Nieman Foundation at Harvard
New York Magazine’s Approval Matrix (Highbrow, Lowbrow, Despicable, Brilliant) has been the magazine’s key signature since 2004 — “the embodiment of the spirit of the entire magazine, to the point that our anniversary book in 2018 was titled Highbrow, Lowbrow, Brilliant, Despicable: Fifty Years of New York Magazine,” editor Carl Swanson told Town and Country in 2020.
“There have been attempts at Matrix television shows and putting the Matrix online. And we have a small Matrix Instagram account, but really what works best is the approval Matrix as a back page that people just keep coming back for. Which I think is such a wonderful thing in a time where print media is so precarious,” then-editor Madison Malone Kircher said in the same interview.
If it works so well, why not … rip it off completely? That appears to be what Prospect, the British weekly magazine, decided to do this month with the first-ever Prospect Grid.
The @prospect_uk Grid. Our monthly quire to who lies where on the taste hierarchy pic.twitter.com/i87kNXWzr7
— alan rusbridger (@arusbridger) January 27, 2022
The tweets are deeeelightful. It’s a real tiny gift to the U.S. from the U.K., a chance to focus on something other than that country’s richness in rapid tests.
“In the long history of journalism it’s difficult to think of a brilliant idea or format that hasn’t been imitated, adapted, borrowed or parodied,” Prospect editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger told me in an email. “Whenever it’s happened to me (quite a lot) I’ve been both irritated and flattered. Along with others on Twitter I’ve seen several attempts to emulate the Approval Matrix, but the original is still the best.”
Everybody who has been in an editorial brainstorm over the past two decades knows the moment when you realize you’ve reinvented the Approval Matrix. At that point you usually stop and come up with something else https://t.co/IKL5L3KK2f
— Gabriel Roth (@gabrielroth) January 27, 2022
this is really VERY funny to think about. was it like one guy who pitched it? has he spent the whole last two months worrying someone was going to pick up a copy of @NYMag and go "WAIT A SECOND!"
— Kathryn VanArendonk (@kvanaren) January 27, 2022
this is a really cool idea, can you talk a little bit about how you came up with it?
— Steve Kandell (@SteveKandell) January 27, 2022
lowbrow despicable.
— Lizzie O'Leary (@lizzieohreally) January 27, 2022
I’ve seen The Approval Matrix ripped off many times but never all the way down to the fonts. Impressive
— Michael Idov (@michaelidov) January 27, 2022
Check out my new grid! https://t.co/s7Flzvolam pic.twitter.com/u49UvOKsHM
— Steven I. Weiss (@steveniweiss) January 27, 2022
when your whole thing is that you're not the echo chamber and then you literally echo the chamber https://t.co/ALe18v9GsK
— Taffy Brodesser-Akner (@taffyakner) January 27, 2022
At Wired we used to call this sort of thing “immovation.” It’s probably fine. After all, @emilynussbaum says she got the idea for the Approval Matrix from a Wired FOB page. (Which we completely missed the potential of, by the way.) https://t.co/A21qdDdq8Q https://t.co/S3cjPccsYY
— Adam Rogers (@jetjocko) January 27, 2022
I know there are a lot of people upset about this aping @nymag, but as with most fun rubrics and franchises, the correct answer is: that’s just another rip-off of SPY https://t.co/aB3DZTrX2E pic.twitter.com/AHyhhOQqJP
— Gabriel Snyder (@gabrielsnyder) January 27, 2022
This post was updated with a comment from Prospect editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger.
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