Bullseye

We haven’t had a chance to look at the new issue of the New Yorker–the one that has been entirely underwritten by the Target corporation. That’s because we haven’t received our copy, and this is added to the bank of anecdotal evidence that the magazine is delivered to nicer neighborhods first, or perhaps to readers who are more loyal than we are–though that’s hard to believe. Our mad love is documented–published even!

But we have already been sucked into the vain conversation about whether that was a good thing to do or not. Some are getting quite shrill about this, and where there are shrill journalists, there usually aren’t nearly enough drinks on the bar.

Lewis Lazare, for example. Down in Chicago, from his seat at the media desk at the unimpeachably righteous Sun-Times, where advertisers are held to the highest standards (of, you know, check-signing and remittance–post office will not deliver without proper postage!), Lazare calls this “the most jaw-dropping collapse of the so-called sacred wall between editorial and advertising in modern magazine history.”

Like we say, we haven’t seen it yet, so we’re not sure whether the hyperbole is warranted. But we’re suspicious. First, in principal the idea is not all that galling. Think, for example, of Firestone’s long, singular, solo underwriting of the radio concert series, and an entire symphonic orchestra. Or of Mobil’s unassisted check-signing for Masterpiece Theater. Practically every season, there are a couple of television programs that are presented without commercials, the largesse of Ford, say, or Microsoft, or Bill McGuire. (Uh, maybe not Bill McGuire.) It’s not unprecedented in the world of magazines either, and in recent years, some of the very best glossies are actually owned and operated by major blue-chip advertisers. (Think of Sony Style, or Benneton Colors–both terrific titles where, one could argue, the fact that Corporate Daddy has chased the wolf away from the door, actually makes the magazine more delightfully idiosyncratic, interesting, provocative. But that’s a different animal.*)

The way Lazare describes some of the issue is a little troubling, if it is–as he claims–as difficult to distinguish ad from edit space. This would suggest the collusion of editors with the advertising people, but then again maybe the conclusion should be a big fat “So what?” It sounds as if the Target campaign is mostly visual, and in a magazine that is typically about 85 percent edit to art, can it be that difficult to discern edit art from advertising art?

Most troubling of all, we guess, is Lazare’s sort of cavalier dismissal of the creative work that undoubtedly went into the “project”–Target wished to credit the artists involved, and this stinks to Lazare’s high heaven.

Often, prigs of Lazare’s stripe assume an awful lot about the history of “modern magazines.” We just happen to be reading a biography of E.B. White lately, and we were interested to learn that some of the best, smartest advertisements in The New Yorker in the halcyon 30s and 40s were actually written by White . (Granted, most were house ads to build subscriptions. Note, though, that White was first an advertising copywriter before he ever took the woolen tunic and vows of poverty of the Edit department. ) We’ve mentioned before, too, that editor Harold Ross actually read the ads in the magazine, and in some cases edited (or suggested edits) in the ad space–largely because advertisements were narrative in form, and looked almost exactly like edit space, and he didn’t want the ads to be held to a lower standard than the edit, because he felt it brought the whole magazine down a notch.

When Lazare expresses outrage at crediting the artists for a project he believes readers are too stupid to recongize as an advertising project, he echoes a most common prejudice. Creative people working in the ad space are paid handsomely, so they don’t get the byline and the non-monetary compensation in prestige that their poor little brothers and sisters get in the edit space. But this too is not a timeless truism inscribed on the stone tablet of Ye Old Testament of Magazine Rules. In a history of Esquire magazine, for example, we recently read that legendary founding editor Arnold Gingrich actually argued the other way-that the fine art appearing in rpestigious advertisments of the 30s and 40s really demanded to be signed by the artists, the readers deserved to know who had created it. (As far as we can tell, the impulse has only survived in those Absolut and Absolut-inspired ads that are commissioned and credited to various strutting cocks of the fine arts world.)

We have a whole week to check into this–if our copy arrives before we leave for vacation. So more when we get back, possibly, if anything more needs to be said.

*FULL DISCLOSURE, in the first-person, and besides, it’s interesting though slightly off-topic: I was for several years the editor of Request, a now-defunct magazine that was owned by Musicland/Sam Goody. I know from first-hand experience what good can come from a corproate sugar daddy who is free from the scimpy margins of traditional publishing. My opinion is biased, of course– I thought it was a terrific magazine. But whatever people might have thought of it, I can say that it was entirely mine to make as bad or as good as I pleased, without any interference whatsoever from our benevolent, Armani-armored overlords. By the way, it is defunct now largely because larger financial pressures eventually made those same overlords say to themselves, “What the hell are we doing in the publishing industry, anyway? With those scimpy margins?!! ” Musicland has been sold several times since then, and my only lasting grudge is that the new owners deleted from the web about five years of my life.