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All the same, Tina Brown got the thing talked about. Newsstand sales doubled during her years there. The trouble was that ad revenue didn't follow. In 1984, the year before Newhouse bought the New Yorker for $168 million, the magazine earned a modest but respectable $8 million. Circulation has climbed from 500,000 to more than 800,000 since then. But according to press reports, including a coolly murderous dissection in FORTUNE (owned by Time Inc.), Conde Nast (which is privately held, and so does not report its numbers) has lost around $175 million on the New Yorker since Newhouse took it on.
"The thing that's so distressing about this is, if Tina Brown can't make the New Yorker work, who can?" says Charles McGrath, editor of the New York Times Book Review. Is the red ink proof that there's no place in this world for a large-circulation magazine with a literary dimension? Even one that drops its pants? Or does it just mean that Conde Nast marketers didn't know what to do with their hot book? A lot of magazine industry analysts fault an ad-sales strategy that worked this way: boost circulation with rock-bottom subscriptions, then charge advertisers higher rates. But the jump in ad rates drove out some of the smaller advertisers that once filled the New Yorker's pages. And it hastened the migration of many advertisers to more specialized publications--magazines devoted to fashion, interior design, cigars, movies--where their ads could be targeted more directly to the readers likely to be interested in their products.
To make a long story short--something Tina Brown did often at the New Yorker--the magazine, which used to have an independent life within the Newhouse empire, is now to be absorbed within it, its ads sold alongside those of Vogue and Glamour. "The editor's job is to create a brilliant magazine," Brown said last week. "It's the publisher's job to sell advertising." The short story: I make the buzz; you make the bucks.
--With reporting by Harriet Barovick/New York