The New Yorker (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The New Yorker seems as though it is lagging behind other competitors in terms of adapting to the Internet. According to Buzzfeed, the magazine has been hindered by Conde Nast‘s lack of resources and contractual writer’s agreements, and a recent resignation of Jonah Lehrer ended up worsening the issues, not improving them. A former staffer blamed the current editor, David Remnick, for the magazine’s failures to integrate, saying that he focused on a book project at the wrong time. Whomever is to blame, the outcome has been a website that features slow-to-update blogs, bulky pdfs, and a homepage that has just recently started staying recent to daily news.
The site started out as a strong web presence, but soon became out of date when in 2008 Conde Nast executives decided to keep all of the site’s content behind a pay wall during the election. After election day, Remnick hired Politico’s Avi Zenilman as a blogger, but this didn’t compare to improvements other sites were making. Jason Kottke, a blogger who had been interviewed as a potential editor of newyorker.com, said about the site, “I think it’s good but not great… I understand that there are a lot of competing interests at the magazine (editorial, technical, political bureaucratic, legal, etc.) but for a reader who just wants to pay to read the magazine’s fantastic material in a reasonable format, it can be a frustrating experience.”
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