David Remnick on 100 years of the New Yorker, Netflix stardom, and why Trump was late to meet him

0:00But I made two really, really good decisions in my life. If I married the right person the first time around and I didn't go on Twitter, I would have looked at it too much. It would have made me feel shitty all the time. I can get that elsewhere. And now it's like a toilet. It's horrible. People going on it and feeling bad about some bot in Germany calling you responsible for the Kennedy assassination. It's insanity. It's insanity.

0:32Welcome to another episode of Mixed Signals from us here at Semaphore. I'm Max Taney. I'm the media editor here at Semaphore. And with me, as always, recording in the evening this time, we usually record during the daytime, is our editor-in-chief, Ben Smith. Ben, is it weirder recording at night? I'm in a windowless box, as always, Max, so I don't even know what time it is. It's a Las Vegas casino-style atmosphere. atmosphere. It could be any time. That is what podcasting is like. Our guest here is perhaps what my notes are saying is the greatest editor of his generation. Sorry, Ben. David Remnick.

1:06He's the editor-in-chief of The New Yorker. And we're having him on the show today because there is a new Netflix documentary out this week, chronicling the hundred-year anniversary of The New Yorker, which just happened earlier this year. I guess They're celebrating it all year. And David is one of the protagonists, obviously, of the documentary, having been editor-in-chief of The New Yorker for almost three decades now. The documentary follows him around and chronicles the magazine at some key moments last year, including on election night 2024. They had some cameras in the office. It's pretty interesting stuff.

1:42Ben, you're an editor-in-chief as well. You've known David for a long time. David's kind of a friend of Semaphores. He's shown up at a few of our events. He's an interesting guy, picks up the phone when we give him a call. What are you interested in asking David about this week? Well, then I think the real big question for The New Yorker is they've got this incredible legacy, this successful business, but there's something also steeped in nostalgia about this, particularly about the documentary. I think I really want to ask, how do you balance that past and the future? And what does the next 100 years look like?

2:09We'll ask David about the relationship between sentimentality and nostalgia, how important it is in today's media landscape. And he's actually a few minutes early. So why don't we bring him in right after this break?

2:47Transcription by CastingWords the real-world challenges and specific strategies they're using to navigate this new era. These are notes from the marketing frontier. You can find Frontier CMO on any podcast platform or watch it on YouTube.

3:08Ben, you got the good newsroom clock behind you, too. Manny, our excellent producer, set the room up for us, which is nice. And you don't wear headphones because of aesthetics. I have the cool in your ear ones that like Jon Favreau wears on Crooker. But see, when I go, when I'm in that studio, I wear the headphones because I like the... Because he doesn't want to share my earwax. That for one. But Ben is convinced that in a few years, it's going to look very like of this specific moment to have the headphones over the ears. You just don't need giant headphones. We in radio call them cans, Max.

3:39Yes, exactly. It is truly an affectation. Yeah, but it's nice though. And you get the good sound quality. Anyway, all right. David, thanks so much for joining us. My pleasure. So you started this job in July of 1998. And I wonder, you start a job like this, and you presumably have some plans, theories about the future. And I wonder if you could begin by taking us back to July 98 and tell us, like, what were you most right about and what were you most wrong about in whatever memo you wrote Cy Newhouse to get the job? You know, as you remember, or maybe remember through the mists of time, what happened was Tina Brown quit pretty abruptly, or at least it seemed very abruptly to all of us at the New Yorker.

4:19And I was a very, very happy writer. I had come from the Washington Post and this was heaven to me, heaven. And just all of a sudden she went off to start this thing called Talk Magazine with Harvey Weinstein, which I think Tina talks about in pretty hilarious terms today as maybe not the best decision in the world, but there was no editor, no editor whatsoever. There was no contingency plan. There was no succession plan. There was know nothing. And by Monday morning, this was, I guess, a Wednesday or Thursday, I was the editor of The New Yorker, and I had never edited anything. I just knew nothing.

