The "New Yorker": Its Content, Advertising, and Audience

Cafe Society
1

Not long ago we subscribed to the New Yorker, and as always I am struck by what seems to be a disconnect between the likely audience, advertising, and content. The content seems to be aimed at college educated, mostly middle class readers, somewhat of a leftward slant, who would be attracted to the long, thoughtfully written articles and evocative fiction. Another likely aspect of the demographic would seem to struggling young journalists, poets, and fiction writers, who likely studied creative writing or literature in college, and some of whom are likely still struggling in waiting or bartending jobs, or the like.

Then we come to the advertising, and what do we find? Private banks. Personal financial management companies that will preserve your wealth unto the sixth generation of your issue. Villas for rent in Italy and Spain. Tiffany jewelry. And I could go on. What I’m wondering is what’s really going on here. Wouldn’t the real targets of such advertising be reading other magazines most of us don’t even know about? Is the explanation, as Paul Fussell theorized in Class, that such ads are put there so that we middle class subscribers can fantasize about actually being rich enough to take a house in France for the summer? Or is it just another example of advertising generally moving upmarket? Judging by advertisements in many mass market channels, it’s fairly clear that a minute percentage of the readership/viewership is potentially interested in, for example, business class flights to London, yet most of us hear these ads every day. So they’re speaking to all of us, but really only interested in that tiny percent. In the case of the New Yorker, though, I think the advertising has always been like this.

So what are your thoughts on this>

2

Er, you do realize that for most of the population, the New Yorker is one of those magazines most of us don’t even know about? :slight_smile: It’s not like you see everyone reading it on the bus along with the tabloids and People magazine.

And yes, the ads in the New Yorker have always been like that.

3

New Yorker addict here - I tend to read the articles cover to cover, or at least give them a try. Consistently high-quality stuff.

SofP - I hear you regarding the advertising. The short answer is - I dunno. Yes, it seems to have always been like that, yes it seems to be a combo of “aspirational” advertising to us middle-class types while also trying to weed out the 1-in-a-million Richie Rich who might actually pull the trigger. It also feels very New York - the whole city seems to try to appeal to the upper .5% of the population when the vast majority of inhabitants are working joes. It’s the same with the ads in the New York Times Weekly Magazine…

Ultimately, I just take in the ads as part of the overall feel of the magazine and try to ignore them - they speak to a part of it I am less fond of, but since I get the other stuff, I am willing to put up with them.

DISCLAIMER - I coincidentally live in a town filled with New Yorker writers and employees and NYTimes reporters and editors. We are thick with these types. I tend not to ask my neighbors about their work though…

4

I wonder who reads the New Yorker in New York.

Local-oriented magazines always seem to contain advertising catering to goods and services that only the richest 10% or 5% of the population can afford. Grab a copy of Cleveland Magazine or Buffalo Spree, and even in those blue-collar cities you’ll see ads for appliance dealers selling Sub-Zero refrigerators, Jaguar dealers, houses with seven digit price tags, and so on.

I’ve always wondered about why there are so many ads for high-end watches in mass market automobile magazines, especially British publications like Car.

Cigar Aficionado and Esquire also seem to be dominated by ads for products that are out of reach to most of their readership.

5

I don’t think that’s quite true. Even if they don’t read it, I think most people at least know it for its cartoons.

6

No, and no. Advertisers do not spend tens of thousands of dollars for full-page color ads for the fun of it. They want proof, in the form of audited circulation demographics, that the magazine is reaching their target groups. In the Condé Nast group of magazines, which includes The New Yorker, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Architectural Digest, GQ, and Condé Nast Traveler, you have the top of the line demographics.

7

I noticed the same thing about Los Angeles, but, unless the content has changed since I last looked at it, that too seems to be directed to the upper crust. And specifically local upper crust at that. The New Yorker different. Except for the “Goings On About Town” section, it doesn’t seem like a local magazine anymore, except that there’s usually a New York “feel” to some of the fiction and humor. They do project a definite iconography of the Big Apple, perhaps to lure those of us who don’t live there, but wish we did, or think we do. For instance, a recent cover showed Cupid himself being given the third degree by some NYC cops; on the table are his confiscated bow and arrow, and a map of Manhattan with the sites of several heart shootings marked by heart shaped stickers. In things like that, the magazine does seem local, but I’d say not in the textual content.

8

I should mention that many, though not all, of the sort of ads I mentioned in the OP are not full-page, but only an inch or two of single-column length. For a magazine with national circulation, especially one targeted to the upwardly-yearning as well as the upwardly mobile, is it entirely out of the question that the publishers would cut Tiffany or Bessemer Trust a sweet deal on their ads, because of the fantasy value of such things?

9

What Walloon said.

I’m not sure why everyone is so perplexed as to why The New Yorker is full of ads for status symbols aimed at the wealthy when the magazine itself is a status symbol aimed at the wealthy, and has been since at least the 50s. It’s the sort of thing a person of a certain education and income is supposed to subscribe to and put on the coffee table, even if they don’t actually read anything but the ads. In that sense all the starving young writers who actually read the whole thing cover to cover are kind of missing the point. :wink:

10

I wonder who reads the New Yorker in New York.

