For Jon Lee Anderson, writing a regular article takes him three months. Three weeks for reporting. Three weeks to write the text until he finds a draft that satisfies him enough to show it to his editor. And three weeks of editing and fact-checking until it is published. Add some unforeseen events - for example, "the editor may be distracted with other things," explains Anderson - and it adds up to three months. At that pace, he produces an average of three to four articles a year. His record is five.
Anderson is not a lazy person. On the contrary, he is one of the most prestigious (and controversial) war reporters in the world, especially regarding two countries he has written about: Venezuela and Spain. The issue is that he works at TheNew Yorker, the highbrow weekly - literally, "of high brow," although in reality, that expression means "for intellectuals" - which turns one hundred years old this week.
This magazine that epitomizes sophistication in journalism reaches its centenary in a healthy state, with 1.24 million subscribers, almost 25% more than all the paper sales it had when its current editor, David Remnick, took the reins 26 years ago. Thus, the New Yorker "has managed to consolidate and expand its cult status," explains Anderson in a phone conversation from Dorset, in southern England, where he lives.
That combination of current affairs reporting, political commentary (invariably criticizing Republicans), essays, fiction, and poetry sprinkled with dozens of cartoons is a formula that, inexplicably, continues to succeed in this 2025 when it is assumed that we should all have attention deficit disorder, although it is also true that now there are podcasts, videos, and online articles that have become challenging for the veterans.
The New Yorker was born, quite fittingly for what is now its image, in a series of poker games at the Algonquin Hotel, near Times Square, where you can still enjoy some of the best cocktails in the area served in an atmosphere of total and absolute decadence. It was there that Jane Grant - the first female reporter in the history of TheNew York Times - convinced her husband, also a journalist, Harold Ross, to butter up one of the regulars at those nights of cards and drinks indecently: the banker Raoul Fleichsmann.
Jane Grant, the first female reporter of 'The New York Times,' and her husband, Harold Ross, founded the magazine after a poker game
Ross and Grant wanted Fleichsmann to put up the money to finance a satirical, somewhat frivolous magazine about Manhattan's current affairs to compete with Vanity Fair. It was going to be a magazine for very sophisticated people. Not in vain, in the promotional brochure of the New Yorker, Ross calmly explained that the weekly was not going to be made thinking "of the old ladies of Dubuque," a town in Iowa with 40,000 inhabitants not famous for anything at all. One hundred years later, the reason why the founder of the New Yorker chose Dubuque, precisely, remains a mystery. But the message was clear: New York is the center not of the world but, rather, of the Universe.
Fleichsmann took the bait and put up $25,000 of the time and the office space. On February 21, 1925, the New Yorker was launched, with its first cover: a cartoon of a man with a top hat, aristocratic pose, and Regency-era clothing (between 1790 and 1820), looking at a butterfly, based on another by the French artist and dandy Alfred d'Orsay made a century earlier. Over time, the character was named Eustace Tilley and became the emblem of the New Yorker, perhaps because it represents the aesthetic and cosmopolitan air of the weekly, which has an exclusive character - including its own spelling rules - that sometimes makes it seem like a private club.
But, although Tilley gave off an aristocratic vibe, the magazine's start was a disaster. "We are not proud of the early issues of the New Yorker," Grant would recount in her autobiography Ross, The New Yorker, and I, published in 1968. By summer, the failure was such that Fleichsmann was about to cut off the money supply. And then, the miracle happened. Precisely, as a result of something that, one hundred years later, could happen again at any moment in the United States: a trial of a high school teacher, John T. Scopes, for teaching Darwin's Theory of Evolution. In covering the trial, the New Yorker began to find its style and audience.
It was an exclusive club that almost failed. The trial of a teacher for teaching evolution saved it
History does not repeat itself but, as Mark Twain said (who died before the New Yorker was born), "it often rhymes." A century later, the magazine founded by Ross - or, rather, co-founded by him and Grant, as modern historiography believes that her role was minimized in her time - faces a United States marked by a cultural war similar to the Scopes trial.
And that has consequences. The retirement of New Yorker's editor, David Remnick, was expected for this 2025, after the centennial celebration. But now it seems to have been postponed sine die due to the return of Donald Trump to the presidency. At a time when the White House is exerting unprecedented pressure on the media, to the extent of, for example, kicking the AP news agency out of the Oval Office because it continues to call the "Gulf of Mexico" what Trump has renamed as the "Gulf of America," Remnick, they say, wants to stay on the front lines and be part of the resistance against Trump.
