NEW YORK — When the final phase of New York magazine’s sweeping redesign is unveiled on Monday, it will be met with something between bated breath and an exhausted pant. A publishing community accustomed to faster overhauls, the magazine’s heavily taxed staff and even patient readers are all saying “Enough.”
Phase Three constitutes the final chapter in an epic overhaul that began when Bruce Wasserstein purchased the title for $55 million last December and installed Adam Moss as editor in chief in February of this year. Eight months later, the Strategist section appeared, and two weeks after that, on Oct. 25, the Culture Pages arrived. Now comes Phase Three and a reconfigured front of book.
“I knew that where we were going in the end was a magazine that was fairly different,” said Moss, “and it would, I think, have been overwhelming to readers all at once.”
On Monday, there will be design changes to the cover (though a spokeswoman declined to be specific about them and at press time the cover had not yet closed). Kurt Andersen’s biweekly column will also debut — the first will be a meditative look at how the national elections will affect cultural life in New York. And the Intelligencer section will also get a new look.
“If you look at this magazine’s history,” said Moss, “we’re really good at media gossip. We’re really good at political gossip. We’re really good at fashion gossip.” And Moss promises there will be plenty of all three in the new Intelligencer — but not a return to the Hollywood gossip of recent years. (Hinting at what’s to come, on Thursday, contributing writer Jacob Bernstein — once a reporter at WWD — broke the story that Susan Lyne would become the new chief executive officer of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia on New York’s Web site.)
“A lot of what we’re doing with all of this renovation is actually restoration,” said Moss. “Going back to the vault in various places during various different eras of the magazine and trying to…modernize it and make sense for our time.” Even certain design elements, such as the Seventies-like illustrations that will open the Intelligencer section each week, seem deliberately retro.
Related Articles
You May Also Like
Where the magazine is forging new ground is in its business coverage, in part to satisfy Wasserstein, who runs the private investment bank Lazard and who bought the magazine intending to infuse it with more stories about the financial sector.
“Manhattan Inc. was a great model [for us],” said Moss. “It was taking writers who aren’t necessarily experts and trying to find narrative ways to tell business stories, in a city which is a capital of business in America.” The cover story in Monday’s issue by Steve Fishman is on hedge funds. “Namely, the main thing we’ve done with business coverage, we’ve done a ton of it in our features to a degree that maybe this magazine has never done in its history.”
As for the magazine’s own financial situation, news appears to be good. Ad pages are running up 8 percent year to date and publisher Lawrence Burstein expects to finish the year at that pace, which would place it at about 2,654 pages compared to 2,457 last year. And while the magazine’s problematic circulation file was said to have discouraged several potential buyers from submitting offers to Primedia last year, Ken Sheldon was recently brought in from Time Inc. to head up circulation. So far, renewals and newsstand are holding steady. The paid circulation for the first half of 2004 is 431,847.
Service continues to be New York’s biggest draw, though — the fall fashion issue and New York doctors issue were two of the best newsstand sellers in 2004. But since the magazine’s weekly pages have grown, New York is phasing out some of the special issues that were big money-makers under Caroline Miller, including New York Shops and Families. The only special issue that will remain under Moss is bridal, with two issues next year.
These moves are further indication that the way the magazine approaches service has changed dramatically. From the Strategist’s Look Book, an anecdotal approach to shopping that looks at a different New Yorker each week, to the enigmatic the Best Bet, which has ranged from a plate of gelatinous tofu to a diamond necklace with a six-figure price tag, the section has cultivated equally vocal fans and foes.
“I really admire what they are doing,” said Stefano Tonchi, editor of T: The New York Times Style Magazine.
A former New York senior editor who was at the magazine under Ed Kosner and Kurt Andersen didn’t agree: “There is this sort of intellectual apology that’s going on now. An over-intellectualization of, and an embarrassment about, doing service. It just seems joyless to me.”
It’s a complaint made by many in fashion and media circles over the last few months, with several media insiders wondering whether New York was becoming too similar to The New York Times Magazine, which Moss used to oversee. Even Moss admits the model of the two weekly magazines isn’t all that dissimilar — apart from their covers.
When asked about internal culture at the magazine, Moss, who is said to be a fan of ideas meetings, said, “I don’t know how to do this without meetings. If you want to create a situation where a lot of people have a chance to impact what you’re doing — when you’ve actually hired smart people and you’re interested in what they have to say — how else do you do that?” Referring to the relatively easy staff transition upon his arrival, he added, “There has been no blood on the floor.”
What there has been, though, is a fairly steady stream of amicable exits. With the final phase of the redesign now closed, much of the pressure is now off. Tonight, Moss is throwing a staff-only thank you party at a bar on the Lower East Side to celebrate.
“I do think people are starting to get exhausted,” Moss conceded. “We’ve really been putting out two different magazines at once. The prototype and the actual magazine” which is now, Moss says, “way more ambitious to produce.”