Today, the New York Observer pulls a nifty stunt. Media writer Tom Scocca recreates the masthead of The New Yorker, which has never published such a thing in its seventy-five years of publishing. We wish we’d thought of that. (We’re thinking Spy magazine must have thought of it before, too; they used to publish the hilarious and informative “Letters to the Editor of the New Yorker” at a time when The New Yorker still did not publish letters from readers, either.) Then we realized what a Herculean task of research it must have involved, poring through contributors notes—also added just a few years ago under the reign of Tina Brown and her celebrity editorship—book jackets, lecture flyers, and so forth.
People who are obsessed with magazines often wonder why The New Yorker does things in such an odd, backward way. There have been lots of other examples, though most have slowly been evolved to resemble how other magazines are built. For example, for more than fifty years, the magazine had no Table of Contents. Bylines came at the end of long articles, and most shorter items had no byline at all.
When they were asked about this sort of thing, editors Harold Ross and William Shawn usually said they did these things simply because that’s the way they had always been done. Famously, Ross said of the TOC that no one ever thought to do it in the early years, and the oversight just seemed to gain momentum. But we have a sense that this was just a deflection, and that in the star chamber of the editor’s offices, there were plenty of justifications for marching to the beat of their own drummer.
There are three very good, old-fashioned reasons not to publish a masthead. First is to subsume the egos of all who contribute and participate in the magazine to the larger project, to the sum of its parts. We live in an age of self-aggrandizement and instant gratification; the age of Me as a personal brand, free of loyalties to anything larger than ourselves. The New Yorker’s non-masthead is a reminder, if anyone needs one, that the magazine comes before any of the individuals responsible for producing it. Second, one of the subtle services a masthead performs is to sustain the longterm employability of its staff—other people in the industry tend to obsess about mastheads, and they poach from each other, and often times it’s the only public credit a hardworking editor gets. Anyone who has ever worked at The New Yorker does not have this worry; they are at the top of their game at the top team in the league, and they subsit on prestige. Don’t call them, they’ll call you. And that’s the third reason: the moment you make public a handful of names at your magazine is the moment you are inundated, by name, with dozens and dozens of queries from writers, press releases from record companies, and fat promotional folders from Manhattan crystal shops.
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