Talk of the Town

National Review, August 3, 1998

IT may be hard for non-Gothamites to fathom, but when Tina Brown announced she was leaving The New Yorker, all systems stopped. The nearest equivalent was Washington during Week One of Monica. The hubbub was partly a tribute to Miss Brown, mistress of spin. But it was also a hurrah for the magazine -- and, considering her tenure, it may be the last.

For half a century The New Yorker coasted on the extraordinary push-off of its first editor, Harold Ross. Ross, a thorny Midwesterner, had a dream of New York, which unrolled in each issue with ``Talk of the Town.'' These unsigned items had to contain some interesting facts. They could be wry, but never heavily ironic. Seemingly slight data glanced toward large themes, like mortality. The ancestor of ``Talk'' was Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's 1711 - 12 Spectator, one of the founding documents of the gentlemanly ideal.

As Richard Brookhiser writes (see p. 53), Ross's successor, William Shawn, pinched the ideal. Miss Brown trashed it. She never savored, but grabbed for glamor, glitz, and proximity to the rich and famous, often media moguls. If Ross was Addison and Steele, she was Moll Flanders. She moves on to Hollywood, her Avalon.

Her tenure as editor accompanied a publishing strategy of sky-high ad rates, justified by circulation increases. But the only way to goose circulation is to buy it, and the directionless editorial buzz undercut reader loyalty and attention. The unworkable formula lost millions.

Miss Brown's replacement, journalist David Remnick, is an excellent writer. As an obituarist of the Soviet Union, he is familiar with dying empires.