4:56So I couldn't have anticipated so much. I mean, at that point, we were sending emails, but we weren't in the digital media revolution in the thick of it. That was not quite imagined yet. And certainly Condé Nast wasn't an avatar of this. We put out a print magazine with 12 pieces, gag cartoons, and a cover. That's what we did. And that's what we had done for three quarters of a century, you know, and everything was ahead. But to get back to, I think, the question that Ben was asking, what were you the most wrong about and the most right about? Well, I was the most wrong about, we were too slow to to embrace digital media fully.

5:37We didn't understand it culturally at Condé Nast and I would say even at The New Yorker, although at a certain point, and really had to kind of push and push and push for a pretty modest investment in just starting a website as if this was some incredibly radical act. I was right about the business, though, I don't mind saying. What happened was there was a post-war boom from 1945 to the late 60s, and the New Yorker was beautifully situated to reap all this advertising money. Right? It had an audience that was educated. It was buying stuff. And advertisers knew they could reach, you know, a kind of well-to-do, aspiring readership.

6:29And William Sean's most difficult editorial challenge was to find enough editorial material to put next to the endless ads running through the course of the magazine. This peaked in 1967, 1968. And it started to slope down for all kinds of reasons, ranging from competition in television, other publications, the Vietnam War, maybe an increasingly political New Yorker, which becomes a little less, I love this term, brand safe for advertisers. so by the time i came around which was the late 90s advertising was sloping down sloping down we were certainly losing money and i would go to meetings i i knew so little about business ben in my first meeting i thought we were making money and somebody had to tell me the parenthesis around the number meant something far darker that's pathetic i majored in comparative literature after all.

7:32But what struck me immediately was that we had this loyal audience that thought of itself as New Yorker readers. It was almost like a community, and they were paying a very small amount for a subscription. And I would go to these meetings and say, well, why don't we charge more? Because I did take Econ 101, you know, supply and demand. And I said, oh, no, that would affect advertising in an adverse way. What was obvious is that we had to, like the New York Times and like a number of places have tried, shift more emphasis from advertising to subscriptions. And I was right about that. My colleagues were right about that.

8:08And the evolution of the business grew out of that. How do you think that that shapes the kind of work that you put out and the kind of people who are reading The New Yorker? Certainly, it was a smart business decision, But I think Ben and I have thought about this and discussed it on the podcast. And of course, we still at Semaphore, we're an advertising and events business. We don't charge for subscriptions yet. But leaning into— But you want to. You want to reach a point where you've got the readership and readership loyalty. I assume—am I guessing wrong, Max? That you want to at some point.

8:49We're going to leave it to Max, yeah. We should. That's a good idea. That is a good idea. But seriously, though, looking inward and writing for your subscribers, does that change the editorial product or what The New Yorker is? I think not, but, you know, what I can't account for the unconscious, only Freud and his heirs could do that. A lucky thing is that our readers, I sense, and you can only sense these things, want us at our best. They don't want us to be a hot take factory. They don't want us to be fast and dirty. And believe me, there were either outside or self-imposed pressures along the way trying to wonder what to do, particularly with the metabolism of the web.

9:37Right? I remember the incredible drama the New York Times went through in their conversion to a digital newspaper. the innovation report, the arguments, the screaming and yelling, arguably people came and went based on how they fared in that drama. I would say that it was even more difficult for us because we were built around a certain metabolism that was built around the weak, and not just the weak, but a pretty damn stately approach to time and investment of time. So Tina Brown innately, just by her nature, injected, I think, more vigor and a pulse here. And I was all with her on that. I mean, I came from a newspaper background.

10:23But I think I don't find myself over worrying this. I think we're in a very lucky place of when we're at our best, that's exactly what our audience wants. How do I know this? I don't go around and check anybody's brainwaves. But that's what I intuit. So give us a sense of the size of The New Yorker these days. How many subscribers do you guys have, and how much money are you guys making? Well, Ben knows only too well that I'm not going to answer that question because we're in a private company and we don't answer it. We're profitable, happily so. It's a very good year. And, you know, I started in 98.

