New Yorker

Maybe New Yorker editor Tina Brown and her well-connected writers, often celebrities themselves, wanted to prove that they're not just a bunch of au courant social swells and intellectuals, that they could compete with the British Sun, the News of the World, the Daily Mail and the other tabloids after all. That they could gossip, predict the future, name-drop and ooze saccharin sentiment with the best of them.How else to understand the Sept. 15 issue of the New Yorker, which pays strange tribute to the late Princess of Wales?

With nominations in five categories, the monthly GQ and weekly New Yorker lead the 75 finalists in the judging of 1994's entries in the annual National Magazine Awards. The awards, the industry's equivalent of the Oscars, will be held April 14 in New York.As for the competition between GQ and the New Yorker:GQ writer Tom Junod has two entries in the feature-writing category.One, "The Abortionist," published in the February issue, is about Dr. John Bayard Britton, the 68-year-old doctor who replaced Dr. David Gunn after he was murdered two years ago in Pensacola, Fla., "the Selma of the abortion-rights movement," as Mr. Junod calls it.Mr.

A New Yorker who police said used cash, drugs and violence to establish a $4-million-a-year heroin and cocaine ring in East Baltimore has been indicted along with 33 other alleged members of his organization, the Baltimore state's attorney's office said yesterday.Complaints from residents of the area where the group operated prompted the investigation that led to the indictments, police said.The alleged ringleader, Billy Guy, a 25-year-old native of the Bronx, N.Y., was said to have marked his $10 bags of heroin with "G Force" to identify them with his organization.

THE KEEPERS and polishers of Baltimore's image have to be glowing over Tony Hiss' long-awaited article on the Monumental City in the April 29 New Yorker.In one of those endless essays in which the magazine specializes -- it winds for 23 pages among cartoons and ads -- Hiss is essentially optimistic about the city's future, and that runs counter to what one hears these days among the cognoscenti. Indeed, Hiss declares Baltimore is entering its third great "flowering" -- a time when it takes on "new forms to be able to nurture people in new ways."

Next month, Eustace Tilley, superfop, will appear on the cover of the New Yorker, just as he has done every year since that incomparably distinguished magazine's first issue 75 years ago. The New Yorker came by mail when I was a child. Since then I have, with a few breaks, been a subscriber. I learned to think about writing there -- from Edmund Wilson and Dorothy Parker. I learned most of what I know about the lavishness of irony from Charles Addams, and about the limits of civility from Peter Arno.

PARIS -- It is unseemly to take pleasure in the failures of others, but there is reason to do so in the news that the New Yorker magazine of Tina Brown and S. I. Newhouse Jr. is a failure.It has been losing money ever since Mr. Newhouse bought the magazine 13 years ago, and now it is to be folded into the operations of Mr. Newhouse's other fashion and celebrity magazines.The New Yorker was profitable when the Fleischmann family sold it in 1985. It had become somewhat predictable, and its circulation and profits were in slow decline, but it still was the country's best and most influential magazine.

New York--For three months now, the talk of the town has been about Tina's tightrope.How will Tina Brown, the flamboyant former editor in chief of Vanity Fair, take her panache to the statuesque New Yorker without losing all those hard-core readers who have spent the summer in distressed anticipation of her arrival?This week, in the middle of closing her first issue, which will hit the newsstands on Monday, Tina talked.Distressed readers, just listen."Basically, my whole thrust has been to go back to Ross' magazine," she said of Harold Ross, the New Yorker's brilliant, eccentric founder, who edited the magazine from 1925 to 1951.

NEW YORK--"That's Molly Ringwald in the red dress." Where? "There! Right next to the table." Indeed, the red-headed star of The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles was standing outside an auditorium in midtown Manhattan, waiting to get into one of the premier events of the New Yorker Festival. Wow, some in line no doubt were thinking: Molly Ringwald -- seminal '80s teen star -- loved the New Yorker magazine as much as they did. Some 17,000 people -- not all of them famous -- attended the magazine's weekend-long arts festival.

When Tina Brown took over the New Yorker 2 1/2 years ago, she did something quite shrewd. Definitely, she was going to turn the place upside down -- but how do you turn upside down a place predicated on tradition without looking like some sort of Chanel-suited vulgarian? You beat the traditionalists at their own game, that's how. Ms. Brown's defense: She was returning the New Yorker to its true tradition, the bounce and flair the magazine knew under its founding editor, Harold Ross.Well, bounce and flair are subjective things, but that hasn't kept Ms. Brown from continuing to present herself as a Rossian revolutionary.

And so, Tina Brown has abandoned the editorial helm of the New Yorker, indisputably the premier vehicle of serious journalism and literary fiction in the United States for two and more generations.Should real people care? Only if the event and its consequences are perceived to affect their lives. It's difficult to see how they will.This has not stilled the cacophony. Brown jilted S.I. Newhouse - owner, with his family, of the New Yorker - to run away with Mickey Mouse. A wailing sigh emanated from earnest souls and throats:"Will the Synergy Monster swallow up the exalted journalism we'd like to believe exists?