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 INTERVIEW Talk of the Town David Remnick, The New Yorker's new editor, comes to Portland to discuss the magazine's past and present. BY JAMES McQUILLEN |
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In Susan Moeller's recent book Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death, Associated Press international editor Tom Kent gives an example of the kind of writing he thinks journalists need to do in order to make people care about the news. "Have you ever picked up The New Yorker, an old New Yorker, and found a page and a half about how ball bearings are made, which you'd never read--but it's so well done that you're reading it?" Kent is not alone in holding up The New Yorker as the model of a great magazine, but his recognition of the weekly's compelling prose illustrates another element of the venerable magazine's reputation: an aloof, high-minded belief in the supremacy of good writing over topicality. That's the way it used to be, at least; the magazine underwent significant changes (for the worse, many say) during the six-year editorship of Tina Brown, and its many devoted readers are eagerly waiting to see how it will change again under its new editor, former Washington Post reporter David Remnick. Portland Arts and Lectures brought Remnick to Portland last Tuesday. When I met him at the Heathman Hotel, I noted that he wasn't listening to the testimony, then clogging the airwaves, before the House Judiciary Committee in the Lewinsky affair. He might have been expected to--like virtually every news organization in the country, after all, The New Yorker has weighed in repeatedly on the story. "We've done a lot, and I'm proud of what we've done," he says of the magazine's treatment of the scandal. "I think it's a big deal." But has obsessive coverage crowded out other stories equally, if not more, worthy of attention? "It doesn't crowd out anything," replies Remnick. "It's a very dangerous situation demanding our attention." The New Yorker has published plenty of reporting in its nearly 75 years, from John Hersey on Hiroshima to Mark Danner on El Salvador to Philip Gourevitch on Rwanda. But it has been at least as likely, especially under Tina Brown's predecessors Robert Gottlieb and William Shawn, to print pieces such as those by John McPhee on oranges, canoes and geology. It now has a newsman at the helm, however, and for him, other newsmagazines are the competition. "In a place like Portland, if you get the magazine on Thursday, that concerns me a little bit, because you probably get Newsweek or Time on Monday or Tuesday," Remnick says. But he thinks the magazine can still address news regardless of when and where it comes out. "A good example is [a story about] Monica Lewinsky. Is that topical? Yes. Can it be read in two weeks with some pleasure and insight? Yes. That's a big deal to me. If it's disposable as tissue, I'm not interested." "The New Yorker was a kind of fizzy, sophisticated Manhattan comic weekly when it began," he explains, "and it evolved and evolved and evolved, so that we were printing pieces like James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time. Its role is first and foremost to present beautiful, extraordinary writing every week. Its role is also to be a part of its time. It's not a museum. It should not smell of must." Its increasing topicality is largely the legacy of Brown, under whose controversial tenure the magazine published not only superb reporting by writers such as Danner, Gourevitch and Remnick himself, but also thousands and thousands of words on the O.J. Simpson case and stupefyingly dull entertainment- and communications-industry pieces by the likes of Ken Auletta and Peter J. Boyer--pieces that make ball-bearing manufacture seem thrilling by comparison. But if Brown's detractors--and they are legion--are looking to David Remnick to distance himself from her, they will be disappointed. "Beware of the stereotype of Tina Brown," Remnick says. "I am proud of what Tina did--I think she had enormous courage to deal with sanctimony.... Change is difficult to take on board. I can't publish James Thurber anymore. He dead."
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