The New Yorker’s David Remnick talks shop

Consider this: Just five people have held the title of editor-in-chief at The New Yorker magazine in the past 100 years. David Remnick has been in possession of arguably the most esteemed job in American magazine publishing for more than 26 years.

In that time, there have been numerous presidents, global conflicts, cultural wars and Patti Smith profiles. Through it all, The New Yorker has endured. In a world of rolling media layoffs and plummeting circulation and subscription revenue, where few publications can boast 1.3 million paying subscribers or justify the employment of 28 fact-checkers who are primarily involved in the fastidious editing of long-form journalism, the iconic magazine has fortified itself under Remnick’s governance.

His ascent to the industry’s highest echelon was meteoric in retrospect. Remnick grew up in Hackensack, New Jersey, in a mildly political house headed by his dentist father and teacher mother. Bill Maher ran in his social circle. He got into Princeton but took a gap year after his first year, which was spent partly in Paris busking on the subway. He returned to college invigorated, and to his parents’ chagrin — his brother took their preferred path into medicine — he embarked on a career in journalism.

Remnick’s voracious work ethic is legendary among staff. He reads every word of every issue — often more than once — and is responsible for writing ambitious, deeply reported features that appear regularly in the magazine. Then there’s his weekly podcast and radio show, The New Yorker Radio Hour.

“It's true that some editors don't write — in fact, probably most of them don't,” Remnick told me. “But that's part of the package with me, and most of all, it's allowed because I try to do it on the margins of time. I’ve made three big trips to the Middle East since October 7, and I hope to make another one sometime soon. But I would never write if I thought it was interfering or detracting from the magazine. And if I'm thinking about writing something and a writer on the staff wants that (subject), I get the hell out of the way as soon as possible.”

So far, The New Yorker seems to have evaded the blowback that other press outlets have endured from the new White House administration. Before assuring Remnick I’m not being theatrical, I ask if, contemplating the next four years, he frets about ever going to jail for something that The New Yorker may or may not publish.

“I don't relish the danger,” he says. “But here's what I'm going to do: We are going to do our jobs, and come what may, we will report hard, deeply, fairly and accurately. And if that gets us in trouble, then there will be a drama. But that's what we're on Earth to do. If we're not doing that, what the hell are we doing? I've been doing this for quite a long time. Why, at this point in my life, would I want to sell that out?”

Remnick’s first full-time gig was as a sports reporter at The Washington Post. When a slot on the paper’s Moscow bureau opened up in the late 1980s, he went after it. His family’s background — his Jewish forebears lived in shtetls in Russian territory, but he doesn't consider himself Russian — was not necessarily the key factor in taking the gig.

Remnick had just married Esther Fein, and the two saw it as an ideal adventure with which to begin their marriage. Having studied some Russian in school, he and Fein immersed themselves in the language to get to a passable level. Perhaps most intriguingly, his wife worked as a Moscow correspondent at The New York Times, so the two were both confidants and rivals.

When the couple eventually returned to the U.S., the illness of both of his parents scuttled any plans to join The Washington Post’s D.C. desk or, as they had envisioned, work on a Middle Eastern bureau. It was clear they would need to be based in New York for the foreseeable future.

Remnick wrote a book on Moscow and, while on book leave from The Post, wrote his first feature for The New Yorker. Not long after, while Tina Brown was plotting from the Vanity Fair editor’s chair to take over the top job at The New Yorker, she met with Remnick one day in the city. When she eventually did become The New Yorker’s editor-in-chief, Remnick joined as a feature writer. An early New Yorker reporting assignment was covering the infamous Mike Tyson “ear biting” fight in Las Vegas.

Just over five years into his tenure at the magazine — with little warning and virtually no management experience — he was thrust into the top job. That was 1998. Today, at 66, having nursed The New Yorker through various periods of tumult, Remnick has earned the ability to revel in something of a victory lap for the magazine’s 100th anniversary.

Remnick joined me last Friday for a wide-ranging conversation about the magazine, the media environment and his own extraordinary trajectory. Fridays being a remote-work day at Condé Nast — and the day he closes the magazine for print each week at The New Yorker — Remnick was holding court in the den of his Manhattan apartment.

After our conversation, Reminck was headed to the New York Public Library to preside over the opening of a significant exhibition for the anniversary.

Remnick is charitable when I make a hackneyed effort to contrast The New Yorker’s 100th anniversary with “Saturday Night Live’s” recent 50th anniversary.

