Fashion magazine new york

Andersen doctrine - new New York magazine editor Kurt Andersen - Interview

New York's new editor, Kurt Andersen, veteran of Spy and Time and now a self-described "overpaid media oligarch," tells how he plans to revitalize the definitive city title.

Kurt Andersen, 39, has a straightforward, but not simple, task: reinvigorate New York. A graduate of Harvard, Andersen worked at Time before founding and co-editing the recently deceased Spy. During his seven years at Spy, where he skewered the rich and pretentious, Andersen also served as Time's architecture, critic, returning there last year as editor-at-large to create a livelier front-of-the-book for the magazine. In a recent interview in his not-yet-redecorated office--only a coffee maker and a framed copy of Time's 1966 "God is Dead" cover distinguish the place as his own--Andersen spoke about his plans for the 440,000-circulation New York, how to revivify service journalism and the "Andersen Doctrine."

Q: Why did you leave Time, a post you described as a dream job when you took it a year ago?

A: A couple of years ago, when I first started thinking about life post-Spy, New York was the one magazine that I thought would be a tremendous amount of fun to run and to edit. It seemed to me that it was being seriously and kind of inexplicably underused. And when you have a weekly that has, at various points, been as great and important as New York in more than a half-million people's lives, that's an incredible opportunity. It's just a magazine that has not been as exciting, provocative or compelling as it could have been.

Q: How so?

A: In general, New York has lost some of its sense of excitement, romance, and kind of voracious curiosity about the city and life. It got a little tired, rote, middle-aged, and somehow suburbanoid.

I'm all for telling difficult truths about race and crime and corruption and charlatans in the city, but too often there was a kind of appalled outsider's view of the unravelings in the city. You come |to New York~ to be, at least part of most days, assaulted, accosted in an experimental way by people speaking Urdu and strange little stores and odd smells. That hurly-burly is why we're here.

Q: When K-III Magazines hired you, CEO Harry McQuillen told me that one of his goals was to attract younger readers. How do you accomplish that?

A: You know--candy in the magazine |chuckles~. Just as a "for instance," you can review and cover rock and pop music instead of not reviewing and coveting rock and pop music. You can perhaps devote more time and energy to Underground Gourmet kinds of things, to cheap, great restaurants and cheap great things and places. Again, we overpaid media oligarchs sometimes forget the degree to which the decision to go to a movie or a restaurant is a financial one for 25- and 30-year-olds. There are a million ways you signal to younger people that this is a magazine that "gets" them: in making the less conservative photo choices, and the allusions you make in headlines.

Q: How do you do that without alienating your more established readers?

A: It's obviously something you think about, but I don't think it's going to be a huge problem. You don't just put River Phoenix on the cover, you don't do stupid pandering to youth. I don't think you have the problem of The New Yorker, where because of the very delicate and important history of the place and of the look of the thing, it's very hard not to alienate certain of its old-line, traditional readership.

But part of the reason you live here is to be hep to what is going on in various sectors of the city. I think that's why sedate 54-year-old CFOs on East 55th Street--unless you give them a diet of nothing but poppy, rocky, edgy, twenty something stuff--aren't going to be turned off. Quite the opposite. They will be reminded of why they moved here 30 years ago, and they're not going to feel quite as out of it when their children mention Pearl Jam.

Q: Is living and working in a certain city enough of a common bond for readers?

A: I think so. Given that 75 percent of people live within an hour or so of Times Square, just on the "how you travel, what you buy, where you go" level, you find a lot of shared references. I think there is more of a shared pool of references and needs and attitudes here than for Esquire or GQ or any number of other magazines.

I know of no place where there is a more interesting collection of intense ambitions. There's a kind of mostly earned arrogance about being able to tough it out, knowing things first, having the best of things. Those things are interestingly mitigated by, and paradoxically combined with, a kind of anti-complacency. In Omaha, where I grew up--or even in most places in America--the hip sophisticates of any given place are pretty smug about being the hip sophisticates. In New York, it's harder to be that way because there's always someone who's smarter, hipper, tougher, more stylish, cooler, better than you.

Q: What topics and issues do you plan to beef up?

A: Fashion as a business has not been looked at quite as closely as it could be in this magazine. Even though there is a lot of politics, recently it has been mostly responsive, as it should be, to the week's events. I think there are opportunities for longer term looks at political phenomena, shifts in the political culture. I think there are some interesting, powerful institutions in this city--museums come to mind--that have never been given the scrutiny they deserve.

Q: What are some of the other changes you're planning?

A: The magazine in its current architecture can't very easily accommodate stories that are more than 300 words or less than 3,000 or 4,000 words. There are a lot of good stories on any given week that ought to be somewhere in between. So one of the most visible changes that I'll make will be to create a new front-of-the-book that can accommodate those intermediate-length pieces--this will make the magazine newsier and more lively.

Q: For many, service journalism has negative connotations. Can you do service journalism in a feisty and exciting way?

A: As a general approach, you should resist formula. You don't want to reinvent the wheel every single time you do it; "The best 100 doctors" is the best 100 doctors, and you should probably do that every so often. Simply bringing some subjectivity and point of view and a little sense of the process can go a long way.

There was a perfectly fine, interesting piece about inexpensive hotels in the magazine |recently~, but maybe it would be fun to have a writer like Henry Alford or Paul Rudnick or any number of people who have a distinct, complicated, witty, entertaining sensibility do a piece like that. So you find out where the $94 rooms are, but you have someone you want to read for his or her own sake. Travel writing is a good example. I don't read the travel section in The New York Times very much any more. But if I come across a piece by Tad Friend in Vogue about Morocco, or by Paul Theroux about Hawaii in Conde Nast Traveler, because it's good writing in addition to telling me about hotels and surfing, I read it.

Q: When you look at city magazines around North America, do you see them as clone-like?

A: I would say that's a good term for it. If anything, New York has perhaps gotten too much like other city magazines by being too nice, too placidly and unchallengingly bourgeois as opposed to excitingly and provocatively bourgeois. Because we all are bourgeois.

Q: So what is the Andersen doctrine?

A: I have that page here somewhere |laughs~. I would say it is a very high standard of craft, a certain amount of contrarianism, a kind of omnivorous, desperate curiosity, a nice balance of romanticism and skepticism, the ability to be irreverent. In people's lives and in people's brains--smart people and interesting people, anyway--they flit naturally from the serious to the trivial, from the glamorous to the banal. The magazines that I have anything to do with ought to have some ability to convey exactly that kind of eclecticism without it being chaotic.