TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=92TT1547> <title> July 13, 1992: Si and Tina's Newest Act </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1992 July 13, 1992 Inside the World's Last Eden </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> PRESS, Page 69 Si and Tina's Newest Act </hdr><body> 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." </body></article> </text>