It is in the nature of the New Yorker