Q&A: Tablet Magazine’s editor-in-chief on opinion writing and Gen Z’s love of print

In a new Sunday Long Read podcast episode, Alana Newhouse, the editor-in-chief of Tablet Magazine, unpacks one of the magazine’s latest cover stories: a piece about the horrors of factory farming in the US, specifically as it relates to pig farms.

Newhouse unflinchingly argues in a corresponding letter from the editor that Americans should stop eating industrially produced meat. “We are consuming slop, and producing slop,” she argues. “The two are related.”

In this in-depth Q&A, Newhouse chats about the origin and purpose of Tablet Magazine, an online outlet she founded in 2009 to serve as “a Jewish magazine about the world.” Since then, the world has changed, and Tablet has changed with it, Newhouse says. The writer and editor-in-chief also digs into the role of opinion writing in the traditional media landscape, how she seeks to “challenge” public discourse, and Tablet’s recent move to print after an unexpected push from younger readers. 

The following are highlights from the SLR’s conversation with Newhouse.

The full version of this podcast episode is out now; you can listen to it on Spotify or Apple podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts.

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On why Tablet chose to focus on factory farming for its recent cover story:

For me, it felt like a story that is exactly a Tablet story: Where we’re trying to isolate and highlight corners of the American landscape particularly, but also of the globe, where things are not working the way that they could or should be, in order to make life better for more people, and in this case, more living things. 

On the professional backgrounds of the writers who worked on Tablet’s cover story, who are not traditional journalists: 

This is a magazine, it’s not a newspaper. And so the way that we cover issues — there are different rules of the game, basically, as far as I believe. And so “bias” or conflict [of interest] works very differently. In fact, conflict is a reality for magazine writers. It’s just a reality that has to be managed. It’s not a reality that we try to scrub away.

So in the case of [authors] Philip [Lymbery] and Ben [Goldsmith], Philip himself was very central to the European Union’s eradication of their own use of gestation crates. And I don’t want to make a secret of this, I think these things are a horror. I thought they were a horror before I commissioned the piece, and I commissioned the piece with that in mind. I was not objective, nor was I ignorant.

On how Tablet often seeks to challenge readers, rather than cater to any given majority view:

We did a piece in the summer of 2023, where two long-standing and pretty central Tablet writers wrote a long piece arguing for the end of US military aid to Israel. There is no way, in the summer of 2023, that was remotely any version of a majority view, inside of either Jewish life or, frankly, broader American life.

My job is not to actually reflect any kind of majority. My job is to try to make sure that public discourse and intellectual life is being challenged, and sometimes challenging it means throwing into our conversation things that seem like they’re coming from left field, but ultimately, I think, elevate and mature the intellectual life here.

On the younger generation’s newfound love for print: 

I tried to do a little focus group with [younger readers] about the next iteration of Tablet, and nearly every single one of them said they wanted print.

One of them put it in this incredible way. He said, you know: “I don’t know anything other than the internet. When I grew up, the internet was the wallpaper in my life. But if somebody sends me something in the mail, I know that somebody put money and time and creative resources into making that product. It’s not to say that I necessarily trust every word that I read in it, but I trust it more than I trust pixels.” And that was a kind of incredible insight.

Compiled by Amanda Ulrich. Photo of pigs from Farm Watch/Wikimedia Commons.