Days after reporting on a criminal trial in Europe for The New Yorker, William Finnegan moved through the crowd at Shrine, a music club in Harlem, where a party was underway for a new magazine called Now Voyager.
As the Congolese ensemble Orchestre Moto played jubilant sebene tunes, Mr. Finnegan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning international correspondent, nursed a drink and chatted with young journalists. He nodded approvingly when he thumbed through the first issue of Now Voyager, which costs $29 and resembles an art object version of Foreign Affairs.
It contained a 22,000-word story centered on the disappearance of a woman kidnapped by a Veracruz drug cartel, as well as an investigation into the abduction of 60 Ukrainian orphans. There were reports from Cape Town, Palmyra, the Vatican City, Riyadh and Ouagadougou.
“Wow, I love this,” Mr. Finnegan said. “I like the small print. The world map illustrations. And it looks like a really good lineup of journalists.”
The budding nonprofit publication is scheduled to come out in print six times a year. It also has a robust website. Mr. Finnegan considered what such a venture might offer at a time when one of the world’s biggest news outlets has gutted its international coverage.
“For people who are feeling the vacuum that The Washington Post has left us,” he said, “and the general vacuum in smart and careful international reporting, they’re coming at the perfect time.”
The founders and co-editors, Hélène Werner and Nicolas Niarchos, both 36, stood close to the stacks of the debut issue. Their bond comes from the nights they spent as fact-checkers at The New Yorker, combing through dispatches filed by Mr. Finnegan, Jon Lee Anderson, Patrick Radden Keefe and other journalistic lions.
“We both came up journalistically through The New Yorker,” Ms. Werner said before the party. “While we’re doing something different, we can’t help but take those qualities along, and we’re proud to do so.”
Mr. Niarchos, who has covered conflicts in Yemen, Ukraine and the Democratic Republic of Congo, is the son of the Greek shipping heir Spyros Niarchos and the English ale heiress Daphne Guinness. He acknowledged the challenges of freelance international reporting, adding that Now Voyager is here to help.
“I was in a town called Beni in Congo, and there had just been a rebel attack, and a photographer friend was trying to sell stories and everybody was ignoring him, because it wasn’t a big enough story,” Mr. Niarchos said. “Everywhere I went, there was somebody who had an amazing story they had pitched to every outlet under the sun. And just because they didn’t have the right connections, they weren’t getting them published.”
Now Voyager is funded through contributions from the McCormick Foundation and “some family money,” Mr. Niarchos said. The rate for reported pieces is $1.50 a word.
As ink-stained types ordered mango mojitos at the bar, the room filled with New Yorker people. The writer Nathan Heller said the debut issue reminded him of “Bill Buford’s Granta magazine in the 1980s and early ’90s.” Peter Canby, a former senior editor and head of the fact-checking department, swayed to rumba music. Colin Stokes, a former cartoon editor, and Carolyn Kormann, a former staff writer, mingled (both are on Now Voyager’s staff).
Packs of journalists spilled onto the sidewalk to smoke and talk. Nearby stood Alexis Okeowo, a contributing writer for The New Yorker who has reported from Africa and Mexico.
“When I was coming up, you could still go somewhere and not have a safety net and still be freelance, but be fairly confident there was a place that would buy your story,” Okeowo said. “Now you’re going out there, reporting in war zones and conflict areas, but you’re not sure if anyone will publish your work. It’s very demoralizing, and I know people who have left foreign reporting because they can’t survive. What is journalism without reporting on the world?”
At the restaurant next door, Yatenga French Bistro, which the magazine had also rented out, guests snacked on gambas in garlic sauce. Among them was Lila Azam Zanganeh, a Paris-born journalist who has a piece set to run in Now Voyager’s second issue — a 7,000-word profile of the new president of the Venice Biennale, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco.
“I considered pitching it to The New Yorker, but I think they would have given me far less freedom to write what I wanted to write,” she said. “When you don’t have a 100-year history, you can let your writers do more of what they want, and I was able to run wild with this piece.”
Alex Vadukul is a features writer for the Styles section of The Times, specializing in stories about New York City.
The post A New Magazine of International Reportage? In This Media Environment? appeared first on New York Times.
