March 21, 2025

By Graydon Carter

Carter’s last day in the office of the New York Observer before moving to Vanity Fair in 1992.Photo: Dafydd Jones

In 1991, I was named the editor of the New York Observer, a desperately sleepy Upper East Side weekly broadsheet that I hoped to turn into a must-read. About a half-year in, the paper was where I wanted it to be, it was getting noticed, and so I started sending a couple of dozen complimentary copies to friends, many of them editors in Britain and Europe. I didn’t know this at the time, but Si Newhouse, the head of Condé Nast, would take a twice-yearly tour of all his international properties, with stops in Milan, Paris, and London. He was on one of these trips in early 1992, and, as he told me later, everywhere he stopped, he would see copies of the Observer in his editors’ in-baskets. Si returned to New York under the misguided impression that the paper was a huge international hit — that everybody was reading it. About three months later, he called me and asked if I would like to get together for a coffee after work. I said of course. This was a Thursday. The meeting was set for Monday.

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