11:02By 2001, with the partnership of the publisher, we went into the black by 2001, and we've been there ever since. And you're on a sort of minor media tour at the moment because there's a documentary out in New Yorker at 100, which I really enjoyed and learned. Oh, good. I would say it felt just a little bit like the video you watched at somebody's funeral. And it reminded me, I mean, the sort of most biting critique of The New Yorker is this 1965 Tom Wolfe piece I'm sure you're familiar with. Sure. Called Tiny Mummies, the true story of the ruler of 43rd Street's land of the walking dead. No, the self-regard and the tweeness.

11:40And he was making fun also of William Sean, who was a very, very brilliant editor, maybe arguably the best editor of the 20th century, but had certain habits that were easy to poke fun at. He couldn't be in an elevator by himself, couldn't go over bridges. But I think the core critique of it really was that The New Yorker had become a museum of itself. Yep, absolutely. Do you ever worry about that, that The New Yorker becomes a monument to itself? All the time. And I don't think in a centenary year that there's been an absence of self-regard or what my mother would call poopigazing, you know, looking at your own belly button.

12:15But that's not unhealthy once in a blue moon. And, you know, we reached 100 years of healthy, incredible journalism, a little self-celebration of the institution. Not the worst thing in the world. I think one of the salubrious things that Tina accomplished was to come in as an outsider, something of an outsider, as a Brit, somebody who didn't have New Yorker religion, and kind of shake things up and get some of the dust off the couch. And that rattled people. And some people walked away. And some of them that walked away, it was unfortunate. And I got a couple to come back. You know, Sandy Frazier was one, Ian Frazier.

12:56They were unnerved by this cultural change. Do you think that your successor should be a rattler or should be a continuity person? Well, it's not something I stay up thinking about a hell of a lot. Ben, you're responsible for raising this subject first a couple of years ago because I had reached a birthday. Actually, to be clear, this was me. I know Ben well enough to know he whispered in your ear. Ben enjoyed the subject. Yeah, exactly. Ben enjoyed the subject, I think. and he clearly saw me turning 65 and they give you this great subway discount, which is absolutely fantastic. And who did you say Barack Obama was going to succeed?

13:35Okay, so that was me. We talked about who the possible successors for you. I don't think he wants to work that hard. I don't think so either because I anticipated that you might bring this up because we did mention Barack Obama in the piece as kind of a joke of there are very few people who are really qualified to do this job. And my point about Obama was, what has he done in his post-presidency that has been as impactful as putting out The New Yorker and doing these investigations and winning these Pulitzer Prizes? He's making Netflix documentaries and podcasts for Spotify. So it's not totally out of the question.

14:08He's very interested in media and, you know, if he still wants to make an impact. Do you believe his lists? I think I actually— His music lists, they—and I say this with all due respect, as I say in The Sopranos. there's a little bit of a whiff of going to your kids and going, okay. Absolutely. Absolutely. Fill in the blanks. I'll give you the Aretha Franklin. You tell me. I did ask Eric Schultz, one of his longtime comms people, about this when I was at Politico. Oh, he insists on it's true. He insists that it's true. I was more interested in like, what's the lobbying process behind people trying to shape what shows up on his list?

14:41I know publishers are trying to get stuff on to his best books of the year, and that that's like, that's a real kind of target. But Ben, don't you want to see Trump's list? His reading list? Yeah, I want to see his reading list and the music list. What gives Donald Trump joy? Golf. I feel like we see it all the time. Golf. Golf championships. Making fun of other people. Humiliation. Accolades and awards, I think, probably. Good point. A Nobel Peace Prize for sure. Cameras. Remember Zoran? He noticed all the cameras and was so pleased. To Ben's question, though, because we were going to get to the succession at some point, but we might as well get to it now.

15:13You've been editing The New Yorker now for getting close to three decades. Let's round up a little bit. But, I mean, this has got to be something, obviously, that you think about. And what would make one qualified, do you think, to take your job? Well, to be their own person, to go back to your original question, that person has to realize that this is a collaborative piece of business, never more so than now because of what it takes in. there are people here that know subjects that I have not a clue and you're talking to someone who dissected a frog and that was the end of their scientific career and my mathematics career ended you know the day I got into college I quit calculus because I didn't feel that I was ever going to need to understand how to find the area under the curve so there are people here that are way better at all kinds of things than me.

