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A fashion publicist was recently talking to me about T, the style magazine of the New York Times, whose fabulously enigmatic editor, Hanya Yanagihara<\/a>, announced in March that she would be stepping down to pursue opportunities in theater. \u201cT is a brochure for how to be tasteful,\u201d the publicist said, calling it their \u201cgold-standard recommendation source\u201d for \u201cwhere to go or what\u2019s interesting.\u201d They added, \u201cI could not tell you a story I\u2019ve read in it, though.\u201d<\/p>\n They are hardly alone. T is neither widely read nor broadly relevant, and under Yanagihara it hasn\u2019t 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\u2019t exactly want to run ads alongside a story on the Iran war) and are drawn to Yanagihara\u2019s eclectic vision. \u201cHanya is a very unique personality,\u201d said another publicist. \u201cMy clients claw over being in the publication.\u201d<\/p>\n T has a \u201chalo of sophistication that we benefit from,\u201d said Times assistant 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. \u201cIt\u2019s an important part of our business,\u201d he said. \u201cThe advertisers who are in T Magazine are fighting to be in T Magazine.\u201d This gives T its raison d\u2019\u00eatre and makes Yanagihara\u2019s successor a subject of interest both inside the organization and out. But T\u2019s success also raises questions about the Times\u2019 other magazine, The New York Times Magazine, whose future is murkier.<\/p>\n 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\u2019 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2013best 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\u2019s West End in 2023. She\u2019s also producing a play in New York \u201cthat will require fundraising, which would clash with the Times\u2019 ethics policies,\u201d according<\/a> to Puck\u2019s Lauren Sherman.<\/p>\n She had already raised eyebrows among the rule-following Times crowd for<\/a> repeatedly<\/a> covering<\/a> her close friend Daniel Roseberry, creative director of Schiaparelli, and for collaborating on a collection with Valentino. But T is so separate from the rest of the operation that none of the ethical boundary pushing seemed to matter. \u201cHanya did what Hanya was going to do,\u201d said a senior newsroom editor. \u201cIt really had nothing to do with anything that was going on in the rest of the paper. And it didn\u2019t matter because she was making money.\u201d<\/p>\n Her team was lean, but they lived large, at least by today\u2019s 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. \u201cAdvertisers loved her because she had A Little Life and had this different celebrity from a typical magazine editor,\u201d said a former Times business-side employee. \u201cThat well-rounded nature helped her.\u201d Publicists were at times willing to wait years to get their stories placed in the magazine. \u201cT has created the aura of \u2014 I don\u2019t even call it luxury. I\u2019d call it prestige and innovation,\u201d said one. These relationships made up for any shortcomings she had as a manager. \u201cShe didn\u2019t want to deal with people. She just wanted to execute her orders and have them done,\u201d said a former T staffer.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> did with its magazine. \u201cThe Styles desk serves a different purpose and a different audience,\u201d said Dolnick. \u201cCombining them, we\u2019d be smaller. I don\u2019t want to do that.\u201d Dolnick and deputy managing editor Monica Drake are vetting internal candidates in the search for Yanagihara\u2019s successor, while former Times executive editor Dean Baquet \u2014 who hired Yanagihara and whom Dolnick calls \u201ca real fashion plate\u201d \u2014 is focusing on external candidates. (Executive editor Joe Kahn will have ultimate approval.)<\/p>\n Nick Haramis, one of Yanagihara\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s unclear whether she would be interested; the power center of the Times is in the newsroom. \u201cIt\u2019s got to be somebody who has experience running magazines\u201d and who \u201cunderstands the value of working at the Times,\u201d said Dolnick.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cIdeas<\/a>\u201d section and \u201cThe Great Read<\/a>.\u201d Meanwhile, the 200-person \u201cOpinion\u201d section basically functions as its own magazine<\/a>, churning out industrial levels of voice-y columns that were once the purview of the magazine (in March alone, the \u201cOpinion\u201d section published four columns about FX\u2019s Kennedy-Bessette show, Love Story). The role of the paper\u2019s actual magazine seems diminished. \u201cThere are a couple properties in the New York Times that don\u2019t make any sense digitally; the magazine is one of them,\u201d said the senior newsroom editor.