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On the floor I visit, the only area that is not dead quiet is the magazine’s legendary fact-checkers department, where people are talking on the phone. The New Yorker is “a living thing”, the magazine’s editorial director Henry Finder tells me. “There’s a certain resistance to indirection,” he says in response to a question on the magazine’s style and possible friction with writers, “but we know that to be a real writer is to be concerned about not sounding like everybody else, and The New Yorker prides itself above all else on being a magazine of writing, not just information. We’re not just decanting knowledge, we’re purveying stories.” Finder says that indirection, according to the magazine founder and first editor Harold Ross, is the tendency to presuppose a fact that has not been established.
The New Yorker has been around since 1925, and has about 1.1 million subscribers now, Finder tells me. For much of its existence, it has been considered a well- respected magazine, a symbol of discernment, and its heft has only grown in recent times. Finder has been with The New Yorker since 1994, and took over as editorial director in 1997. That is a year before David Remnick took over from Tina Brown as editor of the magazine, and it is Finder that Remnick directs me to, when I ask who edits him.
Remnick and I first met earlier this year, on a small plane to Jaipur, and had a conversation ranging from the problems of Kingfisher Airlines to luck in careers to writing and fiction to the fall of communism in Russia and much else besides.
This time it is a more structured chat, but no less eclectic in range. I start by asking him what he makes of the grim prophecies about journalism. “We are all prone to, victim to, and sometimes joyously involved in our devices, both for good reasons and stupid reasons and in between, and find ourselves looking at and reading things that are maybe not the most edifying things in the world,” he says. “But the whole magazine is devoted to the proposition that there is a large number of people, thank God, who want depth and want deep reporting, or when it comes to fiction, deep emotional involvement, because human beings require it. We require more than soundbites and banalities and clichés and brevity and tweets and all the rest.”
“We need it,” he exclaims. “Because it helps us be human. And understand ourselves more thoroughly and operate at a higher plane. I mean, I’m an idealist about this,” he says, while acknowledging that business matters and day-to-day concerns running a magazine are far from idealistic. (...)
You can be sure The New Yorker takes its quotes seriously. Enter the legendary fact-checking department. It all started with a piece found to be “riddled with errors,” according to the head of the fact checking department, Peter Canby, who says he cannot divulge more of the story. Everything, from long pieces to cartoons to poetry… everything is checked. When it comes to a cartoon, there are details, like which side of a blazer the buttons are on, or in a poem, historical references. Wherever there is a fact, it can be checked.
The New Yorker has 16 fact checkers, including Canby, who started out working as a ‘checker’ part time. He split the job with someone, as they both also focused on their own writing. Canby’s book on Maya Indians, The Heart of the Sky: Travels Among the Maya was published in 1992. He started working at The New Yorker again in 1994 and says he does think being a writer helps him in this job. “I would say most people here, to some degree, aspire to be writers. Many of them are successful. Many of them have gone on to be editors at The New Yorker or elsewhere. So it’s a very talented group, with, for me, too much turnover.”
He looks for generalists, he says, highlighting the language expertise. “We have lots of languages here, we always have. To some degree we are kind of captive to our reputation. We have, I think, typically between seven and eight or nine languages spoken fluently to varying degrees, including French and Spanish. We have a German speaker now, also a Mandarin speaker and an Urdu speaker. That isn’t really strictly necessary for us, because we can hire translators for our foreign pieces, but it seems to be part of our sensibility,” he says.
“I also hire for other things. Naturally, people who want to be in this department typically have a literature background or history or something, but we also want people who know economics and science,” he says, emphasising that checkers have to be fast learners. “A lot of this magazine is put together on a very very tight schedule, and our schedules change at an almost frightening rate. We get very long and complicated pieces coming late one week and, say, closing the next Thursday, that are, say, 10,000 words or 12,000 word [pieces] and I’ll have to put two or three checkers on those.”
What they do on those pieces is not just look at the details, but also at the way arguments are constructed. “I’ve come to think of it as reporting in reverse. We kind of take the piece apart, take it down to its components and put it back together again.”
by Amrita Tripathi, Open | Read more:
