By Anna Patchefsky
Illustration by Li Yin
Caroline Miller was the editor-in-chief of New York magazine from 1996–2004. Her job was to tell the story of New York at the turn of the century—a narrative that included the rise and fall of Rudy Giuliani, the boom and bust of dot-coms, the expansion and contraction of Wall Street, and, of course, 9/11. When Miller and I sat down to talk a few weeks before the 2024 presidential election, she brought some of the magazine’s old covers. They depicted the wide range of a New Yorker’s cultural preoccupations: the development of new neighborhoods like the Meatpacking District, the competition to get into the best preschools, and John F. Kennedy Jr. and Caroline Bessette-Kennedy. Three of the covers are from 9/11. After that Tuesday, the landscape of the city was changing, and Miller was funneling the atmosphere into the magazine’s glossy folds.
The covers of the magazines address the question: What do New Yorkers care about? And why does the rest of the country care about what New Yorkers care about? New York, it seems, is always at the center of the country. So then, are its politics.
Miller is currently teaching Journalism and Democracy: The 2024 Election, an American Studies seminar offered in national election years. The class gathers a plethora of Columbia’s poli-sci and journalism–inclined students. Miller started teaching the class in 2012 in response to journalistic disruptions of the digital revolution, polarization, and the disaggregation of big legacy players.
The connection between journalism and democracy is enshrined in our constitution and permeates the foundations of American society. Ideally, journalists enable the electorate to make informed decisions. In a political landscape riddled with misinformation and division, Miller’s class addresses the challenges that journalists face as their mission becomes increasingly difficult to perform. At the precipice of the 2024 election, we spoke about the evolution of New York City, the decline of legacy media, and, of course, its effects on the present political moment.
The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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Blue and White: What was it like the first time you taught the class?
Caroline Miller: The first time I taught the class was 2012, the year Barack Obama was reelected. The most dramatic year, not surprisingly, was 2016. Students in that class had grown up with Barack Obama as president. I think they had an idea that the president was a kind of father figure. When Trump won, the class was so upset. And as a much older person who has lived through many administrations, I saw that my students had a hard time seeing that this would pass. It was very painful.
BW: In your syllabus, it says that journalism has never been more contested than it is now. Has that line always been on there? It seems kind of like the perpetual moment we are experiencing.
CM: Yes, I would say that the role of journalism has become more difficult every year. This is because of the trends that undermine the business basis for it—with Google and Meta sucking all of the advertising money from newspapers, magazines, and online news sites. But the larger thing that has made it worse is the declining belief in the fact base. Now, there is a huge number of people openly defiant about what the facts are, and who will say on the table “I don’t believe in facts.” And the disdain for expertise. And the disdain for science. And just the disdain for government. Even if you are talking about a FEMA worker who is delivering water and food, you don’t want that person in your neighborhood because they are working for the government. That makes it very difficult for journalists to do their jobs, which is to get people’s information so that they can vote in a responsible way.
BW: That is a concise way of phrasing the job of a journalist as producing a vote.
CM: Democracy is based on the notion that people are competent to make decisions for themselves. For that, they need information.
BW: Is it the role of a journalist or of a huge media company, like the Times, to make sure there is actual truth or facts?
CM: You are asking a really big question. The way the media handles facts is one of the things that I have seen since I started teaching the class. I’ll give you an example. When Donald Trump came down the escalator in 2015 to announce his candidacy, he said that Mexicans are sending rapists and murders across the border. The mainstream media was floored. What do you do with that kind of claim? That was 2016, and there was great reluctance to use the word lie. They would say something was a misstatement. If there was fact checking, it would be in a separate story. What we see now is that fact checking is part of the story. You could argue now that it is too much of the story. The facts are checked in the headline—it is part of the narrative.
Many journalists would like to claim they are being impartial. But it gets more and more difficult when you are saying “this isn’t true, you’re wrong.” And people who are Trump supporters believe that is just opposition. It is tough to try to be credible. The other big change is that more people do not really want news that is neutral. They want news that reflects their values and their beliefs.
BW: It seems like the class is unique in that people really are coming to discuss politics, at least in some sense, from very different backgrounds. What have you found about the way they relate to each other?
CM: The students really listen and support each other. I am happy to have a range of backgrounds. We have several students who are from the Deep South, and that is very helpful to explain what we are seeing in the press. We have a range of political views, but we are not arguing the merits of the candidates—we are talking about the coverage of the candidates, and the media produced by both candidates: advertisements, TikToks, and posts.
BW: I can’t imagine the TikTok effect was going on much when you started teaching the course.
