Making journalism ‘great and humane’: An editor reflects on a century of the New Yorker

In a new Netflix documentary that was released last weekend, The New Yorker at 100, editor of the magazine David Remnick, 65, says that he wants The New Yorker to be two things: “Great and humane”.

- Sanjukta Sharma

Remnick had already won the Pulitzer Prize for Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire in 1993 before he took over as editor in 1998. His predecessor, British editor Tina Brown, who established the credo of making “the sexy serious, and the serious sexy” for The New Yorker, hired Remnick among other young writers when she took over as editor in 1992.

Remnick has overseen several milestones since then bringing out The Complete New Yorker in 2005, a collection of all articles published in The New Yorker till then in (now redundant) CDs, and around a decade ago, reinventing The New Yorker for a changing digital-first world. On its 90th birthday, the magazine got its weekly online radio show, produced in conjunction with WNYC. Soon after, a series titled The New Yorker Presents, released on Amazon Prime.