'The Wrong Kind of Readers'
Bagdikian, Ben H.
'The Wrong Kind of Readers' The fail and rise of The New Yorker Nothing in American publishing approaches the profitable heresies of The New Yorker magazine. In an era when magazine editors...
...The author was Jonathan Schell, a recent Harvard graduate who, after commencement, visited his brother, Orville, in Taiwan, where Orville was doing Chinese studies...
...But when they sit down at conferences with big advertisers, they do not present simple numbers but reams of computer printouts that show the characteristics of their audience in income, age, sex, marital status, ethnic background, social habits, residence, family structure, occupation, and buying patterns...
...Once in Taiwan, Jonathan decided to take a trip to Vietnam, where, according to the standard press, the American war against the Vietcong was going well...
...Shawn said he had serious doubts about the war before Schell appeared, "but certainly I saw it differently talking to him and reading what he wrote...
...I didn't hear about it until the early 1970s...
...your coat of arms...
...That was when I became convinced that we shouldn't be there and the war was a mistake...
...They were buying the magazine because of its clear, moral stand against the war and its quiet, detailed reporting from the scene...
...The Wall Street Journal once labeled it "Urbanity, Inc...
...The war, it seemed to him, was not the neat containment of Soviet-Chinese aggression that had been advertised at home or the attempt of humane Americans to save democracy-loving natives from the barbaric Vietcong...
...Despite its violation of the most commanding conventions of what makes a magazine sell, The New Yorker for decades has been a leader in making money...
...Perhaps it's too difficult, too obscure...
...He visited a family friend, William Shawn, the quiet, eccentric editor of The New Yorker, who had known the Schell children since childhood...
...It is almost certain that for conventional corporate ownership the "cure" would be quick and decisive...
...That was true until 1967...
...The New Yorker had begun to attract "the wrong kind" of reader...
...16.6 per cent were members of corporate boards of directors...
...59.3 per cent owned corporate stock, which had an average value of $75,000 (though a scrupulous footnote to this datum says, "In order not to distort the average . . . one respondent reporting $25,000,000 was omitted from the calculation...
...The headline on the ad read: A MAGAZINE DOESN'T WASTE WORDS ON WINDOW SHOPPERS...
...26.1 per cent bought wine by the case...
...But it's important to have...
...Broadcasters do not want just any listeners...
...We published information we believed the public should have and we said what we believed...
...Some did...
...If the magazine was serious, it was no more serious than we were...
...The popular assumption is that if enough people care enough about a publication or a television program to buy it or to turn to it, advertisers will beat a path to their doorway...
...One ad for Audemars Piguet watches suggests giving three to impress a woman while another ad does suggest a price, murmuring in fine print, "From $10,500...
...The Wrong Kind of Readers' The fail and rise of The New Yorker Nothing in American publishing approaches the profitable heresies of The New Yorker magazine...
...Shawn listened to Schell's story and asked him to try writing about his experiences...
...But while the median age of readers in 1966 was 48.7—the age when executives would be at the peak of their spending power—by 1974, New Yorker subscribers' median age was 34, a number brought down by the infusion of college students in their late teens and early twenties...
...I won't permit that—if I may put it so arrogantly...
...Now the whole idea is that you edit for a market and if possible design a magazine with that in mind...
...But The New Yorker is not the property of a conglomerate nor is it insistent on trouble-free maximum profits...
...Neither does any newspaper or broadcast station that makes most of its money from advertising...
...Year after year, The New Yorker was first or second, so fixed in its reputation that other magazines promoting their effectiveness would tell prospective advertisers they were first or second "after The New Yorker," the implication being that, like the New York Yankees in 1950s baseball, The New Yorker was unassailably in first place...
...The only way to deliver a different kind of reader is to change editorial...
...One bad year like the one The New Yorker had in 1967 and either the editorial formula would change or the editor would be out on his ear...
...Its circulation in 1980 was over 500,000, it was running 4,220 pages of ads a year, fourth among all American magazines, and its profits were back above $3 million...
