EMPIRE OF THE ELITE

New York Times media writer Grynbaum looks under the hood of the Condé Nast publishing dynasty.

Condé Nast—the person, not the empire—was a Missourian who came to New York at the invitation of a college classmate, Robert Collier, to work on the family-owned magazine. Collier’s soon became a haven for contemporary stars like Jack London and Upton Sinclair. Nast worked similar magic on Vogue, “barely solvent and barely read beyond a handful of drawing rooms on Fifth Avenue.” His business model, “class, not mass,” was, as Grynbaum notes, perhaps counterintuitive, but it captured the aspirations of readers at the end of the Gilded Age. When Condé Nast’s stable of magazines went up for sale, it was eventually acquired by the Newhouse family, “an afterthought in the power centers of Wall Street, Washington, and Hollywood,” and turned over without much enthusiasm to Si Newhouse, while his younger brother controlled the much more lucrative newspaper portfolio. Si, by Grynbaum’s account, worked the old Condé Nast formula, retooled for the age of Reagan—not for nothing did he found a magazine called Self, which spoke perfectly to the self-absorbed 1980s. He hired working- and middle-class youngsters—Graydon Carter, Tina Brown, David Remnick, Art Cooper—to make of magazines like GQ, the New Yorker, and Vanity Fair a celebration of cultivated leisure, paying a king’s ransom in salaries and perks. He also, like the founder, brought in huge talents such as E.L. Doctorow, Tom Wolfe, and Susan Sontag to appear alongside movie and pop-culture stars. As Grynbaum notes, it worked for a while—Remnick even made the New Yorker profitable—but now the empire is crumbling, with its CEO declaring, “This is no longer a magazine company.”

A well-crafted portrait of a publishing house whose fortunes reflect those of the magazine industry as a whole.