2005 Annual Report - Magazine Content Analysis

There is no question within the magazine industry that the content of The New Yorker has changed in the last 15 years.

The conventional wisdom about the magazine is that Editor Tina Brown upon her arrival in 1992 revitalized it by broadening the topics it covered into areas it once shunned. It was early in Brown's reign that the magazine published its treatise on Hillary Rodham Clinton and Malcolm Gladwell did his well-regarded soft-social-science-trend reportage, his "Tipping Point" piece being a prime example. But over time some felt that Brown trivialized the content of a once great magazine by focusing too much on celebrity. Often cited by critics are the "women's issue," which Roseanne Barr was brought in to "guest edit," and an increase in celebrity profiles (Sharon Stone, John Travolta). Brown's tenure also featured the magazine's heavy coverage of the O.J. Simpson murder trial, including "An Incendiary Defense," the Jeffrey Toobin article that disclosed the Simpson defense's strategy of arguing that the L.A. Police Department had framed the former football star. The article made news, but critics thought it did so at the expense of the magazine's being used by the defense team.

The current editor, David Remnick, took the reins in 1998. He has since married the hipper coverage with the more traditional tone of the magazine, and has put his own stamp on the periodical. Along with its traditional focus on culture and the arts, The New Yorker has become more political under Remnick. It has adopted some of the outlook of the left-leaning opinion journals, but with the heavy reportage and analytical seriousness the "old" New Yorker was known for. Particularly during the presidency of George W. Bush the magazine has adopted a more liberal tone (including a regular quiz on embarrassing and contradictory statements by Bush Administration officials). It has also broken news. In the past year, pieces on the continuing saga in Iraq by the author and former New York Times correspondent Seymour Hersh have become must reads for political and foreign affairs writers in Washington. Hersh's pursuit of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse story pushed CBS to run a story that the network had been sitting on, and his story about the presence of Israeli intelligence in Northern Iraq was groundbreaking.

During the 2004 election the magazine got particularly involved. It did an entire issue on the election and the apparatus sounding it - from polling to advertising. It did a piece on how ABC's daily Internet political roundup The Note had changed American political coverage. And, perhaps most telling, for the first time in the magazine's history it endorsed a candidate for president (Senator John Kerry) in a lengthy, five-page Talk of the Town piece signed by "The Editors."

Since the days of editor Wallace Shawn, there have also been more obvious changes such as the inclusion of photos and contributors notes about the writers in each issue.

Beyond our anecdotal look at those changes, we wanted to examine systematically how much the magazine has shifted over the years. We chose four issues (the last issues of January, April, July and October) from four years (1989, 1994, 1999 and 2004). We examined the topics covered, the timeliness, and whether subjects were linked to current events and news or simply features with no real "news peg." We defined current-events topics as those featuring topics in the mainstream news or profiles of people in the mainstream news. We counted all Talk of the Town pieces in the front of the magazine and all non-fiction features. Listings were not counted in the tally, nor were reviews.

We found a decline in fiction stories but an increase in the number of pieces over all. Stories are generally less esoteric than they once were. One still finds pieces with no particular news peg, just "good reads." Yet by and large we found a magazine that is more focused on the topical.

Topicality of New Yorker Stories 1989 - 2004

Select Issues and years

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Source: PEJ Research

*Data from 16 issues, four from each year selected (last issues in January, April, July and October).

In 1989, only seven of the 26 stories (not counting fiction, poetry or reviews) in the issues we examined were pegged to current events. Two of these pieces were Letters from Washington by Elizabeth Drew about the goings-on within the first Bush administration. One was a profile of Mayor Tom Bradley of Los Angeles, who was running for a fifth term. Other "current" pieces ran in the Talk of the Town section and were either national affairs or something we labeled "New Yorkia" - stories about the primary character of the New Yorker, the city itself.¹

Just as interesting was the limited number of topics represented. The pieces fell roughly into one of four categories: national affairs, international, New Yorkia and United States (stories about events or issues in cities or regions outside New York).

By 1994, two years into Brown's editorship, the number of articles pegged to current events in the issues we examined climbed to 18 out of a total of 29. And the topics those stories addressed were much broader. Four concerned national affairs, but three were focused on international issues, two were United States stories, three were New Yorkia, two were law stories, two were arts stories, one was a media piece and one was about business.²

Incidentally, one of those law stories, Toobin's "Incendiary Defense," was also significant in another way. It put The New Yorker squarely in the same corner - on that topic anyway - as the news weeklies. It was not the usual thoughtful, somewhat detached New Yorker approach. It was dealing directly with the primary issue in the media spotlight and national dialogue and talking to the principals in the story as it was unfolding.

The issues in 1999, a year into Remnick's reign, show a magazine that has absorbed some of the priorities of Brown's New Yorker in terms of being topical, but in other ways a shift back toward some of the magazine's older priorities.

The number of topical stories grew to 21, out of 48, or close to half. National affairs stories led the pack with eight of the 21 topical stories.³ The rest of the "current" list varied: international, New Yorkia, media, entertainment, business. And the total list of story topics in the issues we examined grew to 12. Media in general made up a larger component of the magazine's coverage (four stories), and stories about literature and the book industry began to appear.⁴

Entertainment coverage was actually more prevalent in the issues of the 1999 New Yorker than in 1994, but the frame of those stories was less about individual celebrity than about a larger point concerning the entertainment world. The pieces were used not as celebrity vehicles but as windows into the entertainment business. A piece in the July issue on the recording artist Macy Gray was less about Gray than about the efforts of the music industry to turn her into a star, and the differences between being a star and a mere talent.

Maybe it was just that it was an election year, but the 2004 New Yorker coverage was heavily focused on the topical - a total of 22 stories out of 40 total, the highest total of any of the years we examined.⁵

And in the issues we examined, the topics covered in the "current" stories showed a definite interest in the election - nine of the stories were concerned with national affairs, by far the most, four were focused on New Yorkia, two were U.S. stories, three were on the media, two on entertainment and the arts, one on international affairs and one on science. And even among stories not technically national affairs there were tenuous connections to the election, as in David Grann's piece on ABC's The Note on October 26 and even Susan Orlean's piece on South Boston on July 26, which was set to coincide with the Democratic convention going on that week in Boston.

Again the most obvious signs of The New Yorker's topical-ness in 2004 were Seymour Hersh's coverage of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal and the magazine's political/election coverage, including the special election issue it published and the endorsement it issued. It is unlikely that either of these two topics would have surfaced in The New Yorker 15 years ago, at least not in such prominent ways.

Some skeptics will note that the percentage of topical stories bobbed up and down after 1989 - 62 % in 1994, then 44% in 1999, then 55% in 2004. But it should be noted that in each of those years the percentage of topical stories was greater than in 1989, when they made up only 27% of the total.

To some observers The New Yorker will probably never be a true "news" magazine. It doesn't fit the traditional model. There are no glossy color photos, and the content is not as directly focused on the news of the previous week or the week ahead. But there is little doubt that over the past 15 years the magazine has shifted into space the news magazines once occupied alone. Even the cartoon covers of the magazine have shifted toward news, whether the 2004 presidential debates or the end of Bill Clinton's eight years in the White House. The New Yorker may not be a "news weekly" per se, but it is a weekly magazine that deals directly with news and current events.