New York Magazine editor-in-chief David Haskell today announced new roles for Alexis Swerdloff (@swerdle), who was promoted to deputy editor, and David Wallace-Wells (@dwallacewells), who will become an editor-at-large. These new roles are effective immediately.
Swerdloff has been New York Magazine’s Strategist editor since 2013, and during that time she took it from an award-winning print section to a fast-growing online-shopping juggernaut. More recently, she oversaw the relaunch of Curbed as part of New York. As deputy editor, she will continue to oversee the Strategist and help direct Curbed, along with the magazine’s food coverage. She will also play a larger role in conceiving and assigning features, guiding the production of the print magazine, as well as developing special projects across the magazine. Before joining New York as a senior editor in 2012, she was executive editor at Paper magazine.
Wallace-Wells has been the magazine’s deputy editor since 2017, and with his move to an editor-at-large role, he’ll be devoting more time to writing while continuing to shape the magazine as a member of editorial leadership. His recent writing has focused on COVID-19 and climate change, which he covered most notably in “The Uninhabitable Earth,” his conversation-changing 2017 cover story on worst-case scenarios. His 2019 book by the same name became an international best seller. He joined the magazine as literary editor in 2011 and before that was deputy editor at The Paris Review.
Haskell’s memo about these new roles to the magazine’s staff follows:
Hi everybody,
It gives me a lot of pleasure to announce that, as of the beginning of this month, Alexis Swerdloff is now deputy editor, New York Magazine. This is, as Alexis would say, truly wonderful news for all of us. I’ve watched Alexis with astonishment over the years as she transformed a section of the print magazine into the editorial juggernaut that is the Strategist. Never during that incredible run has she ever stopped thinking about the larger magazine — pitching perceptive and instant-classic magazine features in the ideas meeting, constantly inventing new storytelling devices in the print Strategist, being a trusted brain and adviser for all of the magazine’s senior leadership. Since the spring, she’s taken on yet another role, tasked with bringing Curbed into the New York fold. The success of that complicated project is testament to Alexis’s careful planning, creative thinking, and intuitive management skills. It’s time to recognize that work and solidify her expanded mandate. In her new role, she will continue to oversee the Strategist, where deputy editor Maxine Builder is thriving; she will also oversee our food coverage, with Alan Sytsma, Rob Patronite, and Robin Raisfeld now reporting to her; and she will continue to help direct Curbed, working with Sukjong Hong, who is off to a terrific start leading the team there. Alexis will likely take on all sorts of other projects that come up across the magazine as well.
This news coincides with conversations David Wallace-Wells and I have been having about how best to rebalance the writer-editor makeup of his job. As you all know, Dave has been doing double duty for a few years now, somehow writing an enormous amount of conversation-setting journalism about two of the largest stories on the planet while also helping shape the magazine’s enterprise coverage while also working closely with a large stable of writers on a significant percentage of our features. Going forward, Dave will continue to write — about climate and COVID-19 and other subjects as well — and be an essential part of the enterprise brain trust, attending ideas and features meetings, helping launch big-swing projects, and bringing new writers into our fold. But he’ll be working with fewer staff writers — and closing features less frequently — in order to carve out more space for his own writing projects. Dave now takes on the title of editor-at-large, New York Magazine.