<\/p>\n \u201cThe magazine\u2019s identity as an independent and sort of separate publication has become a little bit harder to perceive, but I don\u2019t think that means our identity is in question,\u201d editor Jake Silverstein, who has been in the job since 2014, told me. The redesign has two goals that, by his own admission, \u201csound as if they\u2019re a little contradictory\u201d: create more digitally native content that connects better with online readers, and make the print product a more \u201cbountiful offering\u201d for the remaining weekend print subscribers \u2014 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. \u201cThe weekend print subscription remains a very significant source of revenue, and all the models suggest that if you withdraw the magazine, it significantly declines,\u201d he said. But even the redesign seems to acknowledge the magazine is in flux. \u201cRather 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,\u201d Silverstein wrote in his editor\u2019s note.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s second-in-command, was recently made editor of the Science desk \u2014 \u201ca signal that the magazine, and magazine journalism and magazine brains, are pretty central to what we do,\u201d said Dolnick. He also noted that Claire Gutierrez, who edits \u201cThe Great Read,\u201d was named editor of the year at the paper\u2019s inaugural awards ceremony<\/a>. \u201cWe\u2019re 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\u2019s a pretty exciting trick to pull off,\u201d said Dolnick.<\/p>\n Journalists inside and outside the Times say the magazine has lost its coherence as a result. \u201cThere\u2019s no overarching theory to it or approach or sensibility,\u201d said one former Times writer. \u201cIt just has no identity. It\u2019s three articles thrown together every week that don\u2019t really speak to each other.\u201d And with the magazine\u2019s focus on wars and drones and mounting crises at home and other grim subjects, it\u2019s not a light read. \u201cIt\u2019s spooky,\u201d said one publicist. \u201cI don\u2019t want to read anything that\u2019s in there.\u201d But the dissolution of the magazine\u2019s identity may have been inevitable given the way everything bleeds together on the app. \u201cWe\u2019ve essentially given up on the idea that they are going to seem as if they\u2019re part of a different section,\u201d said Silverstein. \u201cA reader might encounter it and not know that it\u2019s a magazine story, but we have accepted that if it means we\u2019re going to reach a larger readership.\u201d<\/p>\n The blurring of lines has risks for the newsroom as well. The magazine\u2019s most ambitious undertaking of recent years was \u201cThe 1619 Project,\u201d an effort to \u201creframe the country\u2019s history\u201d 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<\/a> to what they saw as its factual errors and historical flaws. In October 2020, Silverstein\u2019s own colleague Times Opinion columnist Bret Stephens, highlighted<\/a> how the magazine had quietly removed references to 1619 as the country\u2019s \u201ctrue founding\u201d or the \u201cmoment [America] began\u201d from the digital display copy. Silverstein responded<\/a> by arguing that the idea of regarding 1619 as America\u2019s birth year \u201cwas a metaphor.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n \u201cOf 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 afterwards, let\u2019s maybe not do another project that tries to upend national identity for a little while,\u201d said Silverstein. \u201cBut it\u2019s not like we\u2019re trying not to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n 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, \u201cwe generated some of the most important pieces of ambitious enterprise and investigative work that the joint has produced,\u201d he said. \u201cThe idea that we would basically become a downstream receptacle, a kind of magazine print hub, is not the vision.\u201d 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. \u201cThis is all stuff that has been published already, but what\u2019s interesting about it is that it\u2019s curated and condensed,\u201d said Silverstein.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cOn Language\u201d column, which was shuttered in 2011. The \u201cLetter of Recommendation\u201d has been retired. Noreen Malone, an editor in the newsroom, is joining the magazine to figure out \u201cmore recurring short-form franchises that come around every week,\u201d Silverstein said, like \u201cThe Interview,\u201d which started as a Q&A in the magazine and now also exists in audio form, on YouTube, and as a distinct digital franchise. \u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 a distinction that has grown only more hazy with time. \u201cI know there are people who are a bit puzzled, said Silverstein. \u201cYou 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Sign Up for the Intelligencer\u00a0Newsletter<\/p>\n Daily news about the politics, business, and technology shaping our world.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n