16:04It's a collaborative piece of business, although there's an element of leadership and ultimately saying yes or no to certain kinds of things and judgment and taste. Even that is a collaborative thing. Look at fiction, Max. It's an important part of The New Yorker. It might not be the thing that people, every reader reads absolutely, but there are people, that's why they read The New Yorker, the literary side of it. And the fiction editor has read thousands more novels than I have. Now, after she and the fiction department, three people, come up with the stories that they want to publish, they send me all of them with the convenient fiction that I'm choosing.

16:45Well, I'm not, really. They've chosen among hundreds of stories. But if once in a while one out of the four strikes me as incomprehensible, three times longer than it might be, or something, I'll say something. But really, the decision is being made. The important part of the decision is being made by Deborah Treisman, Willing Davidson, and Cresset Elishan. The same with poetry. The same with a lot of things. So cartoons, even. I have this cartoon meeting once a week. Emma Allen comes in with a stack of, I don't know, 40 or 50 cartoons. But she's narrowed it down from over 1 ,000. This is one thing that I actually really like about Ben, is that he gets so bored with things so often that we have these ideas, and we think they're great.

17:26And then we think they're great for a month. And then after the month, it's kind of like, eh, this is why I would be the worst possible editor of The New Yorker. Well, let me ask you a question, Max. Do you tell Ben we're not doing it? I like the challenge of how to make Ben interested in something that he might not be interested in. Well, for example, when he told you to write about my successor, are you a little pissed off that I'm still here two years later? I actually think this is Max's fault, just to be clear. To be clear, it actually was. Oh, had you not brought it up, I would have been long gone.

17:52Yeah, no, but it's one of those things where you also, you learn editor management as well, which is, I know that I don't bring a good idea to Ben unless I know that I actually want to do it. If I don't want to do it and it's a good idea, you know, it might get stuck in his brain. You might ask me about it later. Well, we have a different, on Tuesdays, we have this four o 'clock ideas meeting. And some of the people that are there are a steady cast, you know, Daniel Zalewski and a couple others. But we always rotate in a fact checker to a copy editor. People, you know, who don't, are normally doing X, Y, or Z jobs, But they're bringing something to the table, whether it's a, you know, a band that they're listening to or something that they read in the paper that seemed odd and worthy of deeper investigation.

18:33And stuff comes out of that all the time. So I want to go back to something that you mentioned earlier, which, as you said, it's been one of the best years for The New Yorker in some time. Can you elaborate a little bit on that? What's driving that? Well, subscriptions, subscriptions. But the centenary was an opportunity for focus. You know, it's like a birthday. At a certain point in your life, you maybe sit back and think, let's make sure that we're accomplishing X, Y, or Z, and that we're thinking about the future in certain ways, and that we get smart people in a room to raise uncomfortable questions about all kinds of things.

19:09You know, I get asked all the time about AI, for example. What are you going to do about AI? As if this is something that there's a right answer to, and it's a singular answer to. Well, one thing that we're doing that uses AI that helps us a lot is that it's pretty common wisdom now that a lot of people, instead of reading a lot, they're listening a lot. They listen to books. They listen to articles. And if you are trying to get an actor, a voice actor, to come in and read everything in The New Yorker, you're going to fall behind really quickly. and one day Monica Rasik and Julia Rothschild two terrific people on the staff editors came in said I want you to hear this and they took out their phone and played somebody reading such and such a piece so I said yeah so what and it didn't sound like a robot and it didn't sound like you know something from Star Wars or Lost in Space or something like that it sounded pretty damn good and it's nearly instantaneous in its production.

20:14And I knew that there would be some people who would complain, oh, it's not a huge, it doesn't have the warmth or roundedness of a human voice or mispronounces this or that. By the way, so do people sometimes. But it gets better and better all the time and it allows us to get these pieces into people's ears well nigh immediately. So that's great. I also think as we advance into the AI universe, whatever that may be, I'm idealistic enough to think, and I think I'm right, that there is no substitute for or ready imitation of the best of human storytelling and language and elegance and accuracy and originality.

