The Daily Princetonian reports, as does Dealbreaker‘s John Carney, who finds journalists’ math skills risible. From the Princetonian:

When asked by a student in attendance if he had any advice for Princeton students interested in journalism, Remnick — known for his self-deprecating humor in conversation — responded: “Goldman Sachs.”
 
He advised that the best preparation for becoming a journalist is often not by way of a journalism degree but by gaining awareness and appreciation for the world around oneself. “Learn history, read novels, travel or travel by the page,” he said.
 
No matter what your interests, “all of us need to support [investigative journalism] as a form of social responsibility,” Remnick said.

Also, Jason Kottke notices that newyorker.com pieces are no longer split up into multiple pages. Big improvement!

Why is nearly everything in the Guardian and the Observer so damn good? Oh, those British, who’ve been practicing the language for a while, they know. From the profile/review by Gaby Wood:

Celebrity culture is far from over; if you wrote a plan for a magazine and said you thought you could make a profit by publishing 8,000-word pieces on the future of various African nations, hefty analyses of the pension system and a three-part series on global warming, hordes of people would laugh in your face. So how has Remnick done it? Before I met him, I asked this of an acclaimed New York journalist, who said: ‘If you can work that out, you will have the scoop of the century. No one knows.’
Remnick is well aware of the apparent mystery, which is why no focus group is ever involved in an editorial decision. As he puts it, it doesn’t take a genius to work out that one hundred per cent of his readers are not going to get home from work, put their keys down and say: You know, honey, what I need to do now is read 10,000 words on Congo. ‘So you throw it out there, and you hope that there are some things that people will immediately read – cartoons, shorter things, Anthony Lane, Talk of the Town. And then, eventually, the next morning on the train, somebody sees this piece, and despite its seeming formidableness, they read it.’
You might say that what looks at first like common sense is David Remnick’s most winning eccentricity.
We meet at the New Yorker offices in Times Square on an obscenely hot day in August. Remnick extends a courtly, ironic offer of rehydration: ‘Coffee? Water? Drip?’ His glass box of an office is decorated with original cover art and scattered photographs – a portrait of AJ Liebling sitting under an apple tree; Dean Rohrer’s wonderful image of Monica Lewinsky as the Mona Lisa. On his desk is a rare book about Jean-Luc Godard, in French.
…
In a profile he wrote many years ago of the legendary Post editor Ben Bradlee, Remnick remarked: ‘Generalship is not about fighting the battle; it’s about inspiring the enlisted.’ It’s a notion Remnick has clearly kept in mind in his own work as General. Asked to illustrate his editorial methods, Remnick reaches for a baseball analogy: Joe Torre, the manager of the Yankees, ‘gives players the confidence they need to play their best, then he gets the hell out’. He adds: ‘I don’t believe in swagger. I think it’s infantile.’

Thanks to Jesse Thorn, arbiter of all things awesome, for the awesome tip. For lots more Remnick, mosey over here. Has the site in question (Berkeley’s) fixed the misspellings and messy punctuation yet? I suspect not. Again, I volunteer.

Later: Berkeley’s taken down the page. Because of too much traffic after Kottke linked to it? Because of the iffy punctuation that they’re fixing? Either way, please bring it back! It’s a great conversation!

Still later: I was so excited to read the Slate Hackathalon after Remnick mentioned it in the interview, but alas, it seems to be missing as well (maybe because it was in Slate 1.0, or an early incarnation, anyway). Bring that back, too, please!

Newly discovered, an endearing and near-giddy interview with David Remnick, undated but I’m assuming from 1998 or thereabouts, when he assumed editorship of the magazine. [The interview is now offline, but still at the Wayback Machine.] Interview by Orville Schell, brother of Jonathan Schell, the nicest visionary I know. Quick quote from the Remnick transcript (with cosmetic punctuation corrections; I hereby volunteer to copyedit the thing for free, Berkeley):

It’s curious, isn’t it, if people come to sort of think that a magazine actually belongs to them in some way.

They do! And I’m glad of it! In a way. I’m glad when they get angry about a change! It shows they are paying attention in some passionate way. When I get these letters: ‘I’ve been a subscriber for 25 years and I think it’s an outrage that you misuse the word X…,’ God love them! I just think that’s fantastic! And I don’t mean it in a patronizing way. I want to not only answer this letter, which I do, but I want to look the address up and go and give them a hug and a big kiss. I mean it! Who could ask for anything more than that?

