"Announcing a New Weekly Magazine"

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David Remnick: Hi, I’m David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, and I’m sitting in my office downtown, reading for the first time in a long time Harold Ross’s prospectus for The New Yorker. And I have to tell you, it’s a trip! Because what it tells you is that The New Yorker, in the very beginning, was just a very small group of people who came from all over the country and ended up in this great city of ours and had an idea, and it was an idea of sensibility more than anything else.

It was the desire to stand out in the midst of the Jazz Age and project a mood, a sense of humor, a sensibility that was neither pretentious, but nor was it lowbrow. So in a way, Harold Ross and his friends—and they were his friends—had an idea for a magazine that would amuse their friends and projected circles of people.

What’s really evident from reading this prospectus is how much the magazine has changed and how much it hasn’t changed: which is to say, the genetic material is still there. The humor, the desire to interpret, to provide in narrative stories all kinds of color and dialog and characterization—that’s there. What’s not there, that’s there now, is a sense of politics and history and the intellectual life of the country. And that really got grafted onto The New Yorker with time. 

I think probably the most famous line in the prospectus is that “The New Yorker will be the magazine which is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque. It will not be concerned in what she is thinking about. This is not meant in disrespect, but The New Yorker is a magazine avowedly published for a metropolitan audience, and thereby will escape an influence which hampers most national publications. It expects a considerable national circulation, but this will come from persons who have a metropolitan interest.” 

To read that passage now is to sense what we would now call a certain snobbery. And I will tell you now, as the editor of The New Yorker in 2024, I’m just as happy to have the so-called little old lady in Dubuque reading the magazine as anybody.