The New Yorker Crosses a Line

This week’s New Yorker contains an article (humor by Larry Doyle) that can be fully appreciated only online — it is full of hyperlinks. A press release calls the online version “an interactive version” of the article. A better term would be “the real version.” It’s the difference between a sculpture (the online version) and a picture of a sculpture (the print version).

Before Spy ran into financial trouble, I had had approved an article about someone in the software industry. At the time, the Internet and web pages were just starting. I envisioned my article with lots of pseudo-hyperlinks (underlined bits of text in the main article connected to text boxes). Since there was no online Spy it would have just been a form of footnote or annotation. Alas, the article was canceled. My editor at Spy, Susan Morrison, now edits the section of The New Yorker in which this line-crossing Spy ish article has appeared. “We [the editors of Spy] try to find new ways to present information,” Susan once told me, as some staffers played a board game that appeared in the next issue. Larry Doyle used to write for Spy. Congrats to both of them.

Could this have been cleverly timed to coincide with publication of Doyle’s new book? Probably.

Addendum: Doyle himself comments:

I have a humor piece in the New Yorker today — and it’s interactive! The piece is a website devoted to wedding plans of one particularly ambitious bride, crammed with links both real and fabricated: to her blog; to a new movie starring Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Lopez; to a site on how to treat stab wounds. Once you’ve bought the magazine and read the story, go to gwynnanddavesharetheirjoy.com and poke around (You need to read the story first, or the website won’t make sense.) You can also read the story for free online, but where’s the fun in that?

Love that dare not speak its name. Use of the old-fashioned term interactive is a hint that something is amiss. It’s not interactive in the print version, Larry.