Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Media

Brand X
The name game
Welcome to the vicious world of corporate name-creation, where $75,000 buys you a suffix and competing shops slur each other over the virtues of Agilent and Avilant.
By Ruth Shalit
[11/30/99]

Alt
Attack of the holiday gift guides!
Annual shopping-spree extravaganzas turn otherwise respectable journalists into shills for Santa Mammon.
By Jenn Shreve
[11/19/99]

Media
Life's a scream
Advertising legend Jay Chiat talks about his new company, making ads work on the Web and the best commercials he's seen lately.
By Susan Lehman
[11/17/99]

Media
Don't cry for me, Gray Lady
After 55 years, Abe Rosenthal exits the New York Times, unquietly.
By Sean Elder
[11/12/99]

Alt
Gang land
Can the same entertainment media that have popularized gang culture be used to combat gang-related violence? Plus: Men who collect penis bones; capital punishments throughout human history.
By Jenn Shreve
[11/12/99]

Complete archives for Media

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

There are a lot of really great magazines right now. I think Walter is doing a great job with Time. I think the Weekly Standard is a very amusing magazine. The English Tattler is going through a great renaissance right now; I get that and am very happy to see my old magazine is doing such a great job. Business Week, I think, is a very good magazine. Art Cooper at GQ continues to astonish.

Are you interested in the Internet?

Salon and Slate, I tend to like them. I'm surprised that Slate doesn't have more readers at this point. I think it's very amusing indeed and always has witty stuff.

I have been impressed with the voices on the Web, with the way the individuality of the writers seem to come through so much more strongly than on the page. It's a much more intimate medium.

It has bolstered my desire to have intimacy on the page. I think that a Talk piece is a very intimate piece, and if I'm looking for something particular it's that, that sense of up-close, fresh, immediate connection with the reader.

Has the speed of the Internet or the way it serves narrow interests had any effect on the way you think about editing magazines?

The Web has increased the natural predilection I would have had anyway to continually look for depth and quality. The Web has speed and immediacy and quick take locked up -- you'd be a fool to try to compete with it. You can't compete with it. The only way a magazine can makes its mark, really, is with depth and intellectual muscularity.

What do you make of constant reports that there's no buzz about Talk?

It amuses me because they are obsessively writing about the fact that nobody writes about us. It just isn't correct.

We set a very high bar with the first issue, and I think that's the reason people are saying that. The first issue really surprised me -- I was amazed by it, I thought we'd sell half of what we sold. When it kind of went nuts, I think it set a very high bar, that's all.

How much news has the New York Times Magazine made in the last year? It's a terrific magazine but no one is saying, "This issue didn't have any buzz." It's just a damned good magazine, very well written with some very, very good articles in it. That's true here. This is a damned good magazine with some very, very good articles in it.

You're known for spending a lot of money on writers and have been said to have lost more money than anyone else in the business. Would Talk's prospects be improved with more money?

That is a grotesque piece of baggage that I will probably carry with me forever. It will be there in my obituary.

Vanity Fair made money in my editorship. I took over a magazine that had been a disaster, that had been losing millions. I took it from 200,000 circulation to 1.2 million. We started with 12 pages of advertising. Take a look at my last issue. There are 250 or some such enormous number of advertising pages. It was making between $3 and $5 million when I left. I took the magazine from disaster to profit.

It's much harder to take it from A to Z than to take it over now and take that $5 million profit and turn it into $15 or $20 million. I think it's doing great now and I'm delighted to see that it is. But the fact of the matter is I did leave a very, very solid financial and commercial success. So that isn't true, right?

At the New Yorker, I took over a magazine that was losing documented double-digit numbers. I brought the losses down while reinventing the brand. I re-created the magazine in terms of its new modernization and left losing it less money than when I took it over.

I was as heartbroken as anyone that the magazine never went to profit under me. It didn't go to profit, because, quite honestly, I'm not in charge of that front.

Much has been made of the bad deals Miramax and Talk have offered writers.

That's all rubbish, too. We deal with all the top agents. They are all making deals with us. The writers are happy to make deals with us. We're publishing very good authors, across the board. None of them are making what they feel are bad deals with us.

