Rieder: The enduring greatness of 'The New Yorker'

The New Yorker unveiled its redesigned website Monday, which presents an excellent opportunity to pay homage to a special American institution that has survived and thrived in a hazardous, fast-evolving media environment.

The magazine, coming off one of its most profitable years in a long time, has prospered, while so many print products have struggled, by sticking relentlessly to its commitment to quality and depth. For many readers, it's an essential, identity-defining cultural totem.

In a sense, there's something incongruous about mentioning The New Yorker and "website" in the same sentence. The New Yorker is old media and old school, a print magazine that has been unwavering in its commitment to words, lots of words, to long-form journalism, to depth and insight.

Website conjures up the digital world in which we live, where speed, immediacy, short attention spans and attention-grabbing nonsense hold sway.

Yet maybe there's more overlap between the nearly 90-year-old paragon of magazine excellence and today's dizzying media environment than you might think.

A key to The New Yorker's enduring success is that under its last two editors, Tina Brown and now David Remnick, it sped up the metabolism of its print edition substantially. There's still no shortage of quirky, delightful, wonderfully time-peg-free pieces that are quintessentially New Yorker. But by weighing in with insight and sophistication on the top stories of the day, the magazine has heightened its relevance exponentially.

And despite a less-than-full-blooded approach to the digital world, The New Yorker has shown that its Web presence can have big impact. Media writer to the stars Ken Auletta's piece on the firing of TheNew York Times' Executive Editor Jill Abramson changed the terms of debate on the controversy by bringing the question of pay equity to the fore.

An amped-up digital approach can only make the revered magazine a more vital part of the media ecology.

Similarly, the once deeply rooted gospel that absolutely no one would read long, in-depth stories digitally is as hopelessly outdated as the notion that publishers had to give away their material online. For example, Lawrence Wright's 25,000-word look at Scientology in The New Yorker was a strong online performer. Many other outlets — viral content specialist BuzzFeed among them — are indulging in long-form.

The advent of the tablet has presented an attractive reading option for big, meaty pieces. And news outlets are developing formats for presenting ambitious work in a way that provides a rich, accessible multimedia experience.

Up until now, The New Yorker has taken a haphazard approach to the Web, posting a handful of free articles from the print magazine while limiting the others to subscribers. It also published 15 digital-only pieces a day.

Under its new strategy, which includes the fresh look on all digital platforms that debuted Monday, the magazine this summer will offer up all of its material, print and digital, for free. Starting in the fall, it will adopt the increasingly popular metered paywall approach, where readers have free access to a certain number of articles each month before the meter starts running. The magazine also has posted all of its stories since 2007, and will be adding older crowd-pleasers throughout the summer.

One of the top New Yorker watchers out there is my friend Tom Kunkel, author of Genius in Disguise, the fine biography of New Yorker founding editor Harold Ross, and a forthcoming book about the great New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, due out next spring.

Kunkel, a recovering journalist who is now president of St. Norbert College in DePere, Wis., ticks off in an e-mail the numerous achievements of Ross' baby: "Raising nonfiction storytelling to an art form; cultivating an entire generation of fresh-voiced American fiction writers; essentially creating the now-familiar 'Profile' format; infusing the culture with a new kind of sophisticated humor, manifest both in the magazine's prose and in its wonderful cartoons; and — maybe Ross's most brilliant stroke of all — targeting a publication to a certain high-end audience."

Kunkel notes that the magazine genius was an entrepreneur and a risk-taker, and says Ross would be right at home today.

"I'm confident that had he been around at the dawn of the digital age, it's likely he would have been one of its pioneers," Kunkel says. " I think he would have loved the 'Wild West' aspect of that emerging scene, and it's fun to imagine what he might have created if given that chance."