Becoming the editor of the New Yorker is not easy. In a hundred years, there have only been five. Remnick has held the position since 1998, when at 39 years old, he succeeded another legendary figure in American journalism - although she is British by birth - Tina Brown, who has also led publications like Vanity Fair, Tatler, and the website The Daily Beast. While in her six years at the helm of the New Yorker, Brown brought the weekly down to the level of ordinary human beings from the unattainable heights where her predecessors had placed it, in the over twenty-five years that he has been directing the magazine, Remnick has made two fundamental changes: he has made the New Yorker a very political magazine and has carried out the digital transformation.
First, he did it of his own free will. Second, because if he didn't carry it out, the New Yorker would enter a terminal decline, a very real possibility around 2008, when the Atlantic took the lead online. Even today, both publications have practically the same number of subscribers, something that would have been an insult to the members of Eustace Tilley's private club 15 years ago.
The New Yorker had always given space to politics and had always been center-left. But with Remnick, this was accentuated. One of his first decisions was to commission Hendrick Hertzberg, who had been a speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter, to write, every week, the first article of The Talk of the Town (translatable as something like The Town's Gossip), to unleash his vitriolic (and, like everything in the New Yorker, incredibly skillful) pen to skewer George W. Bush. The investigations by Seymour Hersh - also a winner of the International Journalism Award from EL MUNDO, which this newspaper awards annually - on the tortures carried out by the US in Abu Ghraib prison, and those by Jane Meyer on the dirty war against Al Qaeda placed the weekly at the forefront of world exclusives.
Thus, the New Yorker began to reach beyond New York and the United States and opened up to the world to the point that in 2000 it began to be sold in Madrid at FNAC. Also, in a surreal detail reminiscent of the stories that Woody Allen has published in the weekly, in a kiosk on Peñascales street (Madrid), behind Doctor Esquerdo, located exactly opposite the home of the author of these lines.
"Before, only diplomats or university professors read it. Now the audience is much broader."
Politics also brought difficulties. Remnick, who has always been a staunch supporter of Israel, published an article defending the invasion of Iraq. A few weeks earlier, Jeffrey Goldberg, who is now the editor of the Atlantic and who served in the Israeli military in a prison where most of the prisoners are Palestinians, wrote an article based on sources from the George W. Bush administration claiming that Saddam Hussein had helped Al Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks. But the change was worth it. In an increasingly global world, the New Yorker's perspective reached a much larger audience. This is something that Anderson, who has been writing for the weekly since Tina Brown's time, has noticed. "When I started at the New Yorker, only diplomats or university professors read it; now, the audience is much broader," he states.
The online transformation has been another battle. The New Yorker has not been known for its speed in adapting to anything (taking three months to write an article is an example of this, although the result is worth it), and the integration between the two newsrooms - print and web - has been complicated. This is something that puts the disciples of Eustace Tilley on par with other journalists worldwide. Just like the arrival of budget cuts.
In 2015, Hersh stopped collaborating with the weekly. "I never wanted to be staff, to maintain my independence, but in the end, I left precisely for that reason: to maintain my independence," he explained last week over the phone to La Lectura. In reality, one of the factors that led him to make the decision, as he himself has acknowledged, was that Remnick told him that instead of traveling to another continent alone to interview a source from whom he didn't know if he would get material for a report, he should call on the phone. According to Hersh, Remnick had just come from a meeting with Condé Nast's management, and the first thing he said upon seeing the veteran journalist was, "They've flayed me alive."
For decades, the New Yorker lived in its own world. Anderson recalls that in the 90s, when he lived in Granada, his editor didn't like to use email, so every time he finished a draft of an article, the New Yorker would send it, via London, to New York, where it would be held in a hotel until the final version was approved.
These were common practices in a magazine where money was not important. And it experienced a harsh awakening in 2003 when Condé Nast forced Remnick to make several layoffs, including prominent writers like the humorist Andy Borowitz or the Culture editor Michael Agger. Although there are no official figures, American media have speculated that the adjustment could have affected 5% of the staff. This is very little compared to what the press is experiencing (for example, The Washington Post laid off 30% two years ago). But for the editorial team, it was traumatic.
But now it's time to celebrate. The New Yorker's century will be commemorated in style with, among other initiatives, the Netflix premiere of a documentary by the Oscar-winning short film director Marshall Curry - who has filmed, among other journalists from the weekly, Anderson in Damascus after the fall of Bashar al-Assad - and a party at Jean's restaurant in New York where the invitation requests attendees to come "in festive attire." Eustace Tilley's private club turns one hundred, and it's time to celebrate.