The New Yorker Magazine Crosses the Digital Divide

When you think of The New York­er, you don’t gen­er­al­ly think of a mag­a­zine with a sub­stan­tial dig­i­tal foot­print. But, ever so grad­u­al­ly, under David Rem­nick­’s edi­to­r­i­al direc­tion, this insti­tu­tion in Amer­i­can jour­nal­ism and cul­tur­al com­men­tary has launched a series of dig­i­tal ini­tia­tives that com­ple­ment the tra­di­tion­al print jour­nal. And when you add them all up, you real­ize the mag­a­zine is pret­ty far along the dig­i­tal curve. How else can you look at it when The New York­er now offers a fair­ly robust web­site, which com­bines full pieces from the cur­rent print edi­tion with spe­cial­ized online fea­tures (take for exam­ple the new blog by George Pack­er)? And then con­sid­er the fact that you can now buy on DVD the com­plete his­tor­i­cal archive of the mag­a­zine, going back to 1925, and then search and read through it on your com­put­er — all for a fair­ly scant $63. (Get your own copy here.)

More minor, but nonethe­less inter­est­ing, for­ays into the dig­i­tal world include some recent exper­i­ments on the pod­cast front. Not long ago, we men­tioned that The New York­er’s trade­mark car­toons have been ani­mat­ed and can be watched as video pod­casts (iTunes — Feed). Then there’s The New York­er Fic­tion (iTunes — Feed), anoth­er rel­a­tive­ly new pod­cast that fea­tures famous fic­tion writ­ers read­ing out loud select­ed short sto­ries from the magazine’s fic­tion archives. (It’s issued only month­ly.) Final­ly, to round things out, anoth­er pod­cast has recent­ly emerged, and it’s sim­ply called Com­ment (iTunes — Feed) and that’s because it lets you lis­ten to a week­ly read­ing of the mag­a­zine’s “Com­ment” essay, often writ­ten by Hen­drik Hertzberg, Nicholas Lemann, or David Rem­nick him­self. For a com­plete list of New York­er RSS feeds, click here.

You can find the pod­casts men­tioned above, and oth­ers like them, in our Arts & Cul­ture Pod­cast Col­lec­tion.