(image via mgross.com)
The Observer asked last week after the future of magazines. Their main question was whether or not long thought pieces could ever make it on a medium as fickle as the web. Our pal Michael Gross writes in Gripebox:
"In last week’s New York Observer package on the future of magazines, there’s an interesting quote from The New Yorker’s editor David Remnick: 'Let’s say God forbid something awful happened on a Monday. And someone Herculean could write a 5,000-word piece by Wednesday. Could I put that online? I could imagine it. But we are very, very, very rigorously edited and fact-checked. … So can I imagine it? It would be very, very exceptional. It wouldn’t be part of the routine in the near future.' It wasn’t routine then either, but on a Monday in 1992, when word circulated that Remnick’s predecessor, Tina Brown, had just been given the job Remnick now holds, Ed Kosner, then-editor of New York magazine, summoned me to lunch and ordered me to produce a cover story on the subject, to close three days later. Yes, it took a day longer than Remnick’s imagined scenario, but the resulting piece, 'Tina’s Turn: The New Yorker’s Head Transplant,' published six-and-a-half days after that lunch, was 9,000 words long, very, very, very rigorously edited and fact-checked, and was of high enough quality that the Sunday Times of London later ran it as the cover story of its magazine, too. I didn’t consider it Herculean or exceptional."
Let the record show that The Corsair hath never doubted Michael's Greek God-like skills at scribbling. More here.
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