No one ever told me not to talk about the company, which didn’t mean that there wasn’t an unspoken rule against it. I was a voracious consumer of any and all things business of media, and it wasn’t hard to notice that no one from Conde was going on People versus Algorithms to talk their book. Maybe there was something admirable in this rectitude; a desire to keep the focus on the stories. Maybe a century of operations had made clear that talk was cheap, that cheap talk could be expensive – the rope long enough to hang you with.   

Still, I would get spun up over speculations about our business that one of the outlets that regularly covered us would present, confidently, as facts. This was during a period of time when the company was launching paywalls with something approaching alacrity; it was also the period wherein Google search traffic began its inexorable, stepped decline. These trends were not causal, or at least, there was not any meaningful causal relationship that we were able to find, and so it was irritating to read – to pay to read! – columns ascribing traffic loss to the paywall, even if the paywall in question didn’t exist at the time of writing, even if it was more irritating that pageviews were still treated, by otherwise intelligent people within the company, as the golden apple, the last and only emperor. 

It didn’t occur to me, not then, to question the rest of the coverage.

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The Devil Wears Prada 2 came out in May, and occasioned a broader than usual range of company chatter. The movie itself was fine, I thought. It’s not a documentary, but it is a reasonably accurate commentary on the state of glossies, and their falling place in the cultural firmament, even if many of the specifics are at least a decade out of date. The treatment of the magazine’s day to day operations is generally dismissive and sometimes absurd, but that these (words, words, words!) are secondary to a Vogue World-esque show in Milan is neither: it’s only adjacent industry telling us what they think of when they think of Vogue. As for the benevolent billionaire curative offered in the denouement: it’s depressing and unimaginative, but it’s not unrealistic. Print media has long relied upon billionaire largesse; the pool of billionaires with long leashes and calm heads, if not a genuine passion for journalism or glossies or printing presses, has dwindled as revenue has grown harder to come by. 

Anyways. It was the chatter around the film that had me, briefly, spun up all over again, including at shows I like, like The Press Box and The Big Picture and Jam Session (and shows I sometimes like, like Fashion People). The general consensus amongst the multiple podcast hosts and guests who had worked for the company in 2012, or 2009, for a year, was that the film depicted Conde Nast exactly – it was shot at the offices! (it was not) –  and Vogue exactly; that it was both a precis on the death of magazines writ large, and this particular magazine, now so very small. “I was surprised that such a big budget kind of broad movie wanted to go that deep into like what’s going on at Conde Nast in 2026,” one guest on The Press Box said, before adding that “Vogue the magazine is on life support.” 

This bothered me more than silly errors about the offices. The media landscape is littered with examples of life support – the magazine that dominated paid circulation for decades having ai fake reporter bios and hallucinate volleyball instructions; the Pulitzer-winning newsroom recommending hallucinated books, the many, many once-strong regional and local papers that are now mostly taboola grids stacked one after the other. If you are a legacy media brand, life support comes after the sale to private equity or – worse still – a hedge fund like Alden Global Capital. Vogue isn’t at the height of its powers, but that it still wields the power it does is fairly remarkable, and hard-fought. 

And there’s something galling, I think, in the casualness of the talking heads as they prognosticate over their subjects’ apocalyptic futures, as they buttress valid argument with lazy anecdote. Perhaps they have grown so comfortable with their own voices that voices have become the sun and what is said the distant planets, not beside the point but only points at all because of the sun’s gravitational force. More generously, this may be a byproduct of doing away with fact checkers. In Zach Helland’s charming and engrossing and not at all vaunted essay on the history and practice of fact checking at The New Yorker, Ben McGrath, another checker turned writer, says as much: “It’s really interesting to realize that, these people you’ve been reading and admiring, there’s six errors on every page. And it’s not that they’re full of shit. It’s that this is what every person is like.”

(It’s likely not possible to confirm that every person is like this, but I am. I have spent far longer trying to wring the errors out of this piece than I have writing it.)

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I’ve been reading Catch and Kill, Ronan Farrow’s expansive account of reporting on Harvey Weinstein: it’s a book about the hard and soft power Weinstein wielded over so much of Hollywood and media and politics, such that his sexual predation and abuse of dozens and dozens of young women – an open secret – was, for two decades, deliberately minimized, swept away, ignored. It is an indictment of the media executives at NBC and Comcast who tried to bury their own network’s reporting, and, to an extent, of the reporters at other outlets, like The Hollywood Reporter, who knew there was a there there but weren’t willing to be the first to say so. 

