New York Editor-in-Chief Adam Moss Bids Teary Farewell to Hugo Lindgren
This morning, it was announced that New York Magazine deputy editor Hugo Lindgren will be departing for Bloomberg BusinessWeek. NYM editor Adam Moss sent out a gushing tribute to Lindgren, who's been there for six years and before that worked with Moss at The New York Times Magazine, to the magazine's staff.
As has now been reported , Hugo will be leaving us to join Businessweek. I announce (or, I should probably say, confirm) this news with the usual complicated emotions — happiness for him, sadness for us - but those emotions are amplified in this case, both by how excited he is about his new job as executive editor there, and how hard it is to fully imagine this place without him. During his six years here, he has been important to this magazine in so many ways it is hard to keep count. As a great "ideas man," in the old magazine parlance; as a writer (lately as a particularly adept translator of economics to our audience); as a music critic and overlord; as one of the first writer/editors in print to plunge headfirst online (his Downturnaround coinage has became an important part of our post-crash identity); as story editor and writer-wrangler — and, of course, as our ambassador to Sweden. All the while, he has been especially interested in our financial future, offering a font of entrepreneurial ideas, any of which, if we'd had the capacity to pursue them, might have actually made us some money. I have worked with Hugo for many years. He was the first person I hired here, and I will especially miss him as a friend and counselor. That's not ( I hope) to say he will be leaving our lives - there's Sarah here to visit at least, and the rest of us aren't so bad - but his warmth and worldview (that loveable mix of the sunny and the apocalyptic) has been very much part of the atmosphere here, and his absence will be deeply felt. Every magazine is only as good as the most interesting minds who give it life – and it's not just we here who will miss him, it's the readers too — in ways they likely won't recognize but will surely feel. We still have a month of him left, and we intend to get as much Hugoness into the magazine during that time as we can. That also gives us time to plan a proper farewell, the details of which we'll announce soon.