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Introduction

John Gregory Dunne began his Delacorte lecture on February 14, 2003,
by observing that “in general, it is bad business for writers to talk about
writing. William Faulkner once said that a writer’s obituary should
read, ‘he wrote the books, and then he died.’ ”
Dunne died before the year was out, but as you will see from his talk,
at least as far as his meditation on the writer’s voice was concerned, he
was wrong. No point in summarizing what he had to say here, because
a) his nuanced, careful prose does not easily lend itself to paraphrase;
and b) you can turn to page 1 and read it for yourself. Nevertheless, as a
preview of coming attractions, we can conceive of no better prelude to
this collection of ruminations on magazine journalism than Dunne’s
observation that “the fact of the matter is that as you get older, you will
discover that the singer is more important than the song. If you do mag-
azine journalism, ‘why’ ultimately matters as much as or even more
than ‘who,’ ‘what,’ ‘where,’ ‘when,’ and ‘how.’ And not so much ‘why’ as a
meditation on ‘why.’ Or a contemplation on ‘how’ and ‘who.’ ”
The lectures that follow are part of a series originally aimed at stu-
dents at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism who
have chosen to concentrate on magazines. Their purpose: to provide

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insight into the world of magazines by way of the perspectives of those

who write, publish, edit, and design them.
This is not a how-to book, but it is, in many respects, a how-to-think-
about-it book. At the loftiest level, one might think of magazines as what
Francis Bacon, the philosopher, who helped clarify the difference be-
tween analytic (deductive) and inductive reasoning, meant when he re-
ferred to “the middle axiom.” As Bacon saw it, analytic reasoning starts
at the highest level of abstraction, whereas inductive reasoning pro-
ceeds from the bottom up. Notwithstanding journals of opinion (like
The Nation and National Review) or magazines of ideas (like Harper ’s
and The Atlantic), magazines as a genre do not specialize in abstract gen-
eralities; nor, at the other extreme, do they merely present raw, un-
digested experience. Rather, their comparative advantage is in dealing
with the in-between or netherworld—the middle region, inhabited, ac-
cording to Bacon, by “the solid and living axioms on which depend the
affairs and the fortunes of men.”
As the talks below demonstrate, magazines as a class, be they maga-
zines of ideas, journals of opinion, newsweeklies, or niche publications
about matters culinary, athletic, sexual, or what have you, by definition
reflect the values and tensions of the culture and society they help to de-
fine. And the crazy quilt of perspectives and backgrounds represented
by those whose thoughts appear below help explain why magazines and
the people who run them are still, and perhaps always will be, in the
middle of their journey.
For example, Bob Gottlieb, who had served as editor-in-chief of
Alfred A. Knopf, one of America’s most distinguished book publishing
enterprises, before he became the first post–William Shawn editor of
The New Yorker, one of America’s most distinguished magazines, pro-
vides a unique perspective on the job of magazine editor by looking at it
through a book publisher’s lens:

You are there to keep the writer happy and feeling that he or she is
protected . . . which means they have to believe that their editor . . .
understands their work, sympathizes with their work, and is on

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their wavelength. They must believe that the editor can make the
book not other than what it is, but better than what it is. . . . When
you’re the editor-in-chief of a magazine . . . it’s opposite. You are
the living god. You are not there to please the writers, but the writ-
ers are there to satisfy you because they want to be in the maga-
zine, and you are the one who says yes or no.

The lectures contain foxy perceptions like Ruth Reichl’s casual ob-
servation that tables of contents are moving back farther and farther
and farther in magazines because advertisers pay more to be in front of
the table of contents. They also contain hedgehoggy ones, like Tina
Brown quoting Elizabeth Hardwick on how “magazines are like mush-
rooms. They should grow in the dark.” Translation: the reader, who is
comfortable with things the way they have always been, should not be
traumatized by change. (So the trick is to change things without ap-
pearing to change them.)
In the spring of 1971, on the occasion of his departure as editor-
in-chief of Harper ’s Magazine, Willie Morris famously referred to the
struggle between the money men and the literary men (“As always,” he
lamented, “the money men won”). And Rick MacArthur, in his account
of his own life as the publisher of Harper ’s some years later, seems to in-
carnate the dilemma, although as the ostensible money man his heart
is clearly on the literary side. But of course there are other, no less im-
portant divides at the core of magazine making.
Vide, the tension between the word people and the art people. As
Chris Dixon, design director of Vanity Fair, observes, “A lot of times . . .
[the art people] will put together a presentation of how we’re going to
visualize [a story], and the editor will say, ‘Well, if you had read it, you
would have known da, da, da.’ So they’re assuming [wrongly] that we
haven’t read the piece and we don’t understand.”
And then there is the fashion magazine editor who reports that most
editors learned that “pictures are things that happened down there
with the cool people in the art department, and photos were merely
visual support for the words.”