...Eventually during the 1967-1974 period Shawn did hear what he called "murmurings": "There were murmurings in the background about three things: The magazine was getting too serious, the magazine was getting too much into politics, and the pieces were getting too long...
...Its circulation was at its usual level, around 448,000...
...I think the whole trend is so destructive and so unpromising so far as journalism is concerned that it is very worrisome...
...When the magazine spoke clearly against the war, it was a significant event in the course of public attitudes toward the American enterprise in Vietnam...
...Americans shot, bombed, and uprooted civilians in massive campaigns that resulted in the disintegration of Vietnamese social structures...
...But it is displayed with a polo field in the background and is redeemed by other ads like the one that shows a couple in evening clothes embracing in the cockpit of an executive jet...
...Throughout its crisis years after 1966, The New Yorker audience actually grew in numbers...
...This time the subject was a report from the village of Ben Sue in Vietnam...
...It was then that ad pages began their drastic disappearance...
...Circulation remained the same, but the magazine had become the victim, as it had formerly been the beneficiary, of an iron rule of advertisingsupported media: It is less important that people buy your publication (or listen to your program) than that they be "the right kind" of people...
...The New Yorker faced this problem but it did not fire the editor...
...There are some homely products, like a Jeep station wagon...
...Newspapers, magazines, and radio and television operators publicly boast of their audience size, which is a significant factor...
...They celebrate the ostentatious jet set...
...In Saigon, Schell was liked and "adopted" by the colonels, perhaps because he had proper establishment connections: He carried an expired Harvard Crimson press pass and his father was a successful Manhattan lawyer...
...In 1966, The New Yorker sold 6,100 pages of ads...
...By the 1980s, The New Yorker was economically healthy again...
...The onset of The New Yorker's malady can be traced to July 15,1967...
...You stagnate...
...A New Yorker staff member recalled that in 1967, "Our writers would come back from speaking on campuses and say that the kids are reading The New Yorker out loud in the dormitories...
...When there is a conflict between the printouts and an independent editor, the printouts win...
...But the majority of the losses came from a more impersonal process, one of profound significance to the character of contemporary American mass media...
...The standard cure for "bad demographics" in newspapers, magazines, radio, and television is simple: Change the content...
...William Shawn, a Dickensian man, modest in manner and speech, reddens in indignation when asked whether, during the critical 1966-1974 period, the business leaders of the magazine informed him that his editorial content was attracting the wrong kind of reader...
...Years after the near-fatal disease struck The New Yorker, when recovery had set in, the magazine's Market Research Department commissioned a professional survey to analyze its subscribers...
...If this apolitical organ of the elite said the war was morally DEAN VIETOR wrong, it was saying it to the country's establishment...
...This other way is bad for our entire society and we're suffering from it in almost all forms of communications...
...The disastrous loss of advertising occurred despite a continued high level of circulation which, to lay observers, would seem to be the only statistic needed to indicate a magazine's success...
...The assumption of his hosts was that the nice kid from Harvard would be impressed with the power and the purpose of the American mission...
...It happens regularly...
...At the same time, the magazine was giving the message to a quite different constituency...
...While other magazines assume that modern Americans don't read, New Yorker articles are incredibly long and weighted with detail...
...The military gave him treatment ordinarly reserved for famous correspondents sympathetic to the war...
...There were growing popular protests, but the mass marches were yet to come...
...What do we give them?' "There is a fallacy in that calculation...
...If an editor refuses or fails to change, the editor is fired...
...William Shawn would have "changed editorial," which would have meant dropping the insistent line on the war in Vietnam, or he would have been fired...
...The fallacy is if you edit that way, to give back to the readers only what they think they want, you'll never give them something new they didn't know about...
...That clearly was not happening at The New Yorker...
...The magazine's net profits shrank from the 1966 level of $3 million to less than $1 million...
...The ad pursued the theme that magazines are superior for advertising because they don't want readers who aren't going to buy...
...40.1 per cent collected original paintings and sculptures...
