Blake Eskin, The New Yorker’s first (and present) Web editor, says Internet trends haven’t affected the magazine one bit… oh, expect for that
“Critterati� contest, which encouraged readers to dress up their pets as their favorite literary character. “We’re aware that
people like looking at pictures of dogs and cats on the Internet,� Eskin says in a Q&A with
Sparksheet -- a “custom content� blog run by WPP. Still, Eskin admits,
“If we threw all our energies into this stuff we obviously couldn’t support the kind of journalism we do … You can’t send
someone to Rwanda for a month on the kind of revenue earned from pictures of cats!� (No?) Adds Eskin: “Fundamentally, The New Yorker is something you want to sit
with and not be distracted by … I don’t mean this in a spiritual way, but it’s a meditative experience … The Web is
fundamentally a distracted experience.