CJR, Sept/Oct 98 - David Remnick

David Remnick, says Ben Bradlee, "didn't fall into that pattern of writing voodoo Stalin politics – Kremlin insider stuff. He got out in the country and talked to a lot of people." Bradlee should know. He was Remnick's boss, from 1982-1992. The Princeton grad, who grew up in Hillsdale, New Jersey, came to The Washington Post as an intern, went on to cover sports and local crime, then graduated to the Style section before becoming the Post's second man in Moscow. The timing was exquisite. Mikhail Gorbachev fell as he watched, and Remnick's life altered, he recalls, "in this preposterously exciting, romantic, politically charged landscape." In 1992 he became a staff writer at The New Yorker; two years later his book on the Russian drama, Lenin's Tomb, won the Pulitzer Prize. Perhaps the magazine's most versatile writer, he contributed pieces on Howard Stern and Mike Tyson, Israeli politics and the travails of the Amish in Pennsylvania. At 39, the fifth editor in The New Yorker's seventy-three-year history is very much a shirtsleeves guy. He was dressed in khakis with a red-and-white striped shirt when Stefan Kanfer interviewed him en route to the third Remnick-edited issue:

ON WRITING AND EDITING: I'd love to keep writing, but it would be unfair to the job Ihave to do. My career, such as it is, has always involved going out in the field and reporting and interviewing like crazy, often striking dry holes before coming up with something usable, and that takes extraordinary time and effort. It would not be good for the magazine if I continued to do that. God knows The New Yorker can survive very nicely without my articles. An editor needs to be in the chair, editing and reading, or out and about meeting with writers, and that's where you'll find me from now on.

ON RECRUITING: This is not a newspaper with various levels of competence. Most of our writers will have achieved some excellence before they're published here. At the same time, we want to bring along young people of talent. I remember that John Updike was an unproved but ambitious fiction writer when he first came to The New Yorker in his twenties. He did Talk of the Town and flower shows before moving on to book reviews and longer pieces. His is an example I hope will be followed by other good new writers. I'll be looking for them.

ON THE NEW YORKER'S ROLE: I don't see us as a newsmagazine in competition with Time and Newsweek. Our engines are not equipped that way. Naturally, we'll have pieces on current events, but they will also be concerned with ideas that have resonance. For example, in Peter Boyer's recent piece about CNN, he did not rehearse yet again debates between April Oliver and the executives. Instead, Peter brought an insider's knowledge of television, showing the clash of network and cable cultures that led to the disaster.

ON CELEBRITY: Covering Hollywood is actually an old story for The New Yorker. It reaches way back to the Ross and Shawn eras. Kenneth Tynan's interviews with stars, and John Lahr's profiles of comics are two outstanding examples. I have no objection to running pieces about movie makers or other prominent show people – as long as they're brilliantly written.

ON CARTOONS: We've begun to feature drawings in larger spaces – half-page and even full-page. There will be more of that in the future. Cartoons are our signature, probably the first thing people read, and we want to treat them well.

ON SPORTS: In the past we've had a few outstanding pieces on sport – John McPhee on tennis, for instance, and Roger Angell's baseball coverage. But there hasn't been a lot. It's a subject that has fascinated me since my childhood of watching the Boston Celtics. Sport seems to absorb most Americans as well, so I'll be interested in seeing work about it – again provided it's of a very high quality. Whatever pieces we run are unlikely to be keyed to the news. If we don't run something on professional football for several seasons, I couldn't care less.

ON GENERAL COVERAGE: In the next several years The New Yorker will have a fuller engagement with the world. We're in a crazy Gilded Age of money, money, money, and we want to get much more of that story. And though we want to cover the unique aspects of our city, we also want to have a global reach. Up to now there has been an oddity of geography at the magazine: Adam Gopnik, for example, a brilliant writer, has been confined to New York and Paris. I want to see our map rearranged and widened. After all, many of our readers travel east and west, north and south, not just to Europe and back. We want to acknowledge that.

ON FOCUS GROUPS: The New Yorker's editors have always gone by instincts rather than polls. Interesting as such questionnaires are, for better or worse, I'm inclined to follow my nose.

ON QUALITY: It seems to me those enterprises that have invested in quality have thrived in this era. The New York Times is a prime example. It's interested in greatness, not in cutting back. Even USA Today, which we all made fun of when it first began, has decided to make itself better. When I'm in Denver, I find it's the best paper in town. Perhaps that doesn't say much for Denver journalism, but it says a lot about USA Today. The same striving for excellence will, I hope, characterize The New Yorker. Whatever we do will be the best it can possibly be. There's no reason why the level of writing can't be extraordinarily high in every arena. Ostensibly glitzy subjects such as fashion can be written about with the same intensity and skill as coverage of Bosnia or Rudolph Giuliani.

ON THE MAGAZINE'S FUTURE: I'm aware that some people wonder about whether there is still a need for The New Yorker. I believe the need is in fact more powerful than ever. Americans are surrounded by a blizzard of information. If you were inclined to lose your mind you could stay on the Internet all day. In the middle of this blizzard The New Yorker should stand as a place of clarity, coverage, intelligence, reliability – and hilarity. We don't want to forget hilarity.