Quality is, as you might expect, superb. While the New Yorker.com site itself, although well-executed, is nothing out of the ordinary, the magazine is placing a significant portion of each issue on the Web, including "Talk of the Town," criticism, fiction and at least one major article per week. (The renowned cartoons are there, too, though not as straightforwardly accessible and not necessarily from the current issue.) All of this is available a week before the Monday publication date, which is to say, a week before the physical magazine is delivered to many subscribers.

Even this abbreviated content is more than enough to propel the New Yorker past "competing" Web sites such as Salon, Feed or Slate, all of which were optimistically compared to the brilliant weekly during the Web's frenzied initial growth period. (We plead guilty to this ourselves.) All of these online titles have produced good, sometimes exceptional, work. But we're still waiting for the Web equivalent to Hiroshima, Silent Spring, or The Fate of the Earth, and we're likely to continue waiting for some time.

What's more, none of the e-zines mentioned above come close to the New Yorker's literary depth and range. Susie Bright is no John Updike. Although the New Yorker will occasionally do ephemeral pieces (e.g., the Sean Combs trial), these are served as appetizers, not the main course they represent elsewhere. Even during the Tina Brown era, the magazine's serious writing has always outweighed its fluff stuff.

(One defiant quirk of the New Yorker.com site we appreciate is its refusal to break long pieces into bite-sized chunks: articles and short stories are presented whole, on one long, scrolling page. This is a magazine for readers, even on the Web.)

It is something of a miracle that the New Yorker has sustained its quality for as long as it has. Certainly it has never been an automatic process—Harold Ross, the magazine's founder, was a truly great editor who fought intensely to protect the magazine against corrupting business influences, both internal and external. At the same time, he was an acute business man who took pride in his magazine's increasing prosperity. (The collection Letters from the Editor, edited by Thomas Kinkel, does a wonderful job of conveying the flavor of the magazine's Ross years.) Ross's successors, William Shawn, Tina Brown and (now) David Remnick have managed, along with an illustrious assortment of writers, editors and artists of every stripe, to preserve the magazine's stature and relevance.

Which brings us to the issue of publishing economics, cited above. One wonders what Ross would have thought of this Web site, and especially what he would have thought of this Web site being offered to readers for free. The New Yorker—improbably enough, given its decades of excellence—is part of a large publishing conglomerate. As we have said, the magazine was conspicuous by its absence from the Web. Now the New Yorker has a Web site. Now what?

This is the crème de la crème of the publishing world, and it cannot afford to give away its content. Nor can we afford for it to—what would become of the New Yorker's outstanding array of contributors if they had to, in effect, subsidize a free outlet for their work? In the post-"new economy" era, it is obvious this site must charge for its content. Not necessarily the full (print) subscription price, but something.

Salon, in what we feel is an extremely optimistic move, is now offering readers the option of paying $30 per year for an "enhanced," advertising-free version of its site. Surely the New Yorker's online edition is worth as much. If not, then the magazine has no business on the Web—and the Web's future as a serious journalistic and literary medium is doubtful.

Enjoy it while you can.

(Reviewed March 26, 2001)