Amid a Times business section article about S.I. Newhouse Jr. and the New Yorker magazine comes this paragraph:
Mr. Gottlieb took the job anyway. If he did not reinvent the magazine in his five-year tenure, neither did he turn it into a moneymaker. The median age of the magazine was rising, and Mr. Newhouse decided to make yet another change: He fired Mr. Gottlieb and replaced him with Ms. Brown, the 38-year-old British editor who had made a splash with the celebrity- and royalty-heavy Vanity Fair.
"The median age of the magazine was rising"? What does that mean? I can understand if the median age of the magazine's readers was rising, or of the median age of its editorial staff was rising, or if the median age of the pile of the magazines on my nighttable was rising. But to say that "the median age of the magazine was rising" without further explanation is an example of imprecise writing, the avoidance of which is one reason that some people, regardless of their ages, like and admire the New Yorker in the first place.