Subject: Musical Chairs in the Magazine Industry 
Date: Published: 8/5/92 (126 lines)
Source: Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc.

    LEISURE & ARTS -- Critique:
    Musical Chairs in the Magazine Industry
    ----
    By Raymond Sokolov

    New York -- Recently S. I. Newhouse fired Robert Gottlieb as
 editor of the New Yorker and replaced him with Tina Brown of Vanity
 Fair.  The first reactions were mostly groans and sardonic cracks
 from people who thought the change was the final slide into the mud
 for a splendid and even more splendidly fact-checked magazine that
 was the last bastion of literature and full-dress journalism in an
 age of tin and tinsel.  Perhaps they were right and we will soon see
 movie stars, partly naked and sometimes pregnant, on the cover of
 the New Yorker (yes, the New Yorker).  I doubt it.  And I also doubt
 that the hand-wringers and naysayers have read much in either the
 New Yorker or Vanity Fair since Mr. Gottlieb and Ms. Brown were
 running them.
    Mr. Gottlieb was a peculiar choice to run a magazine.  He was a
 justly celebrated publisher of books, many of which had been
 serialized in many parts of stultifying length in the New Yorker of
 his predecessor, the famously reticent William Shawn.  Mr. Gottlieb
 himself had a clear and ironic sense of the equivocal nature of
 magazines.  He once told me (when I was mainly earning my living as a
 writer of magazine articles but was about to publish a book with
 him) that book authors could tell themselves that they were writing
 for posterity and that newspaper reporters could take comfort from
 the instant effect of their labors, but magazine writers, they were
 caught in the middle and couldn't count on either the here and now
 or on eternity to justify what they did.
    Reliable rumor has it that Mr. Gottlieb will be able to feed
 himself and his appetite for antique plastic handbags handsomely
 with the sum settled on him by Mr. Newhouse.  So the move he made
 from the glittering house of Knopf to the famously tatty house that
 Harold Ross built does seem to have paid off in the literal sense.
 But it was almost inevitable that the man who replaced the sainted
 Shawn would not spend the rest of his active years happily polishing
 sentences on West 43rd Street.
    Mr. Gottlieb was doomed to be a figure of transition between the
 moribund latter days of Mr. Shawn and the real future, if there will
 be one at all, of the New Yorker.  He sleepwalked from week to week,
 continuing to publish books but now in installments, tinkering a bit
 with things that didn't need it, such as the listings in the front
 of the magazine, and letting the critical departments slide further
 into pointlessness or verbosity.
    All the while at Vanity Fair, Ms. Brown had made a worldly
 success out of the higher vulgarity, but the thing to notice was not
 how vulgar, but how high.  There were plenty of other magazines with
 stars a-posing and exposing in them, but none with the constant
 monthly promise of one or two longer articles of depth and
 originality, clever and presciently selected to seize and define the
 day.
    What, then, does a semi-enthusiast expect from Ms. Brown?  He
 thinks that she will move quickly to apply editorial acetone to
 accumulated layers of feyness and of political earnestness.  The Talk
 of the Town will cease promoting the politics of guilt, cartoonists
 will unbutton their collars, a new art critic will ruffle feathers
 at the Whitney, the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim.  A new
 music critic will agree to take up permanent residence in New York
 and then will pay regular attention to music that is not opera.  The
 fiction of suburban malaise will get a red-cell transfusion.  Poetry
 will continue to adorn the magazine's pages, if for no reason other
 than the typographical.  The eco-snob Bill McKibben will be left to
 enjoy his house in the Adirondacks, while a new crowd of reporters
 and essayists will mix things up among the color ads, of which there
 will soon be more.
    Does the semi-Brown enthusiast also expect to see such outrages
 to the New Yorker traditionalist soul as color photographs, overt
 gossip and fashion coverage that speaks to the shopper not the
 social lepidopterist?  He does.  But he also assumes that a pair as
 shrewd as Mr. Newhouse and Ms. Brown will leave the basic vehicle
 intact, as the general magazine that smart people (in both senses of
 smart) will look to for the best magazine articles money can buy.
    The era of the general magazine is far from over, but there is
 also constant change in the special-interest area.  For example,
 there is Genre, a magazine aimed at homosexuals that's now in its
 seventh month.  How do I know this?  There are none of the explicit
 singles ads that have caused some other magazines like this trouble
 with advertisers.  But the following cover lines make Genre's
 orientation clear:  HIV & Dating; Ian McKellen, a Knight Out; Gay
 Teens; London:  From Oscar Wilde to Boy George.  Subscription forms
 call Genre "the gay version of Esquire and GQ."  And there is a
 certain link with Esquire, since both magazines, each in its way,
 try to show man at his best.  I was tempted to conclude that Genre
 was a mainstream slick magazine until I got to Stanley E. Ely's
 article "Pretty Man:  Body Piercing, the Latest Way to Wear Your
 Jewels."
    Moving (quickly) right along the newsstand rack, one stumbles on
 Scuba Diving, a new Rodale publication that seems to be an attempt
 at mixing objective consumer journalism and environmental concern
 for dive-minded readers.  Since the dive press has often skewed
 toward promotional pieces about resorts and equipment, Scuba Diving
 offers a welcome alternative with features on eco-dives and a
 graphically ambitious comparative survey of dive operations in the
 Florida Keys.
    The Rodale influence is overtly detectable in a piece on diver
 fitness that includes predictable tips on diet.  ("Avoid the high-fat
 breakfast buffet of fried eggs and meat.")  But the cover, while
 modest by Brownian standards, does show a leggy female diver from
 behind waving at three dolphins.  The bimonthly magazine also has
 commissioned submarine writing from the humorist Roy Blount, someone
 who might logically also be appearing in the New Yorker (or even
 Genre, if only the gay geist could permit itself a little gaiety).
    The most original of the new special magazines is Ego, published
 in New York in Polish and English on the occasion of a retrospective
 exhibition in Kracow in June of the works of the New York-based
 Polish surrealist artist Andrzej Dudzinski.  This is an extraordinary
 magazine in every sense.  The graphics are beautiful and beautifully
 reproduced.  The texts are highly intelligent and must be accepted as
 authoritative on Mr. Dudzinski's oeuvre, since the editor in chief
 of Ego is Andrzej Dudzinski.  He is also its creative director and its
 only subject.  Nevertheless, the masthead contains the disclaimer:
 "Views and opinions expressed in the magazine are not necessarily
 reflecting the views of the publishers."
    This first issue of Ego is identified as No. 1, Vol. 1, but --
 and this is Ego's most original characteristic -- it is also the
 last issue.  Ego is really an art catalog "in the guise of a
 magazine."  In other words, it is a periodical without periodicity.
 True to its name, it is one of a kind.

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