‘I still haven’t read the definitive piece about Musharraf’s coup’

• Why Princess Diana?

It gave me a prism through which I could look at English society — the aristocracy, monarchy and the press. Aside from the fact that it’s a great human story, but many people have written a great human story. So what I felt I brought to the party was the social history part. It gave me a chance to write about class, how women had changed in the aristocracy, what itwas like to be an upper-class girl in the late 1970s and 80s. I call Diana the last uneducated British girl.

• As you write, she was the first to see the media’s growing power.

Exactly, Diana was a media creation in a way and an extraordinary media interpreter. That’s also what fascinated me as a person who’s lived my life in the media. I call her the tabloid princess in a tiara because she was both a figure of the tabloid papers and a devourer of tabloid journalism. She adored its narrative of rise and fall and and celebrity. And she, of course, became an expert player in the media, as she realised that it was the media that was her power, that she had very little power inside the royal family. I think she also got a lot of affirmation from the media, which she felt she didn’t get at home. What’s the story about me today? Do I look good? It was a bit of fatal attraction, really, which of course ended in her death. The way she manipulated editors was absolutely amazing, but she made the mistake too of believing she was in control by the end. And, of course no one is in control of the media, they turn into a feral beast. She couldn’t understand why it had changed. As soon as she lost the royal family’s sort of protection those paparazzi and tabloid journalists became pretty brutal. They used to, in fact, enjoy upsetting her just to get the picture that was going to sell. Even as she lay dying in that car, the paparazzi were negotiating an exclusive. Ironically, a picture that could not be sold anyway.

• As a long-time editor, how would you say media could gauge the requirements of the time?

I think one of the things that’s really difficult now, and journalists have to keep on is, just when you think you know everything, you don’t know anything at all. There are two kinds of stories. One is a complete news story that you find and break, which is immensely valuable and probably the first thing you should be trying to do. But the other kind of story is also very valuable, where you go back to a story where everybody thinks they know what happened. I mean, I still have not read the definitive piece about Musharraf’s coup, a blow-by-blow tick-tock as we call it of the decision, the hows and whys. I’ll still read this piece at Christmas because it takes time to plan and tease it out of people. I’m a big fan of the depth and the context, which is almost all you can provide in the age of the Internet. Even at the New Yorker in 1997 it became a nightmare trying to protect our news. Then when I went to Talk, one reason why I couldn’t stand it there, it was a monthly. News had so accelerated that it made me nuts that even with a very deep, contextual piece, you began to feel that it had been nibbled at by so many mice.

• But you also came in for some criticism at the New Yorker for making it too newsy, too current.

I saw myself as providing two strands of journalism there. I thought it was very important to have a news element to provide what I used to think of as a threshold piece. To bring people into the tent you have to have a piece about whatever it was that week, this piece that couldn’t wait. Then you could go, in the middle of the magazine, to the big tent piece, the piece that had taken 12,000 words and six months to do. I saw it always as a two-horse stream. And I felt committed to the notion that people would have to read it that week. It can still happen, in an upmarket magazine, people say, “oh, it’s a great magazine, I haven’t got to it yet, but it’s terrific, the last three issues are piled up by my bed.” And I would think, that’s not a compliment. That means, I failed.

• Ten years later, what would you do at The New Yorker?

I would probably redesign it again. I might make a shorter front of the book section. I’m an admirer of the Spectator magazine in London. It does a very good job of a front that’s interesting, voices that you come to every week.

• So, in the midst of TV and the Web, the ideal print content?

I would like the newsmagazines to do a longer, a much more contextual piece. They should not be just reactive. There are three kinds of pieces which interest me. One is to introduce something completely new into the dialogue. Secondly to provide some really good context. And thirdly to provide a pleasure principle — voice, attitude, irreverence are very important to create reader loyalty. And visual excitement. We have great photography out there which gets very little play. In fact, one of the themes I brought out in my Diana book was the irony that several of those so-called paparazzi were actually war reporters. But because there was no market for their kind of serious work, they were dispatched by the news agencies to do the celebrity hit. A lot of them might not have been there that night in Paris if the media had not become so debased as a marketplace for photographers.