Vanity Fair/New Yorker

[Dan Stiffler]

On 5/13/03 6:36 PM, "Brad Hodges" <brad461@earthlink.net> wrote:
 
> 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.

I bought some of the early issues of Vanity Fair way back in its first
months of reincarnation and for some reason did not stick with it.  However,
I must say that its covers have repeatedly caught my eye at the newsstand,
and now I am thinking I need to give it another chance.  I used to read
Hitchens in The Nation (didn't much care for his ostentatious break from
that magazine however), and I am now curious about their "reviews and
criticism."  A combo of VF and the New Yorker sounds promising to me, as
long as the playmate returns to her place of honor.
 
> 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.

Well, if PLAYBOY quits throwing six figures at "artificial and temporary"
celebrities, they just might have money left over for some real content.  A
novel idea, I know, but it just might work.

regards,

Dan Stiffler