The Brand of We

Sometimes editors are assholes. Lots of times. Most of the time. This seems to be a job requirement. But editors should really be assholes for the right reasons, and we certainly try to be an asshole for the right reasons. Still, even if we do it for the right reasons, we’re still being an asshole.

There is a lot of talk these days about how an editor must “personify the brand,” to put a face on the operation, and we try to do this too, whenever we are called on. On the other hand, our first and highest committment is to the magazine itself—to protect its integrity and quality, and this can be an all-encompassing activity all by itself.

We were thinking the other day about the Ross and Shawn years at the New Yorker. Few people realize why the New Yorker is the best magazine in the world today: It is largely because of those legendary editor’s unquestioning, unwavering, absolute committment to their magazine. Harold Ross never had a byline in his magazine, and William Shawn had just one. That amounts to more than sixty years of a weekly magazine in whose pages its editors-in-chief appeared just once. (Since the New Yorker has never published a masthead, the words “Harold Ross” did not appear in the magazine until a week after he died, in 1951.) It’s hard to imagine that sort of thing happening today.

Another anachronism: Staff writers at the New Yorker were never really guaranteed anything. Even the finest feature writers of the time received no assurances that what they wrote would ever get published ~unless it was good enough~. They got no preferential treatment, other than assurances that what they wrote would be given all due consideration of the editors. In the meantime, writers could borrow money against their “drawing account” and they might sign first reader agreements that paid them a little bit of dough, but they were expected to eventually write something publishable to cover their debt to the magazine.

Such a scheme would never fly today, and it shouldn’t. All things considered, writers probably have less security today than they did back in the forties and fifties—if for no other reason than the rise of the middle-class, and the widespread belief that writing is a romantic thing to do, and anyone can do it. But it is astonishing to consider how Ross and Shawn were able to float such an operation (it continued, we have heard, well after Conde Nast bought the magazine in 1986). They could for one very simple reason: They valued quality above all else, and the result was that any serious writer would die (then and now) to get into its hallowed pages. (Some have literally paid to get into the magazine—though in the advertising space, of course.) Ross and Shawn were, therefore, assholes for the right reason, in all probability. But writers seemed to understand that no matter how maddening the editors were, they advocated (politely, diplomatically) first and last for the integrity of the written word. That actually meant something to everyone involved in producing the New Yorker.