David Remnick on journalism in the Trump era and why he hires obsessives

For the past 19 years, David Remnick has been the editor of the New Yorker, perhaps the greatest magazine in the English language. Under his leadership, the New Yorker has received 149 nominations for National Magazine Awards and won 37. It’s also, perhaps more impressively, been consistently profitable in an era where many august journalism organizations have seen their business models collapse.

And Remnick keeps writing. He’s the author of six books, including Lenin’s Tomb, which won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Bridge, a fascinating biography of Barack Obama, and he churns out a steady stream of deeply reported profiles of musicians, athletes, and politicians. Oh, and he hosts the New Yorker Radio Hour.

He’s a busy guy.

Remnick started his career as a beat reporter at the Washington Post. In 1988, the Post sent him to Moscow, an auspicious time for a young reporter to land in what was then the Soviet Union. There, he witnessed the fall of the USSR and the creation of modern Russia — a journalistic background that has become startlingly relevant in recent years.

In this wide-ranging discussion, the New Yorker editor discusses Russia’s meddling in the US election, Russia’s transformation from communist rule to Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, his magazine’s coverage of President Donald Trump, how he chooses his reporters and editors, and how to build a real business around great journalism. Whether you care about politics or journalism or just the role of truth in society today, there's a lot of wisdom here.

Books:

Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell

Middlemarch by George Eliot

The novels of Vladimir Nabokov