The conference room at One World Trade Center, high above a New York City plaza dotted with respectful tourists, contains few distinguishing features. A large screen, an unadorned table, plenty of charging plugs — the antiseptic business of the modern meeting space.
Yet it is here where the future of documentary is often plotted — and, perhaps, rescued. This is where Paul Moakley and Sarah Lash deliberate on which of the dozens of shorts they’ll release from the hundreds they screen each year. He is The New Yorker’s executive producer; she is vp acquisitions at parent company Condé Nast. But those titles only hint at their influence, which entails figuring out what documentaries get made, bought and ultimately platformed for the magazine’s readers and 1 million YouTube subscribers.
“A big part of our future is movement and visual storytelling — people see before they read,” Moakley says in a meeting with Lash in that conference room one afternoon this fall. “I often make sure to remind editors about that,” the producer, who previously worked at Time, wryly adds.
Where many old-school publications have talked about embracing (and, sometimes, have since abandoned) the so-called pivot to video, The New Yorker continues to live it. It can seem hard to believe that the magazine of Joseph Mitchell and Dorothy Parker is down here competing with the latest internet trends. And yet the effort is also of a piece with its intellectual-zeitgeist history. If that pair were around now, one could imagine them scheming up the latest doc short to go viral.
David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, says the shorts fit snugly into the magazine’s history and brand. “The same readers who are eager for Patrick Radden Keefe’s next investigation also appreciate a brilliantly crafted documentary film,” he wrote in an email. “Readers and viewers come to The New Yorker for great storytelling, no matter the form.”
The films can have an inspirationally earnest bent, like Seat 31, about the Montana trans activist and state representative Zooey Zephyr. They also can be filled with surprise, like Public Defender, a short released this fall about a progressive lawyer who defends an alleged Jan. 6 perpetrator that humanizes both parties, or Eternal Father, about an older British dad planning to be frozen cryonically. “What Paul and I come back to again and again is, ‘What’s a truly fresh take on something that’s part of the vernacular?’ ” says Lash, an indie-film veteran.
Like Seat 31, Eternal Father has been shortlisted for the doc short Oscar. If it wins, it will help the publication make history.
The New Yorker has been on a scorching run in the category, nominated in six of the past nine years (and landing 15 doc short nods in its brief history of competing; this is Netflix-level influence). But it has never won, and a victory would tie a prestige bow around its efforts. (More on the shortlisted films below.)
Longform visual storytelling, it would seem, is safe in the TikTok age. And it’s safe thanks to an august media brand that rose to prominence years before anyone heard of ByteDance.
In fact, Lash says longer films (they can run up to 40 minutes) tend to draw more viewers.
“When I started at Condé Nast 10 years ago, the mandate was we couldn’t do a video over six minutes. Then it became 15. It kept creeping up because people want to be immersed in a good story.”
For any text-based journalist wondering how the magazine pulls this off economically — the pivot to video has often been stymied by the pivot to higher production costs — the pair says they’re in part subsidized by ad revenue on YouTube. Also helping is the admittedly fuzzier benefit of the films expanding the brand of The New Yorker and, ultimately, possibly increasing subscriptions.
“That younger demo of 18 to 34 is seeking out video first,” Lash says. “We hope these films make them more curious about the magazine. In an ideal world, someone would love a documentary and then subscribe to The New Yorker.” Condé’s pockets may also help; Netflix’s entrée has made prices for doc shorts not quite as cheap as they used to be.
The magazine also has other ways of monetizing the films, like developing them for Condé Nast’s film and television division, run by Hollywood producer vet Helen Estabrook. (A narrative feature currently in post was developed from a New Yorker doc short.)
The majority of films are acquired finished, either scouted at a festival or chosen from a submissions pool, though the magazine does at times board projects in development.
Remnick believes these shorts, far from a trendy add-on, offer hints at what the publication will look like in the years ahead. “The ability to tell stories in the cinematic form is, I hope, an essential part of The New Yorker’s future,” he wrote. “It creates an on-ramp for a new generation of readers, who may first form a relationship with us by finding a documentary on YouTube or a short clip on TikTok.”
The division is a product of one fortunate trend and two unfortunate ones. With cameras and footage so abundant, it’s easier than ever to make a documentary short, which means more quality films than any distributor could handle. On the other hand, The New Yorker is stepping into a void left by a Hollywood less willing to develop original voices and big streamers reluctant to shoulder even mild political risks.
To get people to watch, the magazine will often leverage its social channels. Instagram — where The New Yorker has nearly 9 million followers — is a key driver, with a Reel often helping a film go viral. In one novel promotional strategy, a director will hang out in the comments section of YouTube for a few days after a new film is published, creating a kind of slow-motion Q&A that (mostly) stays on track. Pairing a film with a relevant text story can also deepen engagement — an advantage Netflix doesn’t enjoy.
Moakley and Lash admit that no one’s truly figured out the secret to converting text audiences to video. “It’s a shifting landscape and we’re all struggling to figure out how to move the chess pieces and make the business work,” Moakley says.
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Here’s video of the magazine’s three shortlisted films for the 2025 Oscars. (A fourth, I Am Not a Robot, was shortlisted in the live-action narrative category.)
Eternal Father
A cryonics hopeful in Eternal Father.
Courtesy of The New Yorker
Ömer Sami trained a camera on a cable technician in northern England and let the poignancy fly. The UCLA-educated, Denmark-residing director followed Nasar, a 59-year-old who married late in life and now worries he’ll miss out on too many high points in his school-age children’s lives. The best moments come when the kids sit around and talk with cherub-faced spirit about what it would mean to meet their dad again decades after he died.
Seat 31: Zooey Zephyr
Zooey Zephyr in Seat 31.
Mike Clark Photography/Courtesy of The New Yorker
Zephyr is a trans activist and Montana state legislator. Kimberly Reed’s 15-minute burst — like an inspirational EpiPen — opens with Zephyr on the Montana House floor telling lawmakers voting against trans medical care, “I hope … when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands.” Zephyr is ultimately censured, leading her to work from a seat next to the House snack bar. By turns maddening and heartening, the film reaches a high point when a young trans person visits Zephyr and can’t hold back a tear. “Chin up,” Zephyr says, grasping their hand. “Don’t let them take that away, OK?”
Incident
Surveillance footage in Incident
Courtesy of The New Yorker
Director Bill Morrison has made a career out of clever deployment of archival footage. In Incident, the 2018 killing of a barber by a police officer in Chicago is given understatedly blood-boiling treatment. Harith “Snoop” Augustus can be seen from surveillance footage not threatening an officer when the officer kills him — then his partner reassures him he did nothing wrong as Augustus’ body is neglected. Morrison tells the story through that footage, often from a distance, so that it plays like a doc by Michael Haneke. He also splits the screen into quadrants, Timecode-style, in the process doing the improbable — creating a film that is as ambitious as it is socially relevant.
This story first appeared in a January stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
