The New Yorker: A collection of ‘personalities’
Why I think magazines should follow the legacy publication’s lead into the digital frontier
NEW YORK CITY — It’s difficult to engage readers daily on a magazine’s website. By virtue of being a weekly, monthly, or quarterly publication, your audience may often be submitted to droughts without content while you whip longform copy into shape.
Over at Ethos Magazine, a quarterly multicultural publication at the University of Oregon, where I serve as Editor in Chief, we grapple with that beast. Ethos writers submit front-of-book style reviews, whether on films or for theatre. When presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump campaigned through Eugene, Oregon, we sent journalists to cover their rallies for the web. And last year, Ethos made the move to a digital-first model, by which we’ll often post our stories to the web long before the quarterly print product arrives. Each of these bricks add up to build our audience engagement outside a 64-page book.
One juggernaut of the print magazine world is experimenting with this topic across platforms: The New Yorker recently rolled out an app and a radio show, the latter being in partnership with broadcaster WNYC.
While inside One World Trade Center this week, I heard insights from The New Yorker on the engagement front. Michael Guerriero, who oversees the weekly magazine’s web management, introduced a takeaway that could — and should — be implemented in magazine web departments.
To motivate writers to pitch The New Yorker online material, he gives them a “real estate” stake on the website: Many will recognize the iconic author avatars, which staffers tend to use on their social media accounts.
Part of the strength of the brand lies in that The New Yorker is a collection of “personalities,” which is of increasing importance for online publications, he said.
The 91-year-old publication is no stranger to personality.
For example, it features original cover art for each week. Eustace the dandy has become something of a spokesman for it. (Would that Ethos had its own mascot.) It was clear from our meeting with Guerriero that even though The New Yorker is a legacy publication, gear are turning there to produce progressive, innovative content.
As a magazine guy myself, I can’t help but be excited to see where their web team goes next — and I hope my colleagues at Ethos continue to engage in that discussion, too.
— Claire Larson contributed reporting to this article.
