Behind the Relaunch of the New York Times Magazine

Welcome to the new New York Times Magazine. For the past four months, as we’ve been putting out the magazine you read every weekend, we’ve also been busying ourselves behind the scenes, crafting something new and different. It is as if we have been bidding our dinner guests adieu each week, busing the dessert plates and then hurrying out to the garage to tinker with our strange creation under a flickering bulb.

We have used the hammer and the tongs but perhaps not the blowtorch; we sought to manufacture a magazine that would be unusual, surprising and original but not wholly unfamiliar. It would be a clear descendant of its line. This magazine is 119 years old; nearly four million people read it in print every weekend. It did not need to be dismantled, sawed into pieces or drilled full of holes. Instead, we have set out to honor the shape of the magazine as it has been, while creating something that will, we hope, strike you as a version you have never read before.

To this end we have made many alterations. You will find new concepts for columns, new writers, new ideas about how to compose headlines, new typefaces, new page designs in print and online, new ideas about the relationship between print and digital and, animating it all, a new spirit of inquiry that is both subversive and sincere. (You will also find, in this Sunday’s print edition, more pages of advertising than in any issue since October 2007.)

Design Director Gail Bichler and Art Director Matt Willey review an in-progress layout of the redesigned Eat column on Feb. 5, 2015.”

Finally, later this year, we’ll be beginning a regular series of evenings with The Times Magazine, events here in New York City at which some of the best stories and subjects from our pages come to life. But we’ll also be bringing The Times Magazine to stages around the country, with gatherings that celebrate some of our special issues. In June, our Design and Technology Issue will furnish the theme for a conference in San Francisco; in October, our Culture Issue will become a Culture Festival in New York; and in December, our Great Performers Issue will make its debut with a premiere screening and conversation in Los Angeles.

This list by no means covers all of the changes that have been made; over the next month, even more new pages and projects will roll out of the garage. But this will suffice as an introduction to our ambitions.

A version of this article appears in print on February 22, 2015, on page MM30 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: In With the New . Today’s Paper|Subscribe

The New York Times