At NR, we take changes to the print magazine seriously.
Remember that period in the 1970s when the logo on the cover was just “NR”? How about that time we ran a cover without a blue border in 2000? Etc.
So this is a big one for us: NR is going monthly as of November.
Our periodicity has always been a bit of a puzzle to people. We’ve all had conversations like this over the years:
“We are a fortnightly.”
“A what?”
“Uh, we come out twice a month.”
We have subscribers who tell us they love getting the magazine every week and subscribers who tell us they love getting it every month.
Now the mystery will be solved. Going monthly is a change that obviously makes sense given the nature of the news cycle. It’s hard to keep up with events these days publishing a weekly, let alone a fortnightly. A monthly schedule will allow us to emphasize the longer-form, higher-level analytical material in print, while we, of course, have a lively website covering hour-by-hour political and cultural developments.
To be clear, we won’t simply be publishing half as often. This change coincides with a redesign that isn’t around-the-edges tinkering, but a sleek new modern design with echoes of the signature elements from the magazine’s past. The paper quality is higher, and every issue will be bigger. There’s practically no one who’s picked up a prototype of the new monthly who hasn’t said, “Wow.”
If you are a print subscriber, we think you’ll have the same reaction.
We’re also adding new features including dedicated long-form essays, statistical deep-dives, expanded book reviews, paeans to Americana, spotlights on emerging conservative personalities, and more.
The Week — the popular digest of current events that has anchored every issue of the magazine since its inception — will still appear in the print edition, but we will also be adding a weekly digital version delivered to people’s email inboxes. (The Week has been a misnomer since the magazine shifted from a weekly to a fortnightly shortly after its founding, but now will literally be weekly — mind-blowing, we know.)
You’ll notice some other changes in our general offering in the months ahead — more video, a better commenting platform, etc. — since the shift to monthly is part of a broader strategic investment.
What will stay the same is that the print magazine will continue to be edited by Ramesh Ponnuru and his team, who are some of the smartest and most committed people in the business, and they will continue bringing you elegant and witty writing, incisive arguments, and stalwart defenses of this nation and what makes it great.
We are conservative in all senses of the word here at NR. So we never embrace change for the sake of it. But sometimes it’s necessary to preserve the best of an institution. We are confident this is the case now, and that you will agree when you see the new magazine in a couple of months.