Malcom Gladwell published a piece about a very strange developmental psychologist who believed that parents don’t matter, that really what matters most is peer groups, and we got hundreds of letters from apoplectic yuppie parents like myself. “What do you mean we don’t matter!” I just thought this was spectacular! And it can be on a grammatical point as well—“Where is that umlaut?” I got one such letter—three pages long. Oh my god, if those two little dots disappear over coördinated, we’re dead in the water!

Later: There are a few more particularly well-spoken bits, for instance Remnick’s description of the editing process at magazines as opposed to newspapers: “You’re talking about a process that can go on for weeks. It’s a conversation. It’s a cajoling. It’s a jujitsu. But finally it is about getting that writer to do the piece that he or she wants.” And on the public visibility of editors: “The magazine is not an esoteric church. It’s not a secret and I’m not a secret.”

Not to mention:

Do you think [Ben Bradlee] had his eye on the market, or do you think he had his eye on…

No. I know time and time again he got all kinds of complaints from advertisers. And without being a jerk about it, without being rude about it, the essential answer for him was, “That’s what we do.”

Has that changed in America now, the ability to say that of some editor?

Not where I stand! I don’t want to speak for anyone else, but clearly it hasn’t. Look, I did not leave writing to pander. Do I hope that we get more and more advertising and that The New Yorker becomes healthier and healthier on the financial side? You bet I do! You bet I do! But not through the easy route. We could do, you know, a market test tomorrow and find out all the obvious things. Drop this, drop that and more of this. Forget it! Forget it! This magazine will publish fiction, it will publish poetry, it will publish foreign reporting! And you and I both know that in the world of focus groups these are not number one on the list. But they will be there in The New Yorker.

And this:

What do you think the legacy of Tina Brown will be?

I think Tina had a lot of guts. And I think that Tina, like any editor, went out and hired a lot of writers that she liked, and that The New Yorker has every reason to be very very proud of her. I also think that it took an outsider, to come in and say, “We can’t do this? Well, yes, I think, we can. I can’t do this? Well let’s just try.” And I think that that attitude went a long way toward shaking the magazine up visually and otherwise, and toward introducing topics that weren’t there before. Again, the topic that always seems to come up is Hollywood. But it’s ridiculous to say it wasn’t there before. Kenneth Tynan, probably one of the best profile writers in the history of the magazine, wrote profiles of Mel Brooks, Louise Brooks, Ralph Richardson and so on.

The look of the magazine is forever changed and I’m glad of it. I’m glad not to have to make the change to photographs myself. Yes, photographs! Cause we took a lot of guff for it, a lot! Such changes take moxie!

You tell ’em, DR!

Related:
Is It Real or Is It Remnorex?
Fly Continental
Casual Friday
Remnick: “There’s a Reason Things Taste Better When They Simmer”
Urban Golf, The Week, and Sex on Legs
Remnick: “I Read Blogs”
New Yorker People in the News
Legacies in the Ether
Last Stand
The Mixed-Up Files of Mr. Basil E. Remnick

OK, this one won’t mind telling you: The New Yorker was first published on February 21, 1925. Wonder how that guy who bought the rare copy of the first-ever issue is doing? He’d better be reeeeally enjoying it.

By the way, I’m sad to see that my logo isn’t appearing on every archive page. (Later: fixed!) I assume it’s a problem with the host…hmmm. Soon I plan to move to emdashes.com for good; donations from .25 to $1.00 welcome! If you can afford more than that, give it to the MusiCares Hurricane Relief Fund—lots of displaced New Orleans musicians still don’t have instruments to play, or houses to play them in.

In the meantime, why not revisit the story of Rea Irvin and Eustace Tilley? From a Whitney Lawson story on cover philosophies:

When Harold Ross put out the first issue of The New Yorker, in 1925, photography was commonplace in magazines. The second thing the magazine’s readers ever saw in its pages, on the reverse side of the first, February 21, 1925, cover, was an advertisement for Parfums Caron which showed two gleaming French perfume bottles in all their photogenic splendor. The cover, on the other hand, opted for Rea Irvin’s hand-drawn rendering of Eustace Tilley. “As compared to the newspaper, The New Yorker will be interpretive rather than stenographic,” Harold Ross wrote in his mission statement, in 1924.

