SOURCE: "Tina's New Yorker," in Columbia Journalism Review, Vol. XXXI, No. 6, March-April, 1993, pp. 31-6.

In the following essay, Utne reports on changes in the New Yorker under the editorship of Tina Brown.

From the founding of the New Yorker, its editor, Harold Ross, insisted on an editorial department free from any domination by the business office; and he was fortunate in having as a major financial backer Raoul Fleischmann, who believed in a separation of the editorial and business functions. "Great advertising mediums are operated for the reader first, for profits afterwards," the magazine observed in its code of publishing practice in 1933, and that attitude was reflected in an intraoffice memorandum by the advertising director more than thirty years later: "We must all bear in mind always that our first obligation is to our readers and our second obligation is to our present and past advertisers." Ross insisted...