...It is an idiosyncrasy in modern media, owned by heirs to the founders who regard it as an institution to be supported in foul weather as well as fair and who are wedded to an idea normally given only lip service: total freedom for the editors...
...I don't want to know because we edit the magazine for ourselves and hope there will be people like ourselves and people like our writers who will find it interesting and worthwhile...
...I find that obnoxious...
...It gradually sank in on me that The New Yorker was being read by young people...
...They are intended to show the advertising industry that the demographics of the publication or station are "correct...
...Even in advertisements for products that cost less than $5,000, the characters seem to come from adjacent ads where cuff links are offered at $675, earrings at $3,500, a bracelet at $6,000, a brooch at $14,000...
...The magazine's cartoons ridicule many of its readers, the fashionably affluent who are portrayed in their Upper East Side penthouses speaking Ivy League patois...
...That's how people learn and grow...
...If there was too much politics, it was because politics became more important and it was on our minds...
...A display of Jaeger-Le Coulture advises that the wrist watch "can be pivoted to reveal...
...The general manager of Rolling Stone expressed it when that magazine wanted to attract a higher level of advertiser: "We had to deliver a more highquality reader...
...They do not urge people to read and listen...
...Like all wars, this one was mutually brutal...
...94.0 per cent had attended college or had degrees (21.8 per cent had Ph.D.s...
...In the place of the Vietnam reporting and commentary there would have been less controversial material that would adjust demographics back to the affluent population of buying age and assuage the anger of those corporations that disliked the magazine's position on the war...
...Ordinarily, this is a happy event in the life of a magazine...
...they want affluent readers...
...He answered: "Are you kidding...
...For the edification of prospective advertisers in The New Yorker, its salespeople could display 134 pages of statistical tables that showed that the magazine's readers were 58.5 per cent male, 63.8 per cent married (6.6 per cent widowed, 8.1 per cent separated or divorced...
...In 1967, a strange disease struck...
...Copyright © 1983 by Ben H. Bagdikian...
...And the Americans were not winning the war...
...It's just this back-and-forth and you end up with the networks, TV, and the movies...
...The whole thing begins to be circular...
...The New Yorker's circulation remained the same, but the number of ad pages dropped disastrously...
...Over the years, the magazine was the envy of the periodical industry in the standard measure of financial success—the number of advertising pages sold annually...
...Whatever change took place did so gradually and spontaneously as we saw the world...
...We never talk about 'the readers,'" Shawn said...
...That issue of the magazine carried a typically long report under the typically ambiguous title "Reporter at Large...
...The rhetoric usually has little relation to reality...
...But advertisers live in the present...
...In an era when magazine editors regard covers with eye-catching headlines and striking graphics as imperative for survival, New Yorker covers typically are subdued watercolors of idyllic scenes...
...I didn't know it in any formal way...
...It would be unthinkable for the advertising and business people to tell me that," he says...
...The "right kind" usually means affluent consumers eighteen to forty-nine years of age, the heavy buying years, with abovemedian family income...
...They seem to be filled with statistics of little interest to potential subscribers or viewers...
...Amagazine industry executive was asked if a magazine owned by a conventional corporation would have supported Shawn during the lean years...
...New Yorker advertisements are in a different world...
...Newspapers and magazines in the main do not want merely readers...
...In a few years, 2,500 pages of ads disappeared, a loss of almost 50 per cent...
...The new tendency is to discourage this creative process and kill originality...
...Fill the publication or the programs with material that will attract the kind of people the advertisers want...
...Now magazines aren't started with the desire for someone to express what he believes...
...By 1981, The New Yorker had recovered enough of its high-quality demographics to make it a desirable carrier for a full-page advertisement by the Magazine Publishers Association...
...The year before was a record one for The New Yorker...
...Editorial doctrine on other leading magazines calls for short punchy sentences, but The New Yorker is almost the last repository of the style and tone of Henry David Thoreau and Matthew Arnold, its chaste, oldfashioned columns breathing the quietude of Nineteenth Century essays...
...These are components of demographics, the study of population characteristics...
