“Everyone’s Here”: Seeking the Anxious Center of the Media Universe at That Condé Nast Book Party

“If this building burned down tonight, I think the whole news industry would be done,” Emily Sundberg told me while standing in front of a table with charcuterie and crudité in the time machine that was the old Condé Nast cafeteria on Wednesday night. “Everyone’s here,” she said of the crowd that showed up to celebrate the release of Michael Grynbaum’s Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America.

“I really wanted to put this gathering together for people who love magazines and their legacy and their influence and what they stand for in the culture,” Grynbaum, a veteran New York Times media reporter, told the crowd. “And I think all of you from different generations have that relationship with them. I’m really thrilled to see everyone, and I feel like it’s coming to Pompeii or something.”

And while it was an intimate affair, it certainly felt like most everyone in media, old guard and new, was there to celebrate. Among those mingling over glasses of wine and light bites in the Frank Gehry–designed cafeteria, I spotted New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn, Cosmopolitan and Seventeen editor in chief Willa Bennett, New York Magazine editor in chief David Haskell, and Vox Media president Pam Wasserstein. At one point, PR maven Risa Heller was chatting with Andrew Ross Sorkin near the entrance, as fellow Times colleagues, Michael Barbaro and Shawn McCreesh, mingled about the room. Derek Blasberg, Molly Jong-Fast, Oliver Darcy, and Jeffrey Toobin were also on hand, along with Breaker’s Lachlan Cartwright, who I caught in conversation with Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff.

“There’s just like osmosis between any two people in the room,” said Sundberg, representing the new media cohort via her Substack newsletter Feed Me. “There’s people who have worked in this building for years, and there are people who have never been into this building and probably have only read about it, and then there are people who probably don’t even know what the significance of this building is, but it’s really fun.”

The book, which is a chronicle of Condé Nast and the cast of characters who shaped the company and its editorial brands throughout the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s, has many feeling nostalgic for the heights of legacy media power. “I do think that we’re in this moment right now where print media in a simpler time in the culture is appealing,” Grynbaum told me. “People have been telling me their memories about reading GQ, reading Vanity Fair as kids, how they grew up with it.”

When starting this project, the Times reporter was surprised to see that no one had thoroughly captured the history of Condé Nast, and the “influence its magazines had on the last, really, 50 years of American life.” Grynbaum added that he “wanted to do it justice.”

One particular member of the old Condé Nast guard, Graydon Carter, drew much of the room’s attention when he walked in with Maureen Dowd. When I caught Carter for a brief moment, about 30 minutes after he arrived, he still hadn’t fully made his way in, with guests constantly approaching him near the entrance to say hello. Carter said the book, which covers his tenure as editor in chief of Vanity Fair, is “wonderful.”

Even the location was a clever callback to a completely different era in media. Grynbaum tells me that having the party in the former cafeteria was a dream he had before even finishing writing the book. “I knew I wanted to do a book party at a location that symbolized Condé Nast because parties were so much a part of the mythology of the company,” he said, adding, “This evening is a brief moment of returning to a more glamorous age in the media industry.”

When inquiring about the space, Grynbaum was shocked to find out that the main tenant using the cafeteria now is TikTok, which is the “cosmic irony of ironies,” he tells me. “You can’t make it up.”

Carter quipped that he was feeling a “little bit of PTSD” being back in his old stomping grounds, 4 Times Square. “I think I’m not the only one who feels that way,” he added, gesturing to the room full of former and current Condé staffers. Being in the cafeteria reminded Carter of having lunch back in the day with Si Newhouse, which he describes as “quite stressful” at times. “But I miss him so much,” Carter reminisced. “He was the God here.”