CM: Well, social media was starting to be a factor. Facebook was starting to be a factor. I remember in 2012 assigning a story from the Washington Post that was about a woman who had gone to jail for threatening Barack Obama. She was probably 65 and had gone online and met all these other people in Facebook groups who shared her views. She was extremely happy to have this community and got more and more radicalized.
BW: Have you seen coverage of the election cycle change in relationship to different forms of media since Biden has dropped out?
CW: The tenor of the coverage has changed a great deal. Journalists like news and don’t like it when races don’t change. And so the dramatic change was pretty exciting for everyone, and it fed a great interest in the election, which journalists love. They had a whole new set of stories to write and new characters in this drama. So it was certainly exciting. And it made it feel like we are in a race. They don’t want a lopsided contest.
BW: Not at all. The excitement is interesting. I noticed that in the class there’s a lot of writing—students are revising and editing in the way that journalists may be more inclined to than students are.
CM: Students in the class write a series of essays that I think of as media analysis or criticism. And every piece is revised after I read it, put in comments, and we discuss it. I know it’s a little unusual, but students usually appreciate talking over what they’ve written. First drafts are rarely as good as they can be, and I think people usually enjoy seeing their piece get better. And, as an editor for so many years, prompting a writer to make something sharper or more compelling is my idea of fun.
BW: Can you talk about how you found yourself at New York magazine?
CM: I started at New York magazine in 1996. But I've been working in journalism much longer than that. I didn’t do journalism in college. I went to Stanford and I taught school for a couple of years. I kind of fell into journalism. I was living in upstate New York, and a friend of a friend had this little weekly newspaper, and he got a job at a real newspaper in Washington. So another friend and I took over this little paper called the Newfield News, circulation 700. It was a weekly paper about a farming community outside of Ithaca. We put it out for a couple of years.
BW: What kind of stories did you cover?
CM: It might be about a school board meeting, a town project, or someone’s salt and pepper collection. We did everything from reporting and photography to layout and driving it to the printer. Then I went to the Ithaca Journal as a reporter. A small newspaper is a great place to start, and that's one of the things that’s tragic about the death of local newspapers in this country. That newspaper was my graduate school. One day I’d be sent to cover a trial, and the next day a plane crash. Every day, there was something different. You’d cover town board meetings and human interest stories. And then one day, I was complaining that the editing was bad and that someone put a stupid headline on my story. The managing editor said, “Well, if you think the editing is so bad, why don’t you do it?” And so I became an editor—at several newspapers and then several magazines.
BW: What is it about magazines that is different from newspapers?
CM: A good way to think about it is that a newspaper is horizontal: It’s meant to cover all the things that people who live in a particular geographic area might want to know about. It’s got sports and food and news and culture and everything. One of the effects of that is that I might buy a newspaper for the fishing news, but I’m also getting the national news—and the international news. It’s an abundance. A magazine is for a particular interest group. It’s for people who have something in common. Sometimes it's an age group—like Seventeen magazine, where I was editor-in-chief for several years, is for teenagers. But it could be for people who are into needlepoint or for people who are into sports. And so, for instance, New York magazine doesn’t try to be for everyone in the city, but is for New Yorkers and other people who share a kind of high information psychographic—people who are early adopters. They like new things. They metabolize ideas quickly. They’re interested in new fashion and new food and art and real estate—how other people live.
BW: A fast pace.
CM: All kinds of new ideas. So a lot of people subscribe to New York magazine who don’t live in New York because they feel like New Yorkers. And they’re interested in what New Yorkers are thinking about and doing.
BW: How have you seen the identity of New Yorkers change?
CM: I arrived at New York magazine in 1996. The Yankees had just won the World Series. And it was a great time to be in New York. New York was booming. Wall Street was flush. Dot-coms were raking in start-up money. Crime was way down. Rudy Giuliani, who was the mayor, looked like a presidential contender. It was a very optimistic time. But I was also there four years later, when there was the dot-com bust and a recession. The air came out of this balloon and the stock market crashed. There were a lot of magazine covers about living with less and people being depressed. In seven years, I saw a lot of ups and downs.
BW: You were editor-in-chief of New York magazine during 9/11. How did you tell the story of New York?
CM: 9/11 was obviously the biggest story that happened when I was at the magazine, and the most difficult and painful. The challenge of trying to do justice to this overwhelming experience in a couple of days—9/11 was a Tuesday and the magazine closed on Friday—was really very painful. But we felt grateful to have something to do that felt like we were contributing something, by trying to channel how people were feeling, what was happening, and finding the stories that we could tell. The mood in the weeks and months after 9/11 was constantly changing. Every day, people got up and said, “Who am I today? Who are we today? Is it okay to go back to the theater? Is it okay to have fun? Is it okay to go out? How do you process something that’s that disturbing?” And, of course, it was still smoking down there. Many people were staying with friends uptown. Everybody was struggling to deal with it and to try to articulate what it meant or who we were going to be now. And how is our idea of romance affected by this?
