Vanity Fair UK Magazine

Eric Kallgren    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 10:21pm on Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

Vanity Fair UK survives in the Internet age because of "a really good narrative," according to editor Henry Porter. Porter was interviewed by Ian Burrell of the British newspaper The Independent on April 6, 2009:

"We survive in the internet age because we have still got something that other people can't do, which is to tell a really good narrative. It makes you understand a story in a way that no other medium does," Porter explains of a magazine that in its most recent edition offers detailed insights into the economic meltdown in Iceland, the changing notion of the American Dream and the Bernard Madoff scandal. These are given treatments over nine, 12 and 16 pages respectively.

"It's not quite a book and it's certainly not the brief, cursory stuff of the internet. It's giving these really detailed, clear narratives. Oddly enough, very few people do that in London," he says.

Porter's explanation of the Condé Nast magazine's secret does not make for easy reading for British journalists. The star Vanity Fair writer William Langewiesche "doesn't take short cuts, he will do it the long way round and find out everything he needs to know. That is America, that is not Britain, in my view," says Porter. "I think Americans are culturally much more diligent. People given a task tend to do it thoroughly, and that applies to journalism, fact-checking, editing."