The New Yorker took the story when NBC would not. And then they fact-checked the hell out of it. There came a point when the New Yorker staff learned that the New York Times, where investigative reporters Jody Kantor and Megan Twohey had also been pursuing this story, would soon be going to print. I, as the reader, having been with Farrow for nine months and dozens of interviews, felt an unbecoming sense of urgency. David Remnick, the magazine’s editor, held firm: the story, which was nearing the end of edits, still needed to go through the fact-checking process. All the pieces matter; one slip up, even on something small, something trivial, like the color of a sweater – it all has to be airtight, for even the smallest inaccuracy can call into question the larger truth.  

“We’re an ocean liner, not a speedboat. We always knew the Times might publish first,” Remnick said. 

The New York Times did publish first; a damning account of a three decades of sexual harassment and Weinstein’s systematic use of professional threats, bribes, and settlements – what Ashley Judd described as “coersive bargaining” – to silence his victims. Farrow’s first piece came five days later. It corroborated the Times’ findings and then laid out, in detail, what happened in some of those episodes. The web version included an audio recording from an earlier sting – a recording both Weinstein and then Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance thought they’d successfully deleted – of Weinstein telling Ambra Battilana Gutierrez the unwanted sexual advances she had experienced in their prior meeting was behavior he was “used to.” 

The combined effect was seismic; more women came forward, more powerful men were held to account. Companies, out of fear of public uproar or threats to shareholder value, began taking allegations of workplace misconduct much more seriously. Congress passed legislation banning employers from forcing employees into private arbitration over sexual misconduct claims, and many states imposed stricter limits on post-dispute NDAs (Washington bans them outright). Weinstein himself was fired from his own company three days after the Times story broke. He was arrested in New York and charged with sex crimes the following May.  Two years later, in 2020, a jury voted unanimously to convict him of rape, and he was sentenced to twenty three years in prison; a second set of charges, in Los Angeles, added another 16 years to this sentence. In 2018, The New Yorker and the Times were jointly awarded a Pulitzer for their work.

But America has no memory, or its memory is cyclical; Weinstein’s third appeal of his New York sentence resulted in a second mistrial; Noah Oppenheim, the mendacious NBC president who repeatedly buried the Weinstein story, may soon lead CNN.

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Sam Kriss wrote about the cognitive and societal value of reading in the spring issue of Jacobin — reading not as in texts and TikTok captions but reading deliberate, literary writing; the sort of writing that narrows the gap between writer (and the act of writing) and reader. Without undertaking this type of reading on a regular basis, he writes, we are “incapable of thinking outside of immediate sensory reality.” We can’t infer or extrapolate; can’t group a saw with a hammer (the saw can only go with a log: “If we’ll be left without firewood, we won’t be able to do anything!”). Writing enables us to speculate, ponder, assess, foment, rearchitect, re-envision. Listening to something that was never written down doesn’t activate those same capabilities, both because listening is inherently more passive than reading and because purely oral discourse sprawls the same way planned developments do: the architecture, paint colors, lollipop cul-de-sacs, lone, sad cherry tree are the same, there’s just more of them.

The crie de coeur in this piece isn’t that listening to streamers makes us dumb and reading Bleak House makes us smart; it’s that the thinking skills we develop from reading are essential to a democratic society. History has made this point, over and over; it’s just been a while, in this country, since the reversion has come so swiftly. Also, remember, America has no memory.

(I know Rose Horowitz made a lot of the same points (and cited some of the same research) in her recent Atlantic feature, but Kriss’ piece came out first, and the writing is wonderful, and thoughtful, and troubling: reading it IS magic.)

Print media is challenged, but it isn’t dead – not as a format ( exhibit a, b, c, see also The Atlantic’s gain of 500K new subscribers in under two years, half of them print (the print take rate at Conde US is similar, and the number of paying subscribers over all grew slightly last year)) and not as a shorthand for media companies that started out publishing physical magazines, and now also publish digitally, in a plenary of formats. They have podcasts and video — but these often start as written artifacts; they are closer to news magazines (or, to be fair, morning shows) than to POV streaming. The optimist in me thinks that some of the places that survived the internet era and the social media era and the search era with some or all of their print media discipline in place can survive this current era of forced ai disintermediation and what feels like a 100:25:1 aggregation:takes:reporting ratio. Maybe, by continuing to explain, in 80,000 word pieces and 44 minute podcasts and a searchable, growing AI watchdog, how overblown ai’s real and potential capabilities are, and how venal and recklessly disruptive the push by a few for its wholesale adoption by the many, they can even help us course-correct.