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I learned the differences between the two kinds of people who go

into magazine editorial, the words people and the visual people,
and woe be to the editor who doesn’t understand the primal
attachment those in both camps have to the superiority of their
point of view. It’s usually the words people who end up being editor-
in-chief, which is interesting because at the big national glossies,
most of the budget is spent on photography.

This raises the still open question of how the primacy of the image
will fare in the age of the Internet. Roberta Myers, who worked for Roll-
ing Stone, Interview, and Seventeen, among other magazines, before
she arrived at Elle, where she is editor-in-chief, recalls, “Somebody told
me that if I needed resources and money for Elle, all I had to do was go to
the 45th floor (where the CEO sits) and yell ‘digital,’ and they’d throw a
pile of money at me.”
Although several of the talks represented here were delivered in the
pre-Internet era, they seem inevitably to anticipate the key issues that
confront magazines in the online world. One of the editors of this vol-
ume recently undertook a survey of “magazines and their Web sites” and
discovered—surprise, surprise—that given online’s presumed need for
speed (in order to gain the traffic coveted by advertisers), many maga-
zine Web sites are not fact-checked or copyedited with the rigor of their
parent magazine, if at all, and the church-state separation between edi-
torial content and advertising is, for the most part, honored in the breach.
Peter Canby, who oversees The New Yorker ’s much-vaunted fact-
checking process, recalls that when he was first hired as a checker, the
managing editor told him that fact-checking was the best way to learn
the basics of journalism. What then does this say about those magazine
sites that do no fact-checking at all?
And Canby makes the interesting case that rigorous fact-checking
does more than prevent errors from appearing in the magazine. As he
puts it, “the checking department attempts to ask really critical ques-
tions, to look at logic, at the flaws in arguments, and to try to get these
things addressed so that what ultimately appears in the magazine does
have this texture of freshness and originality and accuracy. This not

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only gives the magazine its credibility but also imparts a distinctive
quality to The New Yorker prose.”
In other words, as The Atlantic ’s longtime copy chief, Barbara Walraff,
says apropos of copyediting, “a magazine needs someone, or a team of
people, who work on everything and make sure it meets all their stan-
dards.” And since there are no universal English-language standards,
or even consistent American English standards, “each magazine has to
make choices . . . each choice says a little bit of something about the iden-
tity of the magazine.”
Too bad we all can’t have the benefit of Walrath’s explanations why
The Atlantic chose this rather than that in each instance. But she does
share the advice Atlantic editor Bill Whitworth gave on hiring her as
copy chief: that she should always write little explanations on the gal-
leys of the reasons for changes, and that she should always suggest a fix,
“not just circle something and write ‘awkward’ with a question mark
next to it.”
Are online magazines really magazines? That, of course, is a question
that hovers over any comparison of old and “new” (now called “digital”)
media. The answer may be found between the lines of the contributions
of both Tina Brown and Ruth Reichl, each of whom gave two lectures—
one before, and one after the advent of the Internet. They each describe
before and after from very different vantage points.
There is one point on which most of the contributors to these rumi-
nations on Bacon’s middle axiom seem to agree: that ultimately a mag-
azine’s identity is determined by its readers. This may sound like a
truism, but the various paths taken to arrive at that conclusion suggest
it is anything but. Thus, Felix Dennis, the one-time proprietor of Maxim
and current boss of The Week, is eloquent in his sermon on why “the
reader is king.”
And the late Michael Kelly, who went on to edit The New Republic and
The Atlantic , tells of starting out as a writer when Playboy commis-
sioned him to travel the country writing about sex, at a time when sex
seemed to be coming out all over. A talented writer, he wandered the
sex circuit interviewing the male beneficiaries of the new openness, and
found what seemed to him “a rather grim place filled with grim, sad

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men, pathetic really, engaged in a kind of dismal and pathetic pursuit.”

When he finally turned in his essay, his editor told him, “You really cap-
tured something here, and you’ve really got down on paper the sheer
awfulness of these guys’ lives, how sad and lonely and pathetic they
are.” Kelly said, “Thank you very much.” His editor then added, “At Play-
boy we have a term for these men.” And Kelly said, “Really?” And he said,
“Yes, we call them our readers.”
Evan Cornog
Victor Navasky

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