I just can’t stop, can I? At least I don’t. I’ve been marinating, just a bit, in New Yorker history, catching up with Gigi Mahon’s The Last Days of The New Yorker (1988), chronicling the sale of the New Yorker to S.I. Newhouse, and Ben Yagoda’s full-blown history of the mag, Around Town: The New Yorker and the World it Made (2000). Among other things, Yagoda recounts the epic battle of the business folks at the New Yorker to convince legendary editor William Shawn to accept “advertorials”—a “word” that surely must have made Shawn physically ill.
An advertorial, as the name strongly suggests, is simply self-prostitution (is there any other kind?) of a magazine. Instead of supplying its own copy and selling space to advertisers around it, the magazine surrenders X number of pages to advertisers, who supply up-beat, non-offensive, ad-friendly text intended to put readers in a buying frame of mind.
It’s amazing to me that Shawn agreed to allow advertorials at all—things must have been truly desperate for the magazine back in 1970—but he did. The advertorials were one factor in the New Yorker’s return to profitability in the seventies, but in the eighties the magic appeared to be departing. According to Gigi, a 1986 advertorial that ran a measly three pages was a grim portent of impending financial ruin. Of course, we know, as Gigi didn’t, that the New Yorker survived the eighties, and the nineties, and the oughties as well. But today, with advertorials on my mind, I glanced at the current anniversary issue on the stands and, naturally, came across one—a two pager. Things are definitely tough all over.
Afterwords
Gigi tells a story about Mr. Newhouse that doesn’t seem to get much circulation these days. Back in the eighties, when newspapers were still profitable, Newhouse owned the Cleveland Plain Dealer. In 1981 Joseph Cole bought the rival paper, the Cleveland Press, for $1 million, and announced his determination to stay in business for a long time. But a year later he shut the paper down and sold the subscription list to Newhouse for $14.5 million. A little later, Cole also sold Newhouse a shopper’s guide for the Cleveland area to Newhouse for another $8 million. Collusion, anyone? Fraud? Restraint of trade? Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department said no.
