Print reporters do not often have the opportunity to bask in the glow of an adoring public. Next week, when the New Yorker College Tour stops at Georgetown, some of the nation’s most respected journalists and editors will have the opportunity to do just that.
The tour consists of three afternoons of free lectures and classroom visits by New Yorker writers and editors complemented by three evenings of reasonably-priced events by some of the nation’s noted humorists, actors and musicians.
“The idea is to bring the New Yorker in front of a group that might not be as familiar with it as perhaps an older generation,” Jeffery Toobin, New Yorker staff writer and senior CNN legal analyst, said. “It will kind of be a two-way process. We want to hear what people are interested in and learn what they are thinking.”
The idea for the tour was conceived as a traveling variation of the New Yorker Festival held every fall in New York City. Much like the magazine itself, the festival focuses on literary arts and politics, drawing over 17,000 people yearly.
The New Yorker offers some of the country’s finest and most innovative investigative journalism. Stories in the magazine have to be at the same time “timely and timeless,” according to Toobin.
“It’s the best job in journalism. You can write at length and in depth about virtually any subject,” he said. “As [editor] Dave Remnick likes to say, ‘It’s a great burden and curse.’ While we’re not required to cover anything, we have to pick things that are truly extraordinary and unusual in some way, not duplicating things you might read in the New York Times, Washington Post, Time or Newsweek.”
Last spring, Seymour Hersh broke the news of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in the magazine. His articles put him in the running for a Pulitzer Prize, an award given to the top writers of the year. Hersh previously won a Pulitzer for his coverage of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, stories that also broke in the New Yorker. Hersch will discuss investigative reporting with David Remnick, the magazine’s editor and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lenin’s Tomb, on Wednesday afternoon.
David Sedaris, author of Me Talk Pretty One Day and this summer’s New York Times bestseller Dress your Family in Corduroy and Denim, will be part of Thursday night’s sold-out discussion “Writing Funny” with two other New Yorker humorists: Andy Borowitz and Christopher Buckley.
Thursday afternoon’s “Searching for the Story” will bring together a panel of noted journalists, including George Packer, who traveled extensively in Iraq during and after the war.
The events culminate with a Saturday night conversation with music critic Alex Roth and rock legends Sonic Youth in Bunn Auditorium in ICC.
Georgetown is the third stop on the New Yorker College Tour. The tour began last week at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and continues this week at the University of Texas at Austin.
“We thought for all of those people that can’t make it to the festival, we would come to them instead,” Rhonda Sherman, the New Yorker’s director of special events, said. “We decided to visit universities in towns where we have a lot of subscribers and also where we could speak to a younger audience.”
Sellinger Lounge will be temporarily renamed “The New Yorker” lounge next week, featuring the exhibit, “80 Years of New Yorker Political Cartoons.” Students will also be able to sign up for reduced price subscriptions in the lounge.
For more information about the New Yorker College Tour and a full schedule of events, visit www.newyorkercollegetour.com. Tickets are available this week at the GPB table in Red Square. Tickets for the evening programs are $5 for students; afternoon programs are free.
