Does Adam Moss have the best job in journalism? He thinks so, and it’s hard to disagree. The New York Times Magazine is one of a very few widely-read, well-regarded general interest magazines that also makes lots of money. (Last year, it ranked No. 5 out of all magazines in ad pages, with 3,314.2.) Moss came to the magazine after heading up a pair of unsuccessful launches—7 Days, an uptown alternative to the Village Voice, and The Industry, about the media business—and four years ago he became its editor in chief. Media Life recently caught up with him to ask about how the magazine is changing, how its mission differs from that of the parent paper and what he meant when he described it as “pretty gay.”

As newspapers go, The New York Times is already a very magaziney paper, in the sense that it carries a lot of features, cultural coverage, and the “Week in Review” section. How do you differentiate what you’re doing at the magazine from the rest of the paper?

    The magazine is always in a race with the newspaper. As the newspaper gets more magazine-like, the magazine has to get ever more magazine-like, and to use all the tools that a magazine has at its disposal to do that, which include length, full, glorious color and subjective reporting and writing. 
    Every story that we run has a point of view. It’s meant to have a point of view.
    We expect to see the subject through the eyes of one great reporter and one great photographer whose perspective we are hiring them for. There’s no pretense of objectivity in any individual thing we do.
   The magazine is the part of the newspaper that is really about giving you visceral pleasure. That pleasure can be defined intellectually, emotionally and aesthetically, and we’ve been pushing the magazine in that direction for the last several years.

Is the magazine a better product editorially than it would be if you had to sell it on the newsstand?

   Yes. 
   I do think that, primarily because we don't have to make some of the commercial compromises we would have to make in order to move the thing off the newsstands, in order to get it into people's hands. 
    We do not have to put a movie star on the cover unless it's someone that we think is actually important and interesting. 
    We do not have to put models on the cover because they’re beautiful. 
   We can actually look around and see what's interesting, and we happen to have the kind of readers who, if we're doing our job right, will respond to that. What we have at The New York Times Magazine is The New York Times reader, and that is what makes the magazine so exceptional.

What is the magazine’s relationship to New York City?

    We're a national magazine that happens to be published out of New York for a national reader that happens to have a special interest in New York as a subject.
  New York is a big subject for us, but it’s just one of our subjects.

So as the Times increasingly becomes a national paper, does that affect the identity of the magazine?

    It affects it just because it's a national magazine, it reaches more and more readers across the country and in fact internationally through its web component, and that just means you’re talking to more people and you’re talking to people who are not linked by geography so much as by sensibility. 
   That sensibility is something you try to respond to every week.

Last year, you were widely quoted as having described the magazine as "pretty gay." Explain.

   That’s not quite what I said. 
   What I was trying to say is that we do run a number of stories that relate to gay themes, and what I was suggesting, although I think I was quoted quite out of context, is that I was telling the audience, which was a mostly gay audience, that that was something that The New York Times had no trouble with. 
   What I didn’t mean was that we do gay themes out of proportion to anything else.  The change in gay life has been one of the big stories of the last 10 years, but so has the change in technology, the change in national security and the change in the lives of Latin Americans and a whole host of other subjects. 
   That’s all I was really trying to say.

One of the big media stories of the moment is the belief by many people that Howell Raines, The New York Times' executive editor, has been trying to bring the news sections of the paper more closely into line with the views of the editorial page.  What degree of editorial independence do have at The New York Times Magazine, and has that changed at all?

     Let me take the first part of that question first. I think that is a fundamentally incorrect reading of the paper. I don’t think a serious reader of The New York Times would see a more editorially driven news report than before. I just think that’s false.
  How independent are we? 
  We’re fairly independent. I report to Howell and our budget comes from the paper, but the most important aspect of our interdependence is that we reach the same reader and that the magazine is read at the same time as the newspaper: on the weekend. 
   We try to edit the magazine for the person who is also reading the rest of The New York Times. That is the context in which we understand the magazine to be read.

You’ve been editor since 1999, and in that time, the magazine has undergone a lot of change. What have you been trying to achieve? Is there an overriding direction to these changes? 

    Given the New York Times' audience, the opportunity has always been that, with this audience, we could make a financially sound magazine that was this thing which is going extinct, which is a serious general interest magazine for smart people.
   They hardly exist anymore. 
   It’s a type of magazine that I've always loved, and really we are almost unique in our ability to pull that off.
   The effort has been to make a magazine of literary journalism, of great documentary and portrait photography, of great, exciting fashion, of argument and contention, and a magazine that reflects the ongoing saga of the lives of its readers. 
   About three years ago, we started a front part of the magazine which was called “The Way We Live Now.” 
   It was in part to actually give the magazine a front, to give it a kind of structural entrance, which it had never had before and which was one of the things that I think made it more of an illustrated supplement than a magazine per se.
   But it also was to signal that what the magazine was about was not just went on in Washington or Moscow but what goes on in the everyday lives of its readers at work or at home—that we’re about both the public and the private life of the reader.
   Last fall we added something called “Diagnosis,” which is a kind of hypochondriac’s paradise, where you get a set of symptoms and solve the problem with the doctor-writer. 
   We added something called "Page-Turner," which is an introduction to some talented person that we think is wonderful, with a sort of great big exciting exploding picture when you turn the page. We added “Crash Course,” which is a kind of crib sheet to something in the news. 
   We are adding, in two weeks, something called “Domains,” which is kind of like a highbrow “MTV Cribs,” where we go into a newsmaker's life and define that life through their stuff--where they live and what music they listen to and what kind of car they drive, that sort of thing. And then we added "Portfolio," about which we're very excited.  
   It's a sort of mini-gallery of photography in our pages, of photography that has never been shown before—sometimes documentary photography, sometimes portraiture, sometimes great, Hollywood-like scenarios.
   We did something by Gregory Crewdson called “Dream House” which “starred” Gwyneth Paltrow, Julianne More, Philip Seymore Hoffman, Tilda Swinton and a host of other actors. 
   All of these things are important to try to make the magazine as innovative and as thrilling to the reader as we can make it and to make it a true complement to the Sunday newspaper without actually duplicating anything in it.

January 28, 2003© 2003 Media Life

-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.

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