How The New Yorker Goes Viral

The publications that are most effective, influential, and interesting are those making innovative use of the web.

Visit the new CIC website at OpenCanada.Org. Canada's hub for international affairs.

For years I have read The New Yorker as a non-U.S. print subscriber. This meant that somewhere between a few days and a week after an issue was published, it arrived in the mail. The uncertainty of its arrival is fun, and the novelty of flipping through the “Goings on About Town” to find the “Tables for Two” has never really worn off. Every once in a while, a story would reach me in a different way – a Hirsch piece during the Bush administration, for example, would get wide engagement online. But, for me, The New Yorker was principally a solitary print experience. Such was its charm. So the online transition path for the magazine has never been obvious to me. Recently, though, I have been engaging with the magazine in two new ways – on Twitter, and by using its exceptional iPad app. The ways in which the magazine has transitioned to both are a model for a struggling form, and fit into a wider shift in the international-affairs conversation that the Canadian International Council (CIC) website seeks to engage.

Over the weekend, for example, a pre-release of Nicholas Schmidle’s exposé of the bin Laden raid went viral on Twitter. Virtually all of the 100-or-so foreign-policy-specific handles I follow posted it immediately, and it then crossed into most other online conversations. Instead of reading it online, I checked The New Yorker iPad app, and there was Monday’s issue ready to be downloaded. The New Yorker’s iPad app does something quite remarkable: Leveraging the iPad’s elegance and engagement features, the app perfectly balances its focus on writing, journalism, and style in a way that lets the magazine breathe. Each week, a new issue pops up in the app, and it takes a satisfying minute or two for the whole 140MB of the issue to download. Last week, the New York Times outlined the success of the app in a piece that also got a lot of attention.

While it empowers those who create it, does citizen journalism live up to journalistic standards? Read more here.

So, on a lazy Sunday morning, I tucked into Schmidle’s article in this great reader-centric format. The piece itself was astounding in both its detail and style. A decision had clearly been made in the Pentagon or White House to provide the definitive account of the raid to The New Yorker, and that account will surely become the basis for movies and books.

But because The New Yorker pushes content aggressively and effectively online, the reach and life of the piece extended far beyond a limited number of solitary reading indulgences. The New Yorker has now, somewhat unexpectedly, become a hub in the international-affairs conversation and can position pieces cleanly and effectively in the international debate. It is no longer simply the rag of the elite and well-bred. It is fuel in a community of international-affairs journalism, being spread and multiplied by innovative websites, Twitter, and diverse networks of engaged readers.

Take two examples. First, Foreign Policy Magazine has, in the past few years, transformed itself from an austere print publication skimmed in airports to a leader in pushing diverse content online. This has meant changing how the journalists write, who writes for them, and where and by whom the content is seen. I would argue that Foreign Policy Magazine is significantly more influential now than it ever was in its limited and isolated print days. It is certainly more interesting.