Local-oriented magazines always seem to contain advertising catering to goods and services that only the richest 10% or 5% of the population can afford. Grab a copy of Cleveland Magazine or Buffalo Spree, and even in those blue-collar cities you’ll see ads for appliance dealers selling Sub-Zero refrigerators, Jaguar dealers, houses with seven digit price tags, and so on.

I’ve always wondered about why there are so many ads for high-end watches in mass market automobile magazines, especially British publications like Car.

Cigar Aficionado and Esquire also seem to be dominated by ads for products that are out of reach to most of their readership.

11

As a magazine Business Manager I have to tell you that advertisers do not place ads just so people can fantasize about the products without buying them*. (Paul Fussell’s Class is an excellent book, but that doesn’t mean I have to agree with everything in it.)

High end advertisers have a problem: the number of people who can afford their products is so small that they are hard to target. They have to go with demographics. A few venues - magazines, newspapers, tv shows - have both audiences with six-figure-plus incomes and a reputation for prestige, excellence, or worthiness that ensures that they will be perused. Those few venues will garner a disproportionate amount of this kind of advertising because - circularly - they have become known for featuring this kind of advertising. (Since the 1920s in *The New Yorker’s * case.)

There are now venues that exist almost solely for the advertising. A magazine called The Robb Report is the only one that most of us ordinary people will see, mostly because certain high-end stores will carry and display it. It’s worth finding just to have your jaw dropped.

But I guarantee that advertisers who continue advertising in The New Yorker do so because they are getting a good return on those ads. If not, they’ll stop advertising. Any of the many books on the magazine’s history will talk about the ups and downs of advertising pages and revenue.

SoP, many, many, many special deals will be cut to get advertising in a magazine. Any magazine. These deals will increase in bad times, but also decrease in good times. But for the fantasy value? First, it’s hard to imagine the advertiser being that stupid about its money. Second, ads that don’t bring in revenue smell up the whole magazine for future advertisers.** People in the business make it their business to know about these things. Conversely, The New Yorker is famous for turning away advertisers that don’t fit its image, one reason the back of New York magazine is filled with sex and personal ads, a niche market that was waiting for a home in NYC.

Bottom line: even the top 5% of the U.S. population is 15 million people, but they have probably 75% of the disposable income. They are worth pursuing.

*There are a few special exceptions to this rule, as with auto ads that promote the high end product just to get people into the showrooms.

**“Image” advertising is an exception here, but that isn’t usually the kind of ads you’re talking about.

12

I remember picking up the New Yorker a few years ago and seeing an ad on the inside front cover with the headline “Admit it. You’re rich.” I had to laugh.

13

The New Yorker’s core audience has always been rich New York liberals. You know the ones - the people who own condos on the upper west side who think their taxes are too low.

Personally, I just like the funny cartoons. (And the occasional interesting and necessarily long-winded article.)

14

Not all rich people automatically become Republicans. Some still have a conscience.

Think Martin Sheen or Ted Turner or the Kennedys, but New Yorkish. Many of them keep a social-justice, liberal, Democratic Party point of view because they’re non-white minorities or children of immigrants who have personally experienced discrimination and thus, don’t want to buy into the rich, white, male, WASPish, Republican point of view.

Despite the presence of Wall Street Republicans, New York city is very pro-Democrat.

Peace.

15

I hope by core audience you mean not the majority of readership, but only the well-to-do kernel of folks who patronize the advertisers. Otherwise it’s a sad illustration of the state of American culture, if the ability and desire to read such a well written magazine is limited to the trust fund crowd. By well written, I don’t mean that everything in it is brilliant, or that I agree with everything in it, but rather that it’s definitely first and foremost a readers magazine…for those willing to expend the mental effort to read the long articles, and to take their fiction in some other form than TV shows.

And yes, I love the cartoons too. I dabble in cartooning myself, just for the enjoyment of my friends and myself, but I am bowled over each week by elegant humor of some of the cartoons I see in the magazine. Sometimes they are so starkly simple I can’t saying to myself, “If only I could have thought of that!” A fine case in point was the recent “Pie Chart Of Mystery”, in which a pie chart was divided into percentages covering such areas as “Artisanal Cheeses” and “People Who Earn >100K”…the sections had nothing whatsoever to do with each other, but still added up to exactly 100%. I don’t know why but I found that hilarious.

16

Which is why Republicans have been elected mayor for the last twenty years?

17

Correction: ten years.

18

Heh, there really is a Buffalo Spree magazine.

19

This is also the city that gave John Lindsay, Ed Koch and David Dinkins the keys to Gracie Mansion in my lifetime.

Looking just at the cartoons, it seems that sometime around 1975, the focal point of the magazine stopped being Manhattan and started being Scarsdale and the Hamptons.

20

John Lindsay was elected as a Republican.