...Christmas ads offer gold, diamond-encrusted wristwatches without prices, the implied message being that if you have to ask you have no business looking...
...Neither the My Lai massacre nor the Tet offensive had occurred, and the exposure of the Pentagon Papers detailing a long history of government lying about Indochina was still four years away...
...they want rich ones...
...An easy explanation would be that conservative corporations withdrew their ads in political protest...
...In other words, the elite audience was "the right kind" for advertising expensive merchandise...
...Used by arrangement with Beacon Press, Boston...
...nor did the editor "change editorial...
...71.0 per cent were in business, industry, or professions...
...There is always a need for some younger readers so that when older subscribers die the magazine will not die with them...
...Were it not for the incontrovertible behavior of The New Yorker during the Vietnam war, it would be difficult not to regard Shawn's words as the standard mythic rhetoric...
...Younger editors and writers are growing up in that atmosphere...
...We want to edit the magazine to give the audience what they want...
...The full-page ads of other newspapers, magazines, and broadcast networks in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal are often puzzling to the lay reader...
...Many college students will form the affluent elite of the future, but at the moment they are not buying $10,500 wristwatches and $14,000 brooches...
...Thereafter, The New Yorker in issue after issue spoke simply and clearly against the war...
...A Jean Patou perfume ad has no vulgar listing of price but says in bold letters what the spirit of all New Yorker ads seems to proclaim: "So rare . . . and available to so few...
...Most newspapers, including the two most influential dailies in the country, The New York Times and The Washington Post, editorially supported the war...
...Schell produced what Shawn called "a perfect piece of New Yorker reporting...
...Shawn noted that the Time-Life and Reader's Digest empires succeeded because they were started by editors who expressed their own values regardless of the market and thereby established an identity that made for long-range success...
...We sometimes publish a piece that I'm afraid not more than one hundred readers will want...
...But The New Yorker remains an anomaly in the world of American media of the 1980s...
...To be silent when something is going on that shouldn't be going on would be cowardly...
...But unlike the typical industry ad, New Yorker promotional ads are limited to stressing the quality of the writing...
...Increasingly, editorial content of publications and broadcasting is dictated by the computer printouts on advertising agency desks, not the other way around...
...But Schell was appalled...
...The New Yorker was the voice of the elite, the repository of advertisements for the hedonistic rich, of genteel essays on the first day of spring, of temperate profiles of aesthetes, of humor so sophisticated that it seemed designed solely for intelligent graduates of the best schools...
...My reaction was that we should do nothing about it...
...That seems to be a heartwarming morality lesson in the rewards of integrity...
...I don't want to speak about our readers as a 'market.' I don't want them to feel that they are just consumers to us...
...It was not the first publication to do so, but at the time most important media followed the general line that the war was needed to stop international communism and save the Vietnamese, and that the United States was on the verge of victory...
...Ben H. Bagdikian, a professor in the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, has written media criticism for The Progressive and many other publications...
...The story, which ran in the July 15,1967, issue, told in clear, quiet detail what the assault on one village meant to the villagers and to the American soldiers...
...Shawn's words are standard rhetoric of publishers and editors when they are asked about separation of editorial independence and advertising...
...Dividends per share, $10.93 in 1955, were down to $3.67 by 1970...
...In addition to attending the daily military briefing sessions in Saigon, the basis for most reports back to the United States, Schell was also taken on helicopter assaults and bombing and strafing missions and given ground transportation to battle scenes...
...Schell returned to the United States disturbed by his findings...
...19.3 per cent were in top management...
...Who the readers are I really don't want to know...
...Most people in the industry believe that in 1966 the magazine attained the largest number of advertising pages sold in a year by any magazine of general circulation in the history of publishing...
...This article is adapted from his new book, "The Media Monopoly...
...and the median age was 48.4...
...This is the standing head for New Yorker articles dealing in depth with subjects as diverse as the history of oranges, the socialization of rats, and the culture of an Irish saloon...
Vol. 47 • May 1983 • No. 5