He notes one of his writers, Susan Morrison, just wrote a book on “SNL” impresario Lorne Michaels, and that as well as running a long excerpt in the magazine last month, Remnick hosted a party for the book at his apartment, to which Michaels showed up.

“Well, he is the coolest,” Remnick says. “I wish this book had existed 20 years ago, because on one level it's a biography of this huge and very creative figure in television, but it's also a lesson in the management of talented people.”

He pauses for a moment. “I could have used the tips,” he says with a chuckle.

I ask Remnick if the 100th anniversary has found him predominantly looking backward or looking forward.

“Inevitably there's a lot of looking back, and it's wonderful to take stock of the achievements of the past — and it's a pretty glorious one — but I am very oriented toward looking ahead. I don't need to tell you that the media business is… pick your euphemism for ‘challenged’ or ‘complicated’ or ‘tough.’ But I'm absolutely determined to see The New Yorker propelled into the future. Look around and a lot of magazines that were essential to the culture at one level or another have disappeared or are on a respirator. I know we're very fortunate we’re not even remotely in that position.”

The New Yorker has long been more than just a magazine. In fact, for many of its subscribers, the print product is nearly invisible.

“We've taken on new things that we had to learn to be excellent at — for example, to have a daily website, which for us was more culturally complicated than it was for a newspaper. That took time to figure out culturally, journalistically, managerially, technologically. And the same could be said for audio and video. But we can't compromise what we've always done best and it's our calling card, which is deep, accurate reporting; fiction; essays; and all the rest.”

In our conversation, Remnick focused on:

• The managerial challenges of running The New Yorker in 2025.
• Where AI and The New Yorker might eventually meet.
• How Russia impacted his career journey.
• The combative nature of the magazine’s negotiations with the writers’ union.
• Working with a younger generation of reporters and editors.
• The impact of the Israel-Palestine conflict on his workplace.
• How he handled RTO negotiations with staff.
• How the feature stories come together in the magazine.

Here in Remnick’s own words — lightly edited for space and clarity — we go long, New Yorker-style, as he walks us through the ins and outs of maybe the best job in media today.

I totally concede and agree with the proposition that we're more distracted. There are more forms of media in the world, and maybe it takes a bit more discipline than it did 50 years ago to block out the world and put yourself in the presence of a complicated piece of writing for an hour or two. I'm not naive, and I feel it myself too. I know the lure of the phone… But I do think people want to know. And I think people want accurate, fair reporting. Considering the world we're living in of misinformation and disinformation, I think there's a huge audience yearning to read better, deeper, fairer, more accurate journalism than some of the crap that's being hurled at them.

I saw (the Semafor piece on The New York Times’ embrace of artificial intelligence). There's an intelligent bunch of people running The Times, and I don’t doubt that AI can be helpful in the reporting process. They're even using it to kind of see what might be a good idea for a headline. I don't think that's the end of the world. Spellcheck is AI in some fashion, and we've been using that for years. It’s just very primitive. We talk about AI (internally). I think as a society, part of the AI discussion is what it might do to a job — that's hardly limited to our profession. But I think the essence of what we do, the core thing of it, is not going to be done by a robot or AI. We go out into the world with a pencil or a recording device or, more to the point, our intelligence and our five senses and try to make sense of what's happening. That's a very difficult thing, and as smart as Sam Altman may be, I don't think there's a machine for that in the offing.

On a managerial level, you can fall into the trap of letting your to-do list and your schedule of meetings rule your day. It can mean that you don't have time to think and have seemingly random — but very purposefully random? — conversations with other editors and writers and artists. So you can end up being an accountant more than an editor with any creativity. In the modern world, I still find that I have to fight that.

Do I work 100 hours a week? No. It's always bored me to death when people go on and on about how hard they work. And this work is my pleasure too, so it's a little bit indistinguishable. If I'm reading a contemporary novel or piece of nonfiction, or maybe I'm bumping into a new writer I didn't know before, am I enjoying myself or working? Well, it’s conceivably both.

The print magazine is quite structured — more so than it was 50 years ago. There was a certain charming randomness in the order at which pieces came at you in the old magazine, almost to the degree where there was rarely even a tiny table of contents. William Shawn was once asked why there's no table of contents and if the reader knows what he or she is going to get. He said, ‘It's none of their business.’