Here’s Francoise Mouly on the subject. And here, the blogger Literary Kicks reprints a long bit from a Talk of the Town from the inaugural issue. Between the Squibs, what do you make of Issue One? Like it or loathe it, I Hate The New Yorker? I love that blog name, by the way. It still makes me grin.

From the tireless David S. Hirschman at the essential MediaBistro Daily News Feed, this scoop by Greg Lindsay:

During the weblog’s transition from a variation of a personal homepage to a rival to the reporting and commentary of the mainstream media (MSM)—and occasional assassin of the media’s kings—I’ve been keeping an eye open for the announcement that would signal blogging’s entry into the mainstream and the end of its subversive, outsider reputation. As a canary-in-the-coal-mine sign, Tina Brown is the perfect bird. The British-born editor is the consummate MSM insider, who, just as the dotcom boom was peaking, was pouring her media-mogul hopes and dreams into Talk magazine. (Remember that it had the preliminary subtitle of “The American Conversation,” a mantle snatched away with gusto by the collective inhabitants of the blogosphere.)

The blogosphere seemed safe enough. These days Brown is busy with her cable-TV show, her Washington Post column, and the research for her seven-figure bio of Princess Diana. After a St. Patrick’s Day rant in her column in which she point-blank declared that snoopy bloggers “are the new Stasi,” I figured blogging would remain the hole-in-the-wall haven for journalistic outlaws.

But my sense of security was short-lived. Starting next month Brown is crashing the bloggers’ party, as Arianna Huffington’s guest.
Keep reading… [Links mine.]

It really does feel like one of those things that’s already happened. Let us pray that Martha Stewart is next. Remember how her ad slogan was “Every day…”? And how annoying that was? Remember how she scolded us to make our beds? And yet she’s thoroughly wormed herself into our consciousness—all right, I’ll speak for myself. I bought two things “she” designed at Kmart (of course, generally I eschew superstores), and I see and admire them, yes, every day. And I think of her, and am glad she’s out of jail, and understand that those are strange thoughts to be having, and enjoy having them anyway. That is why she will always win, and those who seek to topple her well-scrubbed queen will always lose. I’m ready for the blog. Every day.

When Will Tina Brown Blog? Scoop: Real Soon [Business 2.0, via MediaBistro]
Lunch at Martha’s: Problems with the perfect life [New Yorker]
A Bad Thing: Why Did Martha Stewart Lose? [New Yorker]
Star Witness [New Yorker]

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

What’s a Yale-educated, certified member of the East Coast media elite doing in California talking uber-tech about the potential, and limitations, of the great electronic future?

“I was working with Tina Brown at the New Yorker in 1993, when the Internet was reaching this amazing corporeal explosion,” said Katrina Heron, sitting casually at a Chez Panisse table as she sought to explain her professional and personal transformation. “Except that it wasn’t reaching New York, which can be one of the most parochial places on earth.

“I said, ‘Here we are, trying to rejuvenate this magazine, and we’ve got this new communications revolution occurring,’ ” she recalled. “I told her we could have a searchable Web site, where we take all of the New Yorker archives, put them online, and people could actually come to buy them from us. I used to spend a lot of time at the New Yorker library, which, just like you would imagine, is this very cramped, small room, filled floor to ceiling with gray metal filing drawers. You’d open them, and inside there would be this beautiful yellowed paper with the works of all these wonderful writers that could become available.”

Brown, understandably preoccupied by the cultural wars being waged within the magazine, as well as its financial misfortunes, said she didn’t have the resources to follow up on the suggestion….

Read the rest of the piece about Heron, Wired, and the fate of the Web here.

So, twelve years on, where are those downloadable, searchable archives? I know a set of CD-ROMs is in the works, but it would be even better online. I know you have a plan, folks. I just want to know what it is. What do you need—cookies, pedicures, daily balloon-grams? Name it; it’s done.

Pointing to the Future: Former Wired editor casts a light on the perils—and promise—of technology [SF Chronicle]
The New Yorker Finally Goes Online [Craig Saila]
For Position Only: The New Yorker’s Dot Bomb [CreativePro. The site is considerably improved since this and the above review, though it could be even better; the tiny illustrations, however, are top-notch.]