Kurt Andersen: Magazines Becoming ‘Like Sailboats in the 19th and 20th Century’

At last night’s “Night With WNYC” event celebrating the new public radio show The Takeaway with John Hockenberry and Adaora Udoji, Kurt Andersen sounded off on the future of print magazines. “They will be beautiful luxuries, like sailboats in the 19th and 20th centuries,” the Spy founder told the crowd. He later called Time under founder Henry Luce “a rabidly Republican magazine, even the Fox News of its day.”

The Takeaway, helmed by Peabody Award winners Hockenberry and Udoji, will “convene the American conversation,” Laura Walker, WNYC president and CEO, said in her opening remarks. Andersen was more to the point: “It’s the bastard child of Bill O’Reilly and, I don’t know, Brian Lehrer. (Lehrer, who moderated a discussion between Andersen, Hockenberry, Udoji and On the Media host Brooke Gladstone, played along after he was introduced, saying “Don’t tell anyone… Bill O’Reilly was great.”)

The Takeaway, debuting as a one-hour show on April 28 and eventually increasing to three or four hours, will harness the power of wikis and interactivity to engage listeners. “It’s not a new morning show per se,” Hockenberry explained. “It’s a new platform for discourse itself.”

But how is radio like Rasputin and Hillary Clinton?

During Gladstone and Andersen’s opening presentation detailing the history of radio, the former discussed the frequency with which people have left the medium for dead. “Radio has been dead, then not dead, dead, then not dead,” she said. “Radio was the media’s Rasputin.”

“Or Hillary Clinton,” Andersen deadpanned.

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