Is publishing long, literary pieces still commercially viable for a leading magazine?
Granger: Any commercial magazine that wants to try to do more ambitious pieces has to give readers two separate experiences. There are two ways that even the smartest reader reads a magazine. There’s the 15 minute read, when you’re flipping through it — you’re in the bathroom, you’re on your way somewhere. Then there’s the two-to-three-hour read. And I think that a magazine these days has to serve both of those needs. Esquire has always been good at telling stories. Over the last three or four years we’ve concentrated on combining that with an experience that can be had in a shorter amount of time. We hope that the shorter experience will lead readers into the longer experience. That said, the magazine culture I think is dividing into two camps. There are a lot of magazines today that exist almost without sentences. They exist primarily with images and captions. At the same time, there are magazines like The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly that are seeing a resurgence because they
