The New Yorker editor-in-chief David Remnick has a message for Apple's penchant for policing the content of its app store: "The hell with it."
Like many magazines, including Wired, The New Yorker is betting big that readers will pay to read a well-designed online magazine app on devices like the iPad. (Disclosure: The New Yorker is owned by Wired and Wired.com parent Condé Nast.) But the bet that they can hang on to their current high-end ad sales without having to make many online changes hinges on Apple allowing its apps into its online store.
And that is increasingly looking like a dicey proposition at best, as Wired.com's Brian Chen presciently noted in February. Apple routinely bans political-cartoon apps that ridicule public figures, and fashion magazines are already reportedly censoring their iPad versions to make sure that no racy shots offend the powers-that-be at Apple.
While The New Yorker is hardly known for risque photo spreads, the magazine has drawn fire in the past for its covers, including one that depicted Obama as a flag-burning Muslim -- an attempt to ridicule right-wing stereotypes of him.
Remnick isn't swearing off the app store, but in remarks at a Condé Nast breakfast discussion in New York, he made it clear that The New Yorker had no intention of catering to Apple's whims.
"Quite frankly, when it comes to the question of, you know, Apple being stern about what it's going to put on there, the hell with it," Remnick said. "We're going to publish what we're going to publish."
"If the Pentagon is not going to talk me out of a story, then Apple in Cupertino [California] is not going to talk me out of it either, and if that means that they throw me off, then they throw me off. But we're going to do what we're going to do, whether it's to be serious, whether it's to be funny, whether it's to be provocative on the cover or inside, we are going to do what we are going to do. I don't say that out of arrogance but I say it out of a sense of journalistic mission, out of a sense of fun, and out of a sense of wanting to be provocative."
It's not clear what story Remnick is referring to in regards to the Defense Department, but contenders include Seymour Hersh's Abu Ghraib stories or Jane Mayer's stories on the CIA's secret torture prisons.
The New Yorker does not yet have an iPad -- or iPhone -- app. Both are expected this year.
Additional reporting by New York bureau chief John C Abell.
Photo: David Remnick speaks at Condé Nast media event Tuesday. Joseph Moran/Condé Nast
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