually intelligent, affordable city paper — nothing replaced it; the tabloids stayed tabloids and the Times stayed the Times, and the middle ground disappeared. One trade account called it a paper “shut down before its prime.”⁵ Magazine people had read it for its arts pages and its coverage of city government, and its closure registered as a fact about print itself: even a well-funded, editorially ambitious operation could be switched off if the margin was wrong.

The next year’s threat came from the opposite direction. Maxim brought the British “lad mag” to the United States on April 1, 1997, published by Felix Dennis’s Dennis Publishing — semi-clothed women on the cover, service journalism about cars and gadgets, and a studied refusal of seriousness pitched directly at the earnestness of GQ.⁶ It launched at a modest circulation and became one of the fastest-growing magazines in the country’s history, passing 2.5 million within about four years — more than GQ, more than Esquire. The established men’s titles held the formula in contempt — New York media, one account had it, “hated that Maxim forced them to change their covers, forced them to create brighter, more colorful layouts” — and then accommodated it anyway: GQ brightened its covers and its layouts, Esquire repositioned, and the accommodation proved the more honest of the two responses.⁶ The lad-mag aesthetic — women as cover objects, as service copy, as background — carried past the men’s shelf and into the culture of the offices that competed with it, and shaped what those offices counted as serious and how the women working inside them were weighed.

The Predator That Paid

A magazine of the period ran on two revenue streams: subscriptions, reliable and cheap per copy, and advertising, larger and moving with circulation. The relationship was circular — circulation drew advertisers, advertising funded the editorial that held circulation — and the metric that governed it was the cost per thousand readers an advertiser paid, which a prestige title with a high-income readership could set well above a mass-market one. The recession of 1990–91 broke the pattern for the first time since the 1970s: ad pages across the major titles fell sharply, staffs were cut, salaries frozen, and freelance budgets reduced before anything else. The recovery came back slowly across the following three years.

Then the money returned from an unexpected quarter. Through the second half of the decade, technology companies flush with venture capital advertised heavily, and not only in the technology titles. Wired was the most direct beneficiary, at once the ideological home of the new culture and its natural advertising vehicle, but the general-interest magazines shared in the windfall and carried more advertising than they ever had. The boom produced a comfortable illusion, that the internet was a partner to the magazine rather than its successor. The irony was legible even at the time to anyone who cared to read it: the business whose predator was the internet was, for a few years, being fed by internet money. The web’s own advertising stayed small against print. In October 1994 HotWired, the online arm of Wired, sold what is generally counted the first banner advertisement — AT&T paid about $30,000 for a placement of a few months.⁷ Internet advertising for all of 1996 came to about $267 million — a real sum, and still small beside print.⁸ The trade press was discussing the internet as a competitor by 1996 and 1997, but the dominant response was not alarm; it was reasoning. The web was a companion, not a replacement. It suited breaking news, not the long feature. Readers would go on wanting the object in the hand. Each of these was defensible in 1997 and harder to hold by 2001.

The newsstand carried a disproportionate weight in that arithmetic. It was rarely the majority of a title’s circulation, but it was the visible test of whether a magazine could hold attention in a contested public space, and its copies earned more per unit than discounted subscriptions did. Through the decade, covers with a face outsold covers without one in most categories, which put a standing pressure on every editor who wanted to run a painting or an idea instead. The death of Princess Diana on August 31, 1997, produced one of the decade’s largest newsstand events; the commemorative issues sold in volumes that confirmed, against every argument about serious journalism, that a celebrity death was the strongest-selling category the business had. For a magazine that defined itself against the face on the cover, whether to publish a Diana issue at all was a real question, and how an editor answered it said what the magazine believed it was. By the end of the decade the celebrity had grown so dominant at the newsstand that titles without a franchise in it were pushed out of the market’s attention, and the apparatus around the celebrity cover — the publicists, the contracted photographers, the negotiated access, the subject’s right to approve the image — had become an infrastructure a general-interest magazine could join or resist but no longer ignore.

What the Business Read About Itself

The business conducted its self-analysis in its own trade press, and read it the way a profession reads its journals. Folio:, the trade’s own monthly, was the acknowledged record of the business — circulation marketing, production economics, mergers, and the movements of the senior editorial class — and it ranked the major titles each year and judged the industry’s awards for editorial and design. Advertising Age tracked the numbers beneath the culture: ad-page counts, the rates, the accounts won and lost, the agency moves that explained why some editors kept their jobs and others did not. Keith Kelly’s media column in the New York Post was the gossip layer, read at breakfast by anyone who needed to know who was up and who was down that week, and it ran often enough to keep the anxiety fresh. The trade infrastructure was not itself immune: Inside Media, one of the smaller trade titles, folded in 1997, an early casualty of the same force it had been trying to explain.⁹

The genuinely new competition came from the web, and it was credible in a way the business had not expected. Salon launched in November 1995, founded by David Talbot with former San Francisco Examiner staff.¹⁰ Slate followed the next year with Microsoft’s money behind it,¹¹ and between them they established that original journalism, written by real writers, could be published online. Wired had arrived first, in January 1993, its early copies handed out at the Macworld trade show, and it was read at once as a signal running two ways. The New York Times called it “the totem of a major cultural movement.”¹² The digital culture it covered was real and commercially alive as a subject, and the reader it spoke to — future-facing, impatient with the past — was a reader who might not come to a general-interest monthly for anything at all. Wired’s design, dense and overwhelming and hyperactive, was its own kind of argument, staking a claim to visual energy at the moment the established magazines were most identified with restraint. The people who made those magazines read all of it — in the trades, in the gossip column, over lunch — and watched their own standing in the business rise and fall by the week, without the power to change where any of it was going.