From the Daily Princetonian, a report on David Remnick’s recent talk:

Remnick, a Pulitzer Prize winner, also reflected on his time at the University and discussed topics ranging from the state of American and Russian affairs to managing The New Yorker. During the event, formatted as an hour-long discussion with English professor Michael Wood, Remnick answered questions about his experiences as a University student and his path to The New Yorker. Continued.

Among the good tidbits: Michael Bloomberg claims he’s submitted six captions to the caption contest. As Emdashes readers know from reading our Q. & A.s with the winners, the mayor needs to work a little harder!

Also, Remnick again invokes—with some wariness—a hypothetical, parallel existence as a fiction writer. The first instance I was thinking of was in an old interview with Orville Schell at Berkeley; the page is now broken, but you can read the illuminating transcript at the trusty Wayback Machine. In the Berkeley interview, there’s an exchange so great that, as I read it, I wrote it down as a motto:

Schell: Have you ever written any fiction?
Remnick: Not that I liked.
Schell: But you’ve written some?
Remnick: Yes, not that’s any good. Honestly. But you know life is short, but not five seconds. So we’ll see.

Sounds like there’s a novel possibility in there somewhere, or perhaps some modern-Chekhovian short stories. We’ll be receptive.

Here’s Brown, interviewed by the Indian Express:

As a long-time editor, how would you say media could gauge the requirements of the time?
I think one of the things that’s really difficult now, and journalists have to keep on is, just when you think you know everything, you don’t know anything at all. There are two kinds of stories. One is a complete news story that you find and break, which is immensely valuable and probably the first thing you should be trying to do. But the other kind of story is also very valuable, where you go back to a story where everybody thinks they know what happened. I mean, I still have not read the definitive piece about Musharraf’s coup, a blow-by-blow tick-tock as we call it of the decision, the hows and whys. I’ll still read this piece at Christmas because it takes time to plan and tease it out of people. I’m a big fan of the depth and the context, which is almost all you can provide in the age of the Internet. Even at the New Yorker in 1997 it became a nightmare trying to protect our news. Then when I went to Talk, one reason why I couldn’t stand it there, it was a monthly. News had so accelerated that it made me nuts that even with a very deep, contextual piece, you began to feel that it had been nibbled at by so many mice.

But you also came in for some criticism at the New Yorker for making it too newsy, too current.
I saw myself as providing two strands of journalism there. I thought it was very important to have a news element to provide what I used to think of as a threshold piece. To bring people into the tent you have to have a piece about whatever it was that week, this piece that couldn’t wait. Then you could go, in the middle of the magazine, to the big tent piece, the piece that had taken 12,000 words and six months to do. I saw it always as a two-horse stream. And I felt committed to the notion that people would have to read it that week. It can still happen, in an upmarket magazine, people say, “oh, it’s a great magazine, I haven’t got to it yet, but it’s terrific, the last three issues are piled up by my bed.” And I would think, that’s not a compliment. That means, I failed.

Ten years later, what would you do at The New Yorker?
I would probably redesign it again. I might make a shorter front of the book section. I’m an admirer of the Spectator magazine in London. It does a very good job of a front that’s interesting, voices that you come to every week.

Thanks to Sans Serif for the link. In other news, David Remnick will be speaking at Princeton on November 20:

In “A Conversation With David Remnick,” he will participate in a discussion with Michael Wood, the Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English and Comparative Literature, on topics ranging from Russian politics to the U.S. presidential race to famed journalist A.J. Liebling.

From an interview with Tina Brown, today in the Independent:

What inspired you to embark on a career in the media?
I was a newspaper and magazine junkie from the year dot. My father was a film producer and I have always loved the narrative drive of the great non-fiction stories. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood made me see what a great literary journalist could do with the facts.
…
How do you feel you influence the media?
At The New Yorker and Vanity Fair we constantly set the agenda for TV discussion and editorials. It was great to see how you could help to move the media in a new direction. At Vanity Fair I was proud of publishing William Styron’s piece about his manic depression. He turned it into a bestseller with the same title as the piece, Darkness Visible.
What is the proudest achievement in your working life?
Waking up the sleeping beauty of The New Yorker magazine. It was a very difficult challenge to modernise the grand old lady of American letters.
…
What are your weekend papers? And do you have a favourite magazine?
I read all the weekend papers when I come here. My favourite magazines are still The New Yorker and The Spectator, which I subscribe to in the US. I still enjoy Vanity Fair, love Foreign Affairs in the US and The Week in both places.

I love that expression “the year dot.” We should really reintroduce it over here.

MediaBistro’s smart series continues with Diane Clehane’s “So What Do You Do…?” interview with Tina Brown. A highlight from the section Emdashes readers will be jumping to anyway:

What do you consider your greatest success?
I do think The New Yorker was a very exciting success. As much as I loved Vanity Fair and still do, I still feel The New Yorker was the harder challenge. The stakes were so high with The New Yorker. I felt all the time I was doing it there wasn’t an option to fail. If the magazine not a viable proposition or set for closure — and it was really going down so badly when I took it over. It was so important to revitalize this magazine — the letters, narrative journalism, high standards and the writers that could take three weeks to six months on a story could still be allowed to do that work. What I did realize was that no one again ever was going to start up a magazine that would allow literary journalists to go off months at a time to study and write and do something, so if we failed it would be a horrible consequence.