The Scoop
After a nine-month span in 2020, in which social media furors forced the resignations of editors at Condé Nast titles like Bon Appétit and Teen Vogue, as well as a top video executive, Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch and human resources chief Stan Duncan decided they’d better be ready in case an editor gets hit by a bus or another cancellation.
The new regime is simple: Each year, each top executive at Condé Nast’s One World Trade Center headquarters submits a shortlist of four to six people who could replace them.
The lists remain secret. But none draws more internal speculation than the one assembled by New Yorker editor David Remnick. Remnick, 65, embodies a brand that sits atop American intellectual culture across literary fiction and liberal politics, and a magazine that has largely been held harmless from Condé’s slow, painful decline. But in recent months, the longtime New Yorker editor has increasingly mused to peers about his inevitable departure — and who might take his place.
Remnick, per three sources, will stay at least through next year’s celebration of the New Yorker’s centennial, which is expected to be threaded through the magazine’s coverage. The devoted community of New Yorker aficionados and insiders believe he might leave then, or when his tenure touches three decades in July 2028. He has told colleagues he doesn’t want to overstay his welcome.
“No institution worth its salt fails to think about the future, including succession, but I did sign a new contract recently and very happily,” Remnick told Semafor in an email. “Also, I’ve gotten extremely practiced at picking talking-dog cartoons over the years. We are training a new generation at this rarefied art, and we’ll see the results in due time.”
Max’s view
A New Yorker without David Remnick is difficult to imagine. This year, he’ll become the second-longest-tenured editor in the magazine’s history, and one of only five to ever hold the job. (When Remnick accepted the job, the magazine did not even have a website; it wouldn’t for another three years.) Over the last quarter-century, he has been the public face of the magazine and its voice on The New Yorker Radio Hour.
But now his list of potential successors is growing increasingly relevant, as the company begins to imagine a future without him at the helm.
The New Yorker’s hiring processes are legendary moments of intellectual drama. In 1987, New Yorker writers protested the hiring of a high-profile publishing executive, Robert Gottlieb, to replace longtime leader William Shawn. Gottlieb made some modest changes — more four-letter words, the Times reported — though he stayed for only five years. Then, owner S.I. Newhouse hired Vanity Fair’s Tina Brown to bring shorter, buzzier articles to the magazine, producing a wave of horror on the Upper West Side equaled only by the day The New York Times introduced color photography.
In 1998, Newhouse offered the job to Slate’s founding editor, Michael Kinsley. The two men went out to a celebratory dinner at which they discussed how to keep the runner-up, star New Yorker correspondent David Remnick, from leaving. Fifteen minutes after the dinner, Newhouse withdrew the offer to Kinsley and offered the job to Remnick. (“It was not pleasant at all,” a “drained and angry” Kinsley told the Washington Post. “I’m glad I found out what this guy is like to work for before I took the job.”)
The hiring challenge comes in part because of the long list of qualifications leadership, staff, and readers expect from the magazine’s top editor — and in part because of the magazine’s singular role in American liberal intellectual culture, one that is currently being challenged most strenuously by The Atlantic.
In addition to serving as its head of state, the next editor will need to be an intellectual force who can synthesize both the week’s events and literature, arts, and culture. They’ll have to possess an astute editorial mind that can provide a last line of defense on some of the most famously dense and detailed (and occasionally dangerous) journalism now published in a weekly magazine.
And they’ll have to navigate a political landscape stubbornly dominated by Donald Trump and an intellectual left deeply riven by a decade of culture wars and the current conflict in Gaza.
In conversations with dozens of New Yorker insiders and people close to the publication, a long list of obvious and less-obvious names emerged, which fell generally into three categories.
The competitors: Atlantic CEO and former Wired and New Yorker digital editor Nick Thompson has frequently been mentioned as a strong candidate for the role. Vanity Fair editor Radhika Jones, who has led the magazine through a deep cycle of budget cuts, was once viewed as an obvious candidate to follow in Brown’s footsteps, and she remains a serious contender. Remnick has spoken highly of New York Review of Books editor Emily Greenhouse, and New Yorker staffers mentioned Paris Review editor Emily Stokes, Yale Review editor Meghan O’Rourke, and New York Times opinion editor Vanessa Mobley as plausible candidates.
