No, No, New Yorker

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 21, 2000 | by Jennifer Harper

For decades under the editorship o! Harold Ross and William Shawn, the New Yorker was famous for its loyal readership. Today, however, some readers have second thoughts ...

Magazines go through all sorts of machinations to attract and keep readers -- special deals, sample copies, delayed payments, snappy premiums. They conduct elaborate research to help determine their audience and adjust content accordingly. But it's not an exact science.

In the cluttered, competitive marketplace, subscribers sometimes disappear for complicated and quirky reasons -- as if they were ending a relationship with a person rather than a publication. Such is the case of one subscriber who fell out of love with his favorite magazine, the New Yorker.

"I am not renewing my subscription," says Jeffry, who prefers to be known only by his first name, "because I am a paranoid WASP." His rift with the New Yorker, he says, makes him melancholy. "I feel sad. But I finally decided no more New Yorker. It betrayed me."

Such news isn't likely to worry the 73-year-old New Yorker. It still has 813,043 paid subscribers. (Sizewise, the magazine does not make the MP/A's "Top 100" list for circulation.) But on the other hand, publications fret constantly over their audience and the art of luring readers, especially amid the cunning caterwaul of the electronic age. Even discounting Webzines, there are 18,607 printed magazines to choose from, according to the Magazine Publishers of America, or MPA, and 10 new magazines appear each week.

So why did Jeffry forsake the magazine? "I am one of those people who grew up with it," he recalls. "My parents got it. I loved New Yorker cartoons when I was a kid, like those by Whitney Darrow or John Held. So when I grew up, I thought that reading the New Yorker was part of adulthood. But the thing changed. The New Yorker has gotten mean in the past few years. It lost its civility."

When pressed, Jeffry says that the magazine traded "intelligent insight and original observation for catty stuff and drivel." Jeffry believes the New Yorker has sold out. "Celebrity-driven," he says. "Cheerless. Mean-spirited. Shrill. I can get that elsewhere."

Like a typical consumer, though, Jeffry is hazy on specifics. He and the magazine drifted apart, it seems, like an estranged couple. Some nameless, intimate bond had weakened and finally broke. Jeffry estimates that the process took about three years -- his reading dwindling down to "a few political briefs and the cartoons, occasional science pieces and stuff that Anthony Lane writes, because he's funny."

Then something put him over the edge. "In midsummer, one writer did a piece on the new design of $20 bills," he says. "It was a clever idea. But then he wrote, and I paraphrase here, `New things are poor imitations of good old things -- the New Coke, the New Testament.' I thought that crack on the New Testament just stunk -- a cheap one-liner."

His annoyance with the magazine turned to anger, and ultimately, dismissal. "I have torn up the subscription renewal cards, and that's that. And if any magazine ever wonders why people choose to read -- or not to read them -- it's all in the little things."