The New York Times Magazine Unveils First Redesign in a Decade

The New York Times Magazine is 130 years old, and the world into which it publishes every week is undergoing more change than at any point in its long history. Today, the formats we all work in are vast, complex and ever-changing. A single story may exist as a piece of writing in print and digital form, a long audio experience, and a video that captures the essence of the piece and itself exists in different lengths and formats on different platforms. We've adapted well to this change. The Magazine reaches a larger audience of readers than ever before, across print and digital formats. And most importantly, we continue to publish the best collection of magazine journalism in the country, work that has led to seven Pulitzer Prizes in the past nine years.

Still, a time of great change demands that we change as well. We're redesigning the magazine to make it a more dynamic digital and print product, and to make some adjustments to our editorial strategy.

Structurally, we did a few things: We created new magazine columns and story forms that are more native to the digital platforms where we reach our largest audience; at the same time, we redesigned the print magazine to create a pleasurable, readable, engrossing experience for the reader who wants to put down their phone and turn pages free from distraction. We also introduced two new typefaces both in print and online.

Editorially, the new magazine is more dynamic, producing different types of stories and columns each week. It will remain as committed to deep narrative and investigative longform features as ever. But it will also be more responsive to news. It will feature more visual journalism, and we're excited to form the magazine's first dedicated video unit to help drive this change. There will be more history and humor, more essays and photography, more criticism of all kinds.

You'll find some elements that are familiar (The Ethicist remains, as does The Interview), but most of what you'll find is new material that has grown out of experimentation. Let me talk about a few of them.

One of our new columns is called The Context. The idea here is that the nature of digital information decontextualizesso many of the stories readers encounter. So this weekly essay takes a story line in the news and identifies its deeper meaning by providing intellectual and historical background. The first Context column, by David Wallace-Wells, was published last weekend and is a fascinating look at how the green energy transition has made the world's fossil fuel infrastructure more vulnerable to the kind of war that we're seeing now in Iran. David will show up often in this space, along with a small group of others.

Another new column I'm excited about is a revival of On Language. Written memorably by William Safire for most of its run, the original column was a mainstay of the magazine for 32 years until 2011. Now that social media, online communities and contemporary political discourse are transforming language profoundly - and these new grammars and vocabularies are flowing into large language models that, slowly but surely, are becoming a dominant force - we think it's high time to bring the column back. The primary writer will be Nitsuh Abebe. His first column published earlier this week, on the word "lethality." That follows a string of great columns Nitsuh has written in recent months about the em-dash, the neologism "cope," the suffix "-maxxing " and the reluctance people have to use periods in texts.

There are other new elements:

For the print reader, there is also a new monthly section in the back of the magazine, the Culture Digest,where we'll curate and condense highlights from the newspaper's excellent cultural coverage you might have missed over the past month.

The redesign is the work of our creative director, Gail Bichler, and her design director, Ben Grandgenett. They, as well as the rest of the magazine team, will continue to do this kind of experimentation. So rather than this being the introduction of a new magazine with a fixed lineup, this redesign begins a period in which we will more routinely experiment with new ideas.

We're just getting started.