Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/071392/0713220.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 5KB | 116 lines

                                                                                PRESS, Page 69

Si and Tina's Newest Act


By picking Vanity Fair's editor to head the New Yorker, S.I.
Newhouse hopes to rejuvenate America's best unread magazine

By Bonnie Angelo


    There aren't many absolute rulers around these days, on
thrones or in executive suites, but S.I. ("Si") Newhouse Jr.
comes close. Newhouse, 64, who controls the magazines-and-books
principality of his family's $11 billion media empire, is
accountable to no stockholders, keeps his own counsel and makes
his own moves. When he is unhappy with the way things are going
at one of his holdings, he is noted for acting stealthily,
swiftly and at times brutally to make changes -- as editors at
Vogue and Self magazines, among others, have learned to their
sorrow.

    What Newhouse has been unhappy about lately is the New
Yorker magazine, which he bought for $168 million in 1985. In
1987 he touched off a staff insurrection when he ousted William
Shawn, the 79-year-old icon who had ruled the legendary magazine
for 35 years, to bring in his own editor, Robert Gottlieb,
former president of Knopf publishers (another New house
enterprise). But the evolution he demanded of Gottlieb did not
happen. The magazine lost at least $10 million last year, a
significant sum even to Newhouse. Circulation, which had been
boosted to 632,000 at considerable cost, is slipping.
Advertising tumbled 18.5% in 1991, although it is improving
slightly now. More fundamentally, the New Yorker has not shaken
off its aura of an elegant but musty institution, disdainful of
topicality, given to sometimes self-indulgently long and arcane
articles.

    And so, Newhouse moved again, in an editorial blitz that
caused a sensation in the media world when it was revealed last
week. He forced Gottlieb, 61, to resign in order to make way for
the most unlikely editor the New Yorker has ever had: Tina
Brown, 38, who arrived in the U.S. from her native Britain in
1984 and promptly transformed Newhouse's Vanity Fair from a
faltering revival into the "hot book" of the magazine trade.

    Creating a shrewd editorial mix of celebrity profiles,
newsy features and provocative photos (most notoriously, last
year's cover photo of a nude, very pregnant Demi Moore), Brown
brought Vanity Fair high profits and nearly 1 million readers.
At the same time, she made herself a figure to reckon with on
the Manhattan scene: good-looking, Oxford-educated, a sometime
playwright, married to Harold Evans, former editor of the Times
of London and now head of Random House (yes, another Newhouse
jewel).

    Newhouse arranged Gottlieb's departure more gracefully
than he had past firings: he gave Gottlieb a rich settlement
and allowed him to step down under cover of a plausible (and
largely true) statement citing "conceptual differences that ((Si
and I)) have been unable to resolve." But there was no
mistaking the boldness of New house's double gamble. Besides
matching Brown with the New Yorker, he entrusted Vanity Fair to
Graydon Carter, 42, former editor of the weekly New York
Observer and a founding editor of Spy magazine, who professed
himself to be "modestly confident and modestly terrified."

    There was also no mistaking the feverish, often mordant
speculation about what Brown would do to shake up the New
Yorker. When Brown announced her departure to a devoted Vanity
Fair staff, she dissolved in tears; but as she prepared to
travel the three blocks to the New Yorker offices to meet her
new editing cadre, she fretted privately, "They're going to hate
me." She did what she could to reassure them, pledging that "the
New Yorker will not be Vanity Fair."

    Discussing her plans for the magazine -- which she reads
"some of, every third or fourth issue" -- Brown says it "will
be cerebral but more relevant, timely. I want it to have an
edge, to be irreverent at times. And I hope to encourage wit."
Brown insists, however, that the magazine's characteristic
musing, whimsical streak will not disappear. "The New Yorker
must always have the ruminative, the eccentric piece." How about
photography, that heresy to true New Yorker believers? Yes,
occasionally -- but not as illustration; and no color. (For what
it is worth, before the week was out Brown had met with
celebrated photographer Richard Avedon.)

    Brown is keenly aware that her boss brings more than a
bottom-line interest to her new assignment. Newhouse "always has
been a passionate reader" of the New Yorker, she says. "It
bothers him when he asks people if they've read a piece and they
say no. He feels, `Why haven't they read it?' I think what
concerns him is the notion that perhaps another generation won't
read it."

    Meanwhile, what concerns old hands at the New Yorker is
whether another generation will recognize it. "In the past five
years," maintains a key editor, "we have simply witnessed the
twitching of the corpse. Now the body is really dead." The
staff's waggish valedictory for the magazine as they have known
it -- "Si-yonara" -- shows a clear awareness of who is really
shaping the changes that lie ahead. As one of them says, "What
we've learned is that when you're as rich and powerful as Si
Newhouse, you can do exactly what you want."