ultimately, the issue probably isn't whether or not the New Yorker can survive the occasional cheesy stunt -- or, as Stanley Crouch might put it, the occasional clown or bikini babe. Instead it is whether, as Maureen Dowd suggested in a 1995 New York Times column, it might be worthwhile for Brown to use "her shock tactics more creatively -- on bold fiction or reportage."
As good as the New Yorker has often been under Brown's tenure, and as dramatically as she has revamped it, it is arguable that she has failed thus far to take some essential risks -- that is, to do the fundamental work of a pioneering editor. Her magazine, for example, has been far better at acquiring hot writers than discovering new ones. ("Who has she launched?" asks an editor at a national magazine.) Nor has her New Yorker delivered a fresh, original vision of America or the world in the way that, say, Rolling Stone did in the early '70s with Hunter S. Thompson, Joe Eszterhas and Timothy Crouse, or that Harold Ross did in the New Yorker's early days with writers like James Thurber, Dorothy Parker and S.J. Perelman. There's no statement behind the buzz.
Whatever power, mystique and moral seriousness the old New Yorker possessed was accumulated by staying above the fray -- by resolutely refusing to surrender to the urgencies of the moment. Under Tina Brown that mystique has been stripped briskly away. The magazine that remains is more like a supercharged cigarette boat, complete with flashy decals, than the roomy, well-worn frigate it once was -- it's agile, adept at tight turns. It's easy to find yourself admiring its sleekness while mourning its reduced throw weight.
Above all, you mourn the loss of the old New Yorker's stubborn individuality. Brown has made the New Yorker more readable by performing one fairly simple trick: She has made it more like every other magazine in America. Despite its high seriousness and its marvelous writers, the New Yorker feeds at the great trough of celebrity culture like all the rest.
At this moment, Tina Brown's magazine is probably the finest cigarette boat roaring through the choppy waters of American journalism -- but the sea is full of cigarette boats. She has entered her magazine in the race, and as she steers it toward the millennium, it's hard not to imagine others gaining on her.
June 25, 1997
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