Talk is meant to be an American version of a European magazine like Paris Match or Stern. What makes you think that model makes sense for American readers?

I think a magazine that combines news and current affairs content with glamour with good writing and a little bit of a brainier twist is something of a European model. But I think that people here are ready for that. American readers are always ready for something good. It behooves us to make it good, to make it better.

Have you ever failed at anything before?

You win and lose every day, don't you? Some days I win, some days I lose. I certainly haven't had unbridled success. It's always been incredibly hard work. I don't feel I've had such a rosy path to the top.

I once heard you tell Charlie Rose you were thinking of setting up a film company with the New Yorker because so many of the articles published there were optioned or made into movies. Are you sorry you didn't do that?

I think the New Yorker was a lost business opportunity. The moment of opportunity may have passed now that the New Yorker is part of Condé Nast.

What have you liked best about the New Yorker since you left?

David Remnick has done a wonderful job of sustaining the writers who are such an incredible treasure trove, writers there that we spent eight years building up are some of the best writers in America. David Remnick has done a wonderful job of getting the best out of them.

Is there anything particular that you read that really impressed you?

The e-commerce piece was very good, the piece about the iVillage girl was very well done, I thought. I like Jeff Toobin always. His piece on [Kenneth] Starr was terrific. I'd like to have had that.

Are there any changes you regret having made there?

No. I didn't make enough. If I'd stayed, I would have had to go further. I spent too much time appeasing elements of the magazine that, now that I've left, I realize were really holding it back. The magazine has a great future, but the modernization process needs to continue. If I had stayed I would have pushed it further. Especially visually.

In retrospect, what was the worst Talk cover choice?

Frankly, I didn't focus on that. If I made a mistake, this was it. I have been consumed with the writing, the quality of the writing, attracting the writing. I made that my focus. I guess that's the legacy of the New Yorker, in my brain. I probably should have spent more time on [cover choices], and made that front burner. Now I am focused on that.

And what are you thinking?

Coming out of a weekly, I was interested in being more spontaneous with covers. I have realized that you can't do that with a monthly. You have to forgo that spontaneity, which is something that I regret. As a journalist I would like to be able to decide a week before we go to press who I think gives the right feeling for the cover.

With the celebrity culture being what it is, you can't decide to photograph a celebrity that late or kick them off the cover if a political person is, in fact, a much more Zeitgeist person, which sometimes happens. Sometimes it's not a movie star person at all that you want to put there. It could be something quite different. Sometimes something happens to a person that makes them clearly a great choice for a cover. In sports, or politics, or the record industry. With a monthly, though, you have to basically decide, well, I'm going to lock up my covers from now until next September and forgo that spontaneity because once [the celebrities who agree to be on the cover] have been photographed and locked in, that's it.

What, aside from celebrity culture, interests you about the national conversation?

Politics has become very, very interesting again. The whole churn between the private and the public has become a searing issue. The Internet has liberated so many energies and created so much speed. This has impacted unfavorably, strangely, on people's private lives because they have no time. There are more and more demands on people's lives. That's hell for the family. Questions about how we're living and how we're all coping with the machinery of change is, in fact, the most interesting thing about living today.

Do you have role models. Is there anyone in particular who has inspired you professionally?

I'm really interested in being able to do a magazine that's hot, if you like that word, but also good and fair. The pressure to create heat with unfairness and negativity is really huge; a fast way to get "buzz" is to trash a person. I feel proud that I have been able to create heat without doing that.

One of the things about being written about a lot yourself is that you start to see how incredibly reductive and ludicrous most journalism is about people. If you know people who are being written about, it's particularly agonizing, really.

Have you ever felt like slowing down and taking less of an interest in the here and now, the edgy, the hot?

Let's put it this way: I think this is my last magazine.

What's next?

At the end of this one, I hope to have built a great asset and a great magazine, and then I will melt into the European sunset.
salon.com | Dec. 2, 1999

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

  Get a printer-friendly version

  E-mail a friend about this article

  Backflip this article to find it again

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Search Salon