When and who started the New Yorker?!

When and who started the New Yorker?

The New Yorker debuted on February 17, 1925, with the February 21 issue. It was founded by Harold Ross and his wife, Jane Grant, a New York Times reporter. Ross wanted to create a sophisticated humor magazine—in contrast to the corniness of other humor publications such as Judge, where he had worked, or Life. Ross partnered with entrepreneur Raoul H. Fleischman to establish the F-R Publishing Company and established the magazine's first offices at 25 West 45th Street in Manhattan. Ross would continue to edit the magazine until his death in 1951. For the first, occasionally precarious, years of its existence, the magazine prided itself on its cosmopolitan sophistication. The New Yorker famously declared in the debut issue: "It has announced that it is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque."

While the magazine never lost its touches of humor, The New Yorker soon established itself as a preeminent forum for serious journalism and fiction. Shortly after the end of World War II, John Hersey's essay Hiroshima filled an entire issue. In subsequent decades the magazine published short stories by many of the most respected writers of the 20th and 21st centuries, including Ann Beattie, Alice Munro, Haruki Murakami, Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, J.D. Salinger and John Updike. Publication of Shirley Jackson's The Lottery drew more mail than any other story in the New Yorker's history.

In its early decades, the magazine sometimes published two or even three short stories a week, but in recent years the pace has remained steady at one story per issue. While some styles and themes recur more often than others in New Yorker fiction, the magazine's stories are marked less by uniformity than by their variety, and they have ranged from Updike's introspective domestic narratives to the surrealism of Donald Barthelme and from parochial accounts of the lives of neurotic New Yorkers to stories set in a wide range of locations and eras and translated from many languages.

The non-fiction feature articles (which usually make up the bulk of the magazine's content) are known for covering an eclectic array of topics. Recent subjects have included eccentric evangelist Creflo Dollar, the different ways in which humans perceive the passage of time, and Munchausen syndrome by proxy.

Ross was succeeded by William Shawn (1951-1987), followed by Robert Gottlieb (1987-1992) and Tina Brown (1992-1998). Brown's nearly six-year tenure attracted the most controversy, thanks to her high profile (a marked contrast to that of the retiring Shawn) and changes she made to the magazine's format — the introduction of photography, increased focus on current events and more coverage of hot topics such as celebrities and business tycoons. The current editor of The New Yorker is David Remnick, who took over in 1998 from Brown. The magazine was acquired by Advance Publications in 1985, the media company owned by S.I. Newhouse.

Since the late 1990s, The New Yorker has taken advantage of computer and Internet technologies for the release of current and archival material. The New Yorker maintains a website with some content from the current issue (plus exclusive web-only content) at www.newyorker.com. As well, The New Yorker's cartoons are available for purchase at www.cartoonbank.com. The complete back issues from 1925 to 2005 (4,109 issues, half a million pages) were published on eight DVD-ROMs.

A New Yorker look-alike, Novy Ochevidets (The New Eyewitness), was launched in Russia in 2004. It folded in January, 2005 after five months of circulation.