Pam McCarthy, Champion of Change - The New Yorker

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Of the many things that we’ve missed in these bewildering weeks of homebound distancing, one is the ability to mark properly the joyful passages of life: births, graduations, weddings, anniversaries. A FaceTime toast or a Zoom-ed congratulations hardly feels sufficient, but, for now, in-person festivities must be deferred for safer, sunnier days. Here at The New Yorker, we had plans to celebrate the astonishing career of our dear friend and colleague Pamela Maffei McCarthy, who has been the magazine’s deputy editor since 1995, and who decided not long ago that the time had come to spend her days doing something new. It wasn’t easy for any of us to accept this news—no one is more respected or adored at One World Trade Center. And yet no one is more deserving of a next chapter. This is Pam’s last issue, and, while we’re keeping the champagne on ice for a little longer, we want to thank and celebrate her here.

In the earliest years of The New Yorker, Harold Ross, its founding editor, always said he was looking for a “Jesus”—someone who could keep his venture calm and steady, fending off crisis, bringing the good news. He never quite found that savior. In Pam McCarthy, The New Yorker finally got what Ross was searching for: here was someone who would find, shepherd, and protect every variety of talent, a diplomat who could quiet troubled waters, a businessperson who could multiply loaves and fishes. In no small measure, today’s New Yorker would not exist without her and the extraordinary people she found, put into place, and promoted. The building started the moment she arrived; now she leaves the magazine transformed, expanded, and healthy. She did it not only with editorial acuity and business savvy but with immense depth of character, kindness, and generosity.

Pam McCarthy started her career at Esquire, where, first as a proofreader and later as executive editor, she learned every skill that magazines demand, on and off the page. She learned how to make things sing and how to make things run. As Tina Brown’s managing editor at Vanity Fair, she became an essential figure in that title’s rebirth and flourishing. In “The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983-1992,” Brown describes her as “miraculous,” arriving on the scene and, in no time at all, taking everything in hand: editorial debates, fact-checking disputes, restive egos, production snarls, budgetary headaches, legal quandaries.

When Brown succeeded Robert Gottlieb as the editor of The New Yorker, she brought Pam with her to help revitalize its pages with new writers and artists. The New Yorker entered the modern age gradually––and then, it seemed, all at once, adding a Web site, then a fuller Web site, podcasts, video, newsletters, a radio show. At each step, Pam championed change while making sure that our editorial soul remained true and our business prospects solid. And, even as she shouldered the countless details required to make The New Yorker sail straight, Pam, often on weekends, provided other editors with editorial counsel. Invariably, her suggestions were about fairness, discipline, and tone. She has deep confidence in the power of facts, and she is wary of the cheap shot, the flash of hyperbole, the rickety insinuation. “She protected our business—and that was a huge thing,” as one of us put it. “But her editorial protection was the thing I valued the most.”

Pam McCarthy made sure that we could achieve our greatest ambitions while managing to be a fair-minded, decent, and financially sustainable workplace. Filling a role that once seemed impossible, she has proved one of the most important and influential people to walk through the doors of The New Yorker since the place opened, in midtown, ninety-five years ago. We’ve long ceased to marvel at her ability to create calm from the stuff of crisis. Working miracles, as Ross knew, was always part of the job description. ♦

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Pam McCarthy, Champion of Change - The New Yorker
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