Editor’s Letter: This Devil Wears Banana Republic
There was a time, not too long ago, when assembling a list of New York’s most prominent media personalities was a relatively painless task. The grand institutions of American media were concentrated within a 20-block radius of midtown Manhattan — home to the major networks, newspapers and glossy magazines that dominated American culture and politics. On a typical day at Michael’s, you might spot Barbara Walters, Gay Talese, Diane Sawyer, Mort Zuckerman, Carl Bernstein, Liz Smith and Nora Ephron. Scribble down everyone in your eyeline, and the media list was half done.
Those days are over. Today’s media elites are scattered across platforms that barely existed a decade ago — Substack, YouTube,TikTok — and in this splintered ecosystem, influence is harder to define and easier to manufacture. Compiling a New York power list takes weeks of deep research, anonymous sourcing and a few tense conference-room debates. What qualifies as media power in 2026? Who qualifies as a media personality? What even qualifies as media?
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If you are looking for a cultural marker of that shift, consider The Devil Wears Prada sequel, arriving just as this issue goes to press. The 2006 movie captured magazine publishing at its most glamorous and self-assured; the new installment feels closer to documentary. Meryl Streep is still running Runway magazine, or what’s left of it after never-ending budget cuts, battling shrinking ad dollars and greedy tech bros. In the original, Miranda flew private. In the sequel, she unhappily flies coach.
As an editor for the past three decades, I’ve had a front-row seat to the media revolution, though admittedly less luxe than Anna Wintour’s. Surveying my outfit one day several years ago, the author Hanya Yanagihara, my then-deputy at Radar magazine, wickedly quipped: “This devil wears Banana Republic.”
Of course, it’s not all bad news. The clubby elitism of the old guard has given way to a more decentralized, democratized information-delivery network — more nimble, diverse and unshackled by the biases of the old order. A new generation of media stars like Emily Sundberg has risen to the top propelled purely by moxie. THR’s New York issue — our first since 2022, when the pandemic shuttered both the issue and the annual celebration — reflects the best of both worlds. On Mikey O’Connell’s media power list, stalwarts like Savannah Guthrie and Times editor Joe Kahn share the stage with newcomers. And Lacey Rose’s cover interview with soon-to-be-former Late Show host Stephen Colbert is as sharp as anything Talese tapped out on his Selectric. On May 7, we’ll be in Manhattan for a party to celebrate this issue at an event at Daniel sponsored by A&E in honor of the nation’s 250th birthday and the important impact that the media, including magazines, has played in it.
Like vinyl, print may well come roaring back. At least that’s what my AI chatbot keeps telling me.
This story appeared in the May 6 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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