min magazine 2008: Launch Editor of the Year
Friday, November 7, 2008

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Editor of the year
Lewis H. Lapham, Lapham’s Quarterly

What does it take to be a good editor?
It has become difficult given the emergence in the Internet, blogosphere and television. When I first came to New York in 1960, there were seven newspapers in New York, all of them healthy. If you were Jack Kennedy in 1961 and wanted to communicate with people, you would give an exclusive interview to The Saturday Evening Post or Life. By the end of the ’60s you are on television. So the energy shifts to TV. That has accelerated since 1980 and the coming of the personal computer and the Internet.

What was your strategy for Lapham’s?
When I was editor at Harper’s, it carried an inflated circ to impress advertisers. So we cut it until it was real. But maintaining that kind of audience is difficult because advertisers only care about numbers. Our projection suggests that Lapham’s is a break-even proposition at a circulation of 35,000—without advertising.

What do you think of all the changes the media is undergoing today?
It used to be that there was no way for a monthly to compete with a weekly and no way for a weekly to compete with a daily, Now, a daily is having trouble competing with the Internet. You have to play to your strength, and the strength ought to be the best possible journalism. Develop a reputation for in-depth reporting.

How do you do this?
If somebody were to give me The New York Times to edit I would reduce the news coverage to a minimum and go for in-depth reporting. The Times occasionally will do long-form pieces that require somebody to stay on the story for weeks, if not months, before they sit down and write. That is where the value is going to be. I won’t buy The New York Times just to get a rerun of something I have already seen on the Internet.

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