I saw myself as providing two strands of journalism there. I thought it was very important to have a news element to provide what I used to think of as a threshold piece. To bring people into the tent you have to have a piece about whatever it was that week, this piece that couldn’t wait. Then you could go, in the middle of the magazine, to the big tent piece, the piece that had taken 12,000 words and six months to do. I saw it always as a two-horse stream. And I felt committed to the notion that people would have to read it that week. It can still happen, in an upmarket magazine, people say, “oh, it’s a great magazine, I haven’t got to it yet, but it’s terrific, the last three issues are piled up by my bed.” And I would think, that’s not a compliment. That means, I failed.

• Ten years later, what would you do at The New Yorker?

I would probably redesign it again. I might make a shorter front of the book section. I’m an admirer of the Spectator magazine in London. It does a very good job of a front that’s interesting, voices that you come to every week.

• So, in the midst of TV and the Web, the ideal print content?

I would like the newsmagazines to do a longer, a much more contextual piece. They should not be just reactive. There are three kinds of pieces which interest me. One is to introduce something completely new into the dialogue. Secondly to provide some really good context. And thirdly to provide a pleasure principle — voice, attitude, irreverence are very important to create reader loyalty. And visual excitement. We have great photography out there which gets very little play. In fact, one of the themes I brought out in my Diana book was the irony that several of those so-called paparazzi were actually war reporters. But because there was no market for their kind of serious work, they were dispatched by the news agencies to do the celebrity hit. A lot of them might not have been there that night in Paris if the media had not become so debased as a marketplace for photographers.