The star journalists: Before he was hired, Remnick hadn’t been editor of a publication since editing his high school newspaper. In that spirit, the company could hire one of its star reporters, such as Columbia Journalism School Dean Jelani Cobb, the narrative whiz Patrick Radden Keefe or the wide-ranging music critic Kelefa Sanneh. Masha Gessen has been its clarion voice on Trump and on the rise of authoritarianism, and in 2010 even founded a sort of Russian New Yorker called Snob. Condé Nast could also look to The New York Times, where the investigative journalist Jodi Kantor, columnist Lydia Polgreen, and opinion writer and podcaster Ezra Klein each have the reach across culture and politics the job seems to require. Another wild card: the cerebral MSNBC host Chris Hayes, who has written for the magazine.
The insiders: Condé Nast could also select from the pool of editors who currently get the magazine to print each week and ensure that new, quality articles appear on the website. They lack the high profiles of the last three hires, but would ensure continuity. New Yorker staffers generally see Daniel Zalewski, the features editor, and deputy editor Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn as the most likely in-house replacements for Remnick, and digital editor Michael Luo’s name is also in the mix.
Ultimately, the decision won’t be Remnick’s, but instead will be in the hands of the Newhouse family, which still controls Condé Nast parent Advance Publications. But whoever Condé Nast selects will have their hands full.
The next leader will have to navigate the same difficult political environment of Condé Nast that Gottlieb once described as “like sticking your head in a pencil sharpener.” The New Yorker is a profitable part of a fashion magazine company otherwise beset by questions about its future direction and ability to maintain relevance (and revenue) in an age where it no longer serves as the most important tastemaker. Condé’s gossiping masses (and there are a lot of them) were taken aback when it imposed layoffs on The New Yorker, which has often been shielded from cuts to other parts of the company. The financial uncertainty has also created a deep rift between Condé Nast’s upper management and unionized staff, who have been unafraid to embarrass executives and threaten revenue when angry.
And the New Yorker faces its own financial hurdles. In the years before Remnick arrived, the magazine reportedly lost $175 million; one of his achievements is turning around its finances. The New Yorker has grown its digital footprint and subscriptions in recent years, and according to the Alliance for Audited Media, the magazine has about 1.2 million paying subscribers, one of the highest numbers in American magazine journalism. Yet the magazine’s subscriptions have plateaued and even dipped slightly in recent years, while those of competitors like The Atlantic have grown.
Looming over the decision is another specter that has haunted The New Yorker for more than half a century: The allegation that, unchecked, it can drift into dullness.
The charge came most bitingly in the pages of the New York magazine in 1965 from Tom Wolfe, in an essay titled, “Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead!” (The essay is now available only in an essay collection with the unfortunate title, “Hooking Up,” but Remnick himself recalled it in a 1995 New York Review essay, summarizing its critiques as claiming the magazine had become “a humorless, genteel museum piece of middlebrow culture living off the literary capital accumulated in the days of [co-founder] Harold Ross.”
The worry now is whether Remnick’s New Yorker, too, is becoming a museum of itself. Alarm bells rang this year when The New Yorker was shut out of the National Magazine Awards, though some staff are quick to note that it won two Polk Awards in March.
The difficult qualifications for the job and the uncertainty of the media landscape require conceding that whoever inherits Remnick’s title will inevitably struggle to have all of his skills.
In conversations with staff, I joked that former President Barack Obama might have enough qualifications to get the job if he decided to throw his hat in the ring. (An Obama spokesperson told Semafor that they respected Remnick, but that I “knew the answer” to whether Obama would be up for being the New Yorker’s next editor.)
Asked in an email whether he thought Obama would be a good editor, Remnick told Semafor, “He would need to know that the Portuguese Water Dog, while hypoallergenic, is not funny.”
Corrections: Tiny Mummies was published in New York, and the collection in which it was reprinted remains in print.