Like every media company, The New Yorker is tangling with the big paradigm shift. You can get it on the newsstand (remember those?) for $5.99 or subscribe along with 1,011,821 others for about $1.50 per issue.
I like the magazine. Tom Wolfe feels exactly the same as I do: “The New Yorker style is one of leisurely meandering understatement, droll when in the humorous mode, tautological and litotical when in the serious mode, constantly amplified, qualified, adumbrated upon, nuanced and renuanced, until the magazine’s pale-gray pages became High Baroque triumphs of the relative clause and appository modifier.”
Leisurely meandering can be terrific in a canoe (see Ipswich River). It’s really cool to experience that with words. They’ve been doing that to great effect since 1925. That’s not to say that they’re not with the program. The New Yorker staff has been examining the media revolution before Zworkin stole the iconoscope.
Now they’re out there: observing social networking in Libya and playing their own clever publishing games too. It’s always interesting when media examines media while being media. I can relate. I’m working in communications for communications companies that are changing media as I teach undergrads how it all works. I know, it hurts my head sometimes too.
Meanwhile, here’s a look at The New Yorker iPad app. It’s not exactly rocket science but it is nicely litotical.