21:01I don't think Sam Altman is streaming that one up. I really don't. I think there are loads and loads of uses for AI, some of them beneficial as with the medical aspect of things. Some of them will be game changers in offices as with writing legal letters or all kinds of other things. I may be wrong, and I certainly don't have all the answers, but at this point, that's how I'm looking at AI. So we have conversations like this and bring in people that know what the hell they're talking about as opposed to yours truly. Some of your competitors are taking kind of a different approach to this moment, which is, and I'm really thinking of The Atlantic, which is really like playing much harder in the news cycle.

21:44Yep. Hired a bunch of Washington reporters from your alma mater, The Washington Post and elsewhere. I think Jeff must have hired half The Washington Post. Yeah. It's given the thing both more speed, more political edge, and just more value. I mean, there's a bigger presence in the conversation. I think what Jeff is doing, and I don't want to speak for him, but, you know, I do look at him as with admiration and as a competitor, too. And I've, you know, Jeff used to write for The New Yorker and I know him very well and admire him. But I think what Jeff is doing, he certainly has, there are some long pieces that contribute to the monthly 12 times a year Atlantic.

22:22And then on a daily basis, you're right, there's like a kind of reported op-ed approach and there are many of them. And that is one approach, but it's not ours. What's the downside of that? Well, I think the upside is he's filling a space that, among others, the Washington Post, the LA Times are not stronger than they were a year or two or three ago. There's no question about it. The downside, there's no downside. It's just it's different. It's like the downside of red as opposed to blue. It's just different. The New Yorker is a very different animal. It does strike me that The Atlantic sort of feels to me like it's edited by people who are on Twitter.

22:57And The New Yorker feels like it's edited by people who are not on Twitter. I don't know. What is your relationship with social media? I mean, Twitter long time. I think I've said this to you before, Ben. I made two really, really good decisions in my life. I married the right person the first time around and still married to her, Esther Fon. And I didn't go on Twitter. And I remember David Carr of Sainted Memory making endless fun of me for not going on Twitter. Maybe you did too. As if this was the insignia of cluelessness. And I have to say, I would have looked at it too much. It would have made me feel shitty all the time.

23:35I can get that elsewhere. And now it's like a toilet. It's horrible. People going on it and feeling bad about some bot in Germany calling you responsible for the Kennedy assassination. It's insanity. It's insanity. Once in a blue moon, I'll confess. I'll go on and I'll punch in and see what are they saying about Remnick. And literally, the Kennedy assassination. And it's just, what is this mess? But you have enough of whatever that weird personality flaw we all have is that you occasionally search your own name on Twitter. I mean, that is dangerous. I make these confessions to you, Ben, as if in a Catholic church.

24:15Nice Jewish boy visiting Notre Dame. Well, we have a lot more that we want to get to with David, but we have to take a short break, so we'll be right back after this.

24:30In this week's branded segment from Think with Google, I spoke with Google's VP of Marketing, Josh Spanier, about what he saw at CES. So Josh, you were at CES at the beginning of this year. Why does that event matter for CMOs? So CES gives us a real view into how people are going to be living their lives and spending their money in two, five, even 10 years time. I know from the outside, it looks like a giant toy show. There's smart rings and foldable laundry robots and flying cars. But I was chatting with Shelley Palmer, who I interviewed for my new podcast. He's an AI visionary and tech leader.

25:09And he swears by, and I agree with him, that the ability to see patterns amongst all the gadgets is actually really, really compelling for near term and into the future. So what did you learn from that conversation? Well, the gadgets aren't really the thing. Stuff gets announced. Some of it launches. Some of it doesn't launch. What you're really looking for are business model changes, the new paradigms that are emerging. So two that I saw and we spoke about, one is around agentic commerce. Google announced during CES and just after CES a whole bunch of partnerships with Shopify, with Walmart, with Target around agentic commerce.