REVIEWS: The New Yorker at 100

I recent watched The New Yorker at 100 documentary on Netflix, which turned out to nicely complement the 100 Years of New Yorker Cartoons exhibition we saw at the Society of Illustrators during our visit to NYC in April.

The documentary offered a great glimpse into the magazine’s inner workings and history, including segments devoted to some of the magazine’s established cartoonists (and the cartoon selection process), as well as its iconic covers and distinctive spot illustrations. It was particularly nice to see fFrançoise Mouly, art editor of The New Yorker, in action, who of course is also the co-founder and co-publisher of Raw and Toon Books, as well as the spouse of cartoonist Art Spiegelman—a few weeks before, I had coincidentally re-watched the American Masters episode on Spiegelman, Disaster is My Muse, when I came across it on YouTube—Mouly is prominently featured there as well.

It also included an overview of some of the groundbreaking and celebrated articles and stories in the magazine, such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which first appeared as a piece in The New Yorker, and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, first serialized in the magazine. One doesn’t always associate hard journalism with The New Yorker, but it definitely has become known for such work. As an example, Ronan Farrow brought his coverage exposing Harvey Weinstein to the magazine after others thought it was too hot to handle. There were other examples from its history of how the magazine stood by its reporters, a courage that seems to be lacking in many of today’s news outlets.

I’ve always been a fan of magazine and print journalism and, over the years, have intermittently maintained subscriptions to magazines like The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Wired, Esquire, Time, and The Economist. In fact, it was a career path I briefly considered, and worked as a copy editor at my college paper and interned at an ambitious startup magazine called Buzz in the early 1990s. 

During my brief time there, I worked as a fact-checker—my name is in the masthead on a few of the early issues. The New Yorker is considered the gold standard in fact checking and we were given a fact-checking style guide from The New Yorker to train us. So I was delighted to see the documentary cover its fact-checking operation and, must admit, my jaw dropped when I learned that the magazine had 29 fact checkers on staff!