The order is (derived) from the power of the art. If there's a particularly powerful photograph or illustration that might open that well of the magazine in an optimal way, that might influence the structure of a given week. Again, we're talking about the print magazine, but desktop, laptop and phone are at least as important in the structure of how we present ourselves. Maybe one day we'll project the magazine on the side of buildings, you never know, or onto your eye or in your eyeglasses generated by AI — I have no idea. We'll stay open to every possibility that comes about or is imposed on us.

The TV show ‘The Americans’ was like it was made for me. But putting my time in Russia in perspective, I work alongside Dexter Filkins and John Lee Anderson, who were in Iraq and Syria and many other very dangerous places. I lived in Moscow from the beginning of 1988 to the very end of 1991. And then periodically, I would go for longer trips, including to nasty places like Chechnya, and OK, that was no picnic, but compared to that kind of war correspondence over a sustained period where you're hurling yourself into peril daily, that was not my life in Moscow, except on very limited occasions. I was very lucky.

My wife and I got married in 1987, so spending our first few years together in Russia was an amazing way to begin a marriage. We really began our marriage in Moscow. It was a profound, shared experience that we can't help but talk about even now, you know, at the kitchen table. I've had two huge strokes of fortune. The first was to be sent to Moscow by The Washington Post, and the second was to be hired as a New Yorker writer and then be given this job —?for reasons that still surpass understanding. The last time I was in Moscow was in 2014 at the Sochi Olympics. I don't know if I'll ever be able to go back, but that's a minor consequence.

I would have stayed at The Washington Post when we finished in Russia and it would have been a happy thing. I wrote a book in the interim called Lenin's Tomb, and while that happened, Esther and I were thinking about what to do, and the likelihood was we’d have to be working in New York. My parents’ health was failing. If we had had the opportunity, we might have gone to the Middle East, but my parents were too sick. And then along came Tina Brown.

I wrote one piece for The New Yorker at the end of 1991 that was published in March, 1992, about Gorbachev's last days at the Kremlin and the last days of the Soviet Union. The piece was published as a freelancer while I was writing the book. A few months later, I got a call from Tina Brown, then the editor of Vanity Fair. Half the conversation was about The New Yorker, and I thought, ‘Why is she asking me about The New Yorker, what does she care?’ But clearly, she knew that she was going to be making this move. After she became editor, she offered me a writing job, and it took me about 11.5 seconds to say yes. I had nothing against The Washington Post, but I had already had the best job I was ever going to have there. I had been dealt an ace.

I had no experience running a place or creating a vision for an enterprise like The New Yorker. I was now responsible for other human beings and their careers and the direction of their careers and all that goes into the creative and managerial parts. I had no preparation for that. I painted houses with my brother — that was my managerial experience when I was a teenager.

The role of editor includes management, but it has to be foremost creative. If you have no mind for that, then you might as well get somebody who's the best student that year at the Harvard Business School. One of the oddities of journalism traditionally has been very often that somebody's a very good reporter and therefore it's assumed that they will be a good editor. It's not always the case. And sometimes somebody is elevated to their level of incompetence. That could easily have happened to me were it not for those colleagues of mine who gave me an education.

Google search has gone off, so traffic all across places like The New Yorker and many others has been challenged by that reality. So how can we best directly come at our readers is the challenge for the business and the technological side of things. But I have to do my work almost in defiance of this, otherwise you get unduly pessimistic. If I’d allowed myself to get unduly pessimistic when we were struggling with advertising previously, before we made the great gamble and necessary transition to a subscription-based business, I would have talked myself out of a magazine, much less a job. I genuinely believe that in a country of 330 million, and God knows how many millions more in the English-speaking world, there has to be a much wider market for something like The New Yorker. Our challenge is to reach those people.

The scale of The New York Times is a 2,000-person newsroom. We are around one-tenth of that. The Times is an immense institution that's obliged to cover everything. And we are the thing you read in addition to whatever you're keeping up on the news with. I would rather be a first-rate New Yorker than a second-rate newspaper.

Is The Atlantic a rival? A friendly one. I mean, I admire them. But we do a different thing. We overlap in some ways. They have more of a Washington identity and we are more rooted in New York, but we still cover Washington with real rigor. So sure, if they publish a big story that I know could have easily been in The New Yorker, for about 10 minutes I'm pretty steamed about it. But no forest has one tree. It's a healthy thing for The New Yorker to have a rigorous set of competitors. It's a bad thing in the newspaper world if The Washington Post is in decline. Very bad.

The New Yorker union was formed in 2018. Was it a combative process? We came out of it just fine, from my point of view, and I think the lion's share of people in the union would think so. Here's the way I would look at it… I was a member of this very same union for 10 years at The Post. Everybody was. I didn't think about it much because it was well established. What was different at The New Yorker was that there wasn't one. There was a formation of a union, and that came with its drama, yes. To be the management guy suddenly and they're unionizing (against) you, it has its tender moments.

With the first union contract, both sides needed to learn how to do this. That made things a hell of a lot more complicated than the second deal (in 2024), because there are things you have to establish in the first contract that you don't have to then go and re-establish in a second contract. We had some bumps too, signing a second contract, but it wasn't (as difficult) as the first. I remember at The Washington Post, the printers’ union went on strike for weeks and they destroyed the presses and Katherine Graham had helicopters landing on the roof. That's a real drama. So this was more frosty than fully combative. Also for the first contract, some of it took place in the pandemic. That didn't help. Everybody's grumpy. It wasn't a walk in the park, but we got through a number of things, particularly salaries on the lower end being raised and more logic in our practices about performance reviews.

You hear these older editors talk about ‘the young wokes’ and blah blah blah. But I refuse to bitch and moan. One of the true thrills of this job is working with people who are in their 20s and 30s, who know things that I don't know and who are open to learning. I find that incredibly enriching. If there's mutual respect in the air, you're not going to run into that problem as much.

We are moving from three to four days (compulsory attendance in the office). I grew up waking up Monday morning and you're there in the office all week, and that just was as natural as, you know, the sky was blue. Then you started hearing from other newspapers, well, maybe the reporters will stay home on a given day. That started to become a little regularized. Our feature writers stay home a lot for a very particular reason: They don't have a door at the office. They are more like novelists than newspaper reporters. And if they're lucky, they have a living arrangement where they don't have 14 shouting kids or barking dogs in the room where they're trying to work. The editors all come in though, the copy editors come in, the fact-checkers come in, the art department comes in. I'm going to sound like a geezer, but I think there’s value in incidental conversations and not just meetings. You think of something and bounce it off somebody, and it can be stupid or intelligent or a possibility. I don't say that as a bureaucrat but in a creative spirit. What's the right balance in the modern world? I leave that to experts in human resources.

Starting with Tina Brown's era, I've been the writer that has probably gone to Israel and that part of the world more than anybody. So I don't feel like a sharp-elbowed editor. Others have too, I know. What is absolutely imperative coming out of this is that the Palestinian voices need to be heard, as well as Israeli and American. And what's most paramount is accuracy and fairness.

I had a very interesting experience related to Israel-Palestine coverage six months ago. By then, I'd published a couple of long pieces, and we'd had any number of other things published. I was told the union wanted to get together with me and discuss our coverage of the Middle East, and I thought, ‘Here we go, it's my turn,’ right? You've seen these kinds of unpleasant, sometimes tumultuous conversations in many organizations. But it turned out to be great. Thirty of us were packed into one room. People had a lot of questions: When do you use certain words and when do you not, and are we being fair about this and what about that? And some people knew a lot about the situation in history, some people knew very little. But it was a generous, productive and sometimes critical conversation. I welcomed it and I was very proud of it and them. These were not people who were going to go cover it. Most of them wanted to know more, and some of them were confused and emotions were hot in the air — and still are. So I was gratified by that. Not that everybody will like what I write or what we publish or even agree with it.

I say this with darkness: Trump learned how to be the president he wanted to be. He was, in many ways, hamstrung in the first presidency, and he wasn't a very competent neo-authoritarian. He seems to have gotten the hang of it. I mean, Joe Biden, God bless him for whatever he did well in his first term as president, had no business running again, and he knew it better than we did, and his aides knew it better than we did. But we also knew it more than we were willing to admit. Look, Evan Osnos went and interviewed Biden (for The New Yorker) and gave an honest account. You know, his voice was like it was and he walked like he does, but he was in reasonable command of his policies and had a serious record. So I don't blame reporters, and I certainly don't think they were lying. But you know, the math was not hard. He was finishing the term at 82 and was proposing to run to 86 years of age. We all know people who are 82 to 86.

We can't chase every rabbit on coverage. So we do it a different way — and we have historically. We now cover things like Washington with far greater energy than we would have decades ago. This week, we have a nice piece about the use of Guantanamo. But we also have to do the other thing: writing and publishing pieces that no one else even thought to do. That's part of the recipe of who we are. And in these times, it’s also once in a while necessary to be funny. Because if you lose that, man, you're in deep trouble.