BW: I haven’t heard that one.
CM: Six months after 9/11, we did a cover story about romance after 9/11. Before 9/11, New Yorkers were infatuated by Wall Street. Wall Streeters were kind of heroes. They were the it guys, making insane amounts of money and retiring at 35. Then, there was this storyline that after 9/11, our values were going to change. Were we going to be interested in different kinds of people?
BW: Firefighters.
CM: Do you remember the famous photograph from the end of World War II?
BW: The kissing one with the nurse?
CM: Yes. We redid that in Times Square with a firefighter and a model. The model was Melania Trump.
BW: Wow.
CM: Another haunting 9/11 memory came from the fact that our office was on the 13th floor of 444 Madison Avenue, a building adjacent to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. So from my office, I was looking down at the top of St. Patrick’s. After 9/11, there were funerals at St. Patrick’s practically every day for weeks. First I would hear the bagpipes, and then the organ, and then people singing hymns. Some days there was more than one funeral.
BW: It’s interesting that the sonic world was kind of changing at the same time. But you also published a book on photography after 9/11?
CM: Of course, there were a lot of photographers down at the Trade Center site. We called it the pile. There were thousands of pictures of the ruins, which were heartbreaking and actually really beautiful. The structure of the Twin Towers had cathedral-like shapes at the base, so there were these towering shards of Gothic cathedrals, and smoke, and people covered in ash. We had three days to put out the magazine, and we could only run a few pictures. When we were finished, there were photographs all over the floor, hundreds and hundreds. My husband Eric Himmel was the editor-in-chief of Harry Abrams, an art book publishing company. So we got together and published a book of photographs. It sold out 60,000 copies in a couple of weeks, and we donated the proceeds to a fire company that lost most of its men.
BW: I’m thinking about how important New York stories and the New York press is for the rest of the country. Today then, what is the importance of New York for American journalism?
CM: New York leads the country in many ways, and is resented by the country in many ways. When I was at the magazine, we used to joke that if people hate New York City so much, we should secede and join Europe. But New Yorkers are different from a lot of other Americans. They’re more cosmopolitan and more diverse than a lot of places. A lot of trends and ideas and creativity filter down from New York. Now New York is being described as this crime-ridden, disgusting hellhole. And I think that’s a projection that isn’t really fair.
BW: That projection almost seems as if it’s part of the election cycle itself.
CM: Right. Well, it’s something that the right wing has tried to capitalize on to suggest that liberals look down on you, despise you, and think you’re stupid. It’s a tribal kind of thing.
BW: I was wondering if you could talk about what’s happening to journalism outside this city.
CM: What’s happening nationally is that small newspapers are dying. First the classifieds died because they moved online to Craigslist. And then, as the internet got bigger and bigger, Google and Meta scooped up most of the advertising that used to sustain them. You know why they were able to do that, right?
BW: Because online an advertiser knows what I’m looking for.
CM: Yes. Our data is being used to allow Meta and Google to just suck all the advertising out of not only print publications but also online publications. A very large percentage of small newspapers have already closed. A lot of them that are still left are what I call ghost newspapers. When I worked at the Ithaca Journal, there were more than 60 people in the newsroom. And now there is one. A lot of papers will have three and they work from home. Many of them have been bought up by private equity firms interested in milking them until they die. And so there isn’t a place for people to start in journalism.
BW: So how do you start in journalism?
CM: Some people get started by going to graduate school in journalism or in the field that they would like to be covering as journalists. A lot of others do it by publishing their own thing—starting a blog, a site, a podcast, or YouTube or TikTok videos—and getting a lot of attention. Then, a newspaper hires them because they have a following. They bring their readers to the paper. And there is often a revolving door. They launch a site, then they work for the Times, then they go back out and start something on Substack. Then they come back and work for the Washington Post. There’s a lot of coming and going between the big publications and people who become stars.
BW: Do you think that the rise of celebrity journalists has changed the way journalists write the actual stories?
CM: Certainly. When people leave places like the New York Times and go to Substack to start their own thing, they’re liberated from Times editing and protection from mistakes, but also the kinds of things that you are not allowed to say at the Times. Does that lead to more mistakes, or make them more extreme? It can. But it is interesting to see what people do when they’re let loose.
BW: Do you feel, regardless of the outcome, as if the relationship between journalism and democracy will continue to change after the election?
CM: Oh, I think we’re in a lot of trouble. If you have a whole country in which large parts of the country are defying information and knowledge and competence and expertise, what happens next? We’ll have to find out.