Vanity Fair/New Yorker

Brad Hodges brad461@earthlink.net
Tue, 13 May 2003 18:36:16 -0400


>I was a bit surprised by that one too, Gretchen, but then I can't claim to
>know much about the editorial content of Vanity Fair, so I am not a fair
>judge. 

I recently started a subscription to Vanity Fair, it is a smashing-looking
magazine. I'm a little put off by their obsession with the idle rich and
their foibles, but looking past that, their personality profiles and
investigative journalism is pretty good. They have the spicy wit of
Christopher Hitchens, and of course they're photography is excellent. In a
previous digest I mentioned that if Playboy sought to be a combo of VF and
the New Yorker, only with naked girls, they'd be on the right track. 

Dan, as for The New Yorker's sales numbers, I don't know. I briefly worked
for Advance (at Fairchild Publications) in 1999-2000, and I know that The
New Yorker was sort of treated with kid gloves. I think part of the reason
they lose money is that they pay their contributors fairly high, how else
can they keep people like Steve Martin, John Updike, Woody Allen and the top
fiction writers of our times happy? I only wish Steve Martin was writing
humorous pieces for Playboy.

Brad