Photo: The New York Times
A fashion publicist was recently talking to me about T, the style magazine of the New York Times, whose fabulously enigmatic editor, Hanya Yanagihara, announced in March that she would be stepping down to pursue opportunities in theater. “T is a brochure for how to be tasteful,” the publicist said, calling it their “gold-standard recommendation source” for “where to go or what’s interesting.” They added, “I could not tell you a story I’ve read in it, though.”
They are hardly alone. T is neither widely read nor broadly relevant, and under Yanagihara it hasn’t tried to be, instead reflecting her hyperspecific tastes and interests: avant-garde sculptors, Milanese apartments, all things Japan. (One travel issue was structured around how different cultures relate to rice.) The weird thing is it worked, remaining well respected in rarefied arts and style circles and an attractive destination for luxury advertisers who want to reach the affluent, educated Times print subscriber in a safe way (Chanel doesn’t exactly want to run ads alongside a story on the Iran war) and are drawn to Yanagihara’s eclectic vision. “Hanya is a very unique personality,” said another publicist. “My clients claw over being in the publication.”
T has a “halo of sophistication that we benefit from,” said Times deputy managing editor Sam Dolnick. And it makes money, the last piece of the Times that is still an advertising-oriented editorial product while the rest of the paper goes all in on a subscription-revenue model. “It’s an important part of our business,” he said. “The advertisers who are in T Magazine are fighting to be in T Magazine.” This gives T its raison d’être and makes Yanagihara’s successor a subject of interest both inside the organization and out. But T’s success also raises questions about the Times’ other magazine, The New York Times Magazine, whose future is murkier.
The two magazines began as one. Historically, the Times magazine, known colloquially as the Sunday magazine, was a showcase for photography and writing with the kind of stylishness, length, and subjectivity that had no home in the more buttoned-up daily reports. For a long time, it was the highlight of the enormous wad of paper that landed with a thud on subscribers’ doorsteps every weekend. It also became a place for a certain kind of advertiser that preferred the magazine to the paper, particularly the Style pages in the back of the book. In the early aughts, those pages became their own magazine, T, and the luxury advertisers followed.
Yanagihara, who declined a request for an interview, took over as editor in 2017, but she had a sideline as a novelist, having published the mega–best seller A Little Life two years earlier. That sideline is now closer to the main act: She was involved in a stage adaptation of A Little Life that premiered in London’s West End in 2023. She’s also producing a play in New York “that will require fundraising, which would clash with the Times’ ethics policies,” according to Puck’s Lauren Sherman.
She had already raised eyebrows among the rule-following Times crowd for repeatedly covering her close friend Daniel Roseberry, creative director of Schiaparelli. But T is so separate from the rest of the operation that none of the ethical boundary pushing seemed to matter. “Hanya did what Hanya was going to do,” said a senior newsroom editor. “It really had nothing to do with anything that was going on in the rest of the paper. And it didn’t matter because she was making money.”
Her team was lean, but they lived large, at least by today’s magazine-editor standards, traveling to Europe for collections and design fairs and staying in ritzy hotels. Despite her reputation for being something of a recluse, Yanagihara was a dedicated global brand ambassador. “Advertisers loved her because she had A Little Life and had this different celebrity from a typical magazine editor,” said a former Times business-side employee. “That well-rounded nature helped her.” Publicists were at times willing to wait years to get their stories placed in the magazine. “T has created the aura of — I don’t even call it luxury. I’d call it prestige and innovation,” said one. These relationships made up for any shortcomings she had as a manager. “She didn’t want to deal with people. She just wanted to execute her orders and have them done,” said a former T staffer.
Her departure gives the Times an opportunity to shake things up. But Dolnick said the paper has no interest in combining T with the Styles desk, as The Wall Street Journal did with its magazine. “The Styles desk serves a different purpose and a different audience,” said Dolnick. “Combining them, we’d be smaller. I don’t want to do that.” Dolnick and deputy managing editor Monica Drake are vetting internal candidates in the search for Yanagihara’s successor, while former Times executive editor Dean Baquet — who hired Yanagihara and whom Dolnick calls “a real fashion plate” — is focusing on external candidates. (Executive editor Joe Kahn will have ultimate approval.)
Nick Haramis, one of Yanagihara’s deputies and the former editor-in-chief of Interview, will likely be on the shortlist among other T deputies. Going that route could result in a Hanya-lite version of T. If the Times wants more of an overhaul, it could go with former T features director Thessaly La Force, Harper’s Bazaar editor-in-chief Samira Nasr, or Styles desk editor Stella Bugbee. Bugbee was in the running to lead T last time around, though it’s unclear whether she would be interested; the power center of the Times is in the newsroom. “It’s got to be somebody who has experience running magazines” and who “understands the value of working at the Times,” said Dolnick.
The unexpected upheaval at T coincides with a redesign of the Times magazine, its first in a decade. The redesign marks a reset for a publication that has seemingly struggled to adapt to changes at the Times, which is now primarily an app that makes it difficult for the reader to differentiate between magazine and newspaper content. Various desks in the newsroom are publishing magazinelike features and narrative reporting, often with the help of Times magazine editors who have been dispersed throughout the newsroom to lead initiatives like the “Ideas” section and “The Great Read.” Meanwhile, the 200-person “Opinion” section basically functions as its own magazine, churning out industrial levels of voice-y columns that were once the purview of the magazine (in March alone, the “Opinion” section published four columns about FX’s Kennedy-Bessette show, Love Story). The role of the paper’s actual magazine seems diminished. “There are a couple properties in the New York Times that don’t make any sense digitally; the magazine is one of them,” said the senior newsroom editor.
“The magazine’s identity as an independent and sort of separate publication has become a little bit harder to perceive, but I don’t think that means our identity is in question,” editor Jake Silverstein, who has been in the job since 2014, told me. The redesign has two goals that, by his own admission, “sound as if they’re a little contradictory”: create more digitally native content that connects better with online readers, and make the print product a more “bountiful offering” for the remaining weekend print subscribers — who still number in the hundreds of thousands, like to do the Sunday crossword, and are far more important to the Times these days than advertisers. “The weekend print subscription remains a very significant source of revenue, and all the models suggest that if you withdraw the magazine, it significantly declines,” he said. But even the redesign seems to acknowledge the magazine is in flux. “Rather than this being the introduction of a new magazine with a fixed lineup, this redesign begins a period in which we will more routinely experiment with new ideas,” Silverstein wrote in his editor’s note.
Both Dolnick and Silverstein argue that the newspaper as a whole becoming more magazinelike reflects not the decline of the Times magazine but rather its growing importance to the overall enterprise. Bill Wasik, Silverstein’s second-in-command, was recently made editor of the Science desk — “a signal that the magazine, and magazine journalism and magazine brains, are pretty central to what we do,” said Dolnick. He also noted that Claire Gutierrez, who edits “The Great Read,” was named editor of the year at the paper’s inaugural awards ceremony. “We’re creating something that has some of the dynamism of magazine journalism at the pace of daily journalism without missing a beat on creating a weekly magazine, and to me that’s a pretty exciting trick to pull off,” said Dolnick.
Journalists inside and outside the Times say the magazine has lost its coherence as a result. “There’s no overarching theory to it or approach or sensibility,” said one former Times writer. “It just has no identity. It’s three articles thrown together every week that don’t really speak to each other.” And with the magazine’s focus on wars and drones and mounting crises at home and other grim subjects, it’s not a light read. “It’s spooky,” said one publicist. “I don’t want to read anything that’s in there.” But the dissolution of the magazine’s identity may have been inevitable given the way everything bleeds together on the app. “We’ve essentially given up on the idea that they are going to seem as if they’re part of a different section,” said Silverstein. “A reader might encounter it and not know that it’s a magazine story, but we have accepted that if it means we’re going to reach a larger readership.”
The blurring of lines has risks for the newsroom as well. The magazine’s most ambitious undertaking of recent years was “The 1619 Project,” an effort to “reframe the country’s history” through the lenses of slavery and white supremacy. The initiative, which launched in August 2019 with a 100-page spread in the Sunday magazine, was predictably divisive, and a group of distinguished historians objected in a letter to the paper to what they saw as its factual errors and historical flaws. In October 2020, Silverstein’s own colleague Times Opinion columnist Bret Stephens, highlighted how the magazine had quietly removed references to 1619 as the country’s “true founding” or the “moment [America] began” from the digital display copy. Silverstein responded by arguing that the idea of regarding 1619 as America’s birth year “was a metaphor.” The fallout cast a shadow on a project that was otherwise a smashing success; it won writer Nikole Hannah-Jones a Pulitzer Prize. Perhaps it was too big.
“Of course it was exhausting to go through the battles that followed, and I think it is true that, maybe for the first year or so afterward, let’s maybe not do another project that tries to upend national identity for a little while,” said Silverstein. “But it’s not like we’re trying not to do that.”
The magazine has also notably become a home for newspaper stories that are simply really long, but Silverstein rejects the notion that the magazine is coming up with fewer of its own ideas. In the past year, “we generated some of the most important pieces of ambitious enterprise and investigative work that the joint has produced,” he said. “The idea that we would basically become a downstream receptacle, a kind of magazine print hub, is not the vision.” Though that does seem to be the vision of a new section introduced in the redesign: a monthly digest of coverage from the culture pages of the Times. “This is all stuff that has been published already, but what’s interesting about it is that it’s curated and condensed,” said Silverstein.
One focus of the redesign is the front of the book, where there are some new columns, such as an essay on books, by Parul Sehgal, and the revival of the “On Language” column, which was shuttered in 2011. The “Letter of Recommendation” has been retired. Noreen Malone, an editor in the newsroom, is joining the magazine to figure out “more recurring short-form franchises that come around every week,” Silverstein said, like “The Interview,” which started as a Q&A in the magazine and now also exists in audio form, on YouTube, and as a distinct digital franchise. “It represents the most successful expression of this idea that we need to be able to create a single story in multiple modes, each of which has been edited to perfection.”
When T was born, more than 20 years ago, it not only robbed the Sunday magazine of advertising dollars but yanked a lot of color, beauty, and frivolity from the publication, turning it into a variation of the daily report — a distinction that has grown only more hazy with time. “I know there are people who are a bit puzzled, said Silverstein. “You know, The magazine, what does it do here? Part of the goal of this redesign is to define that value much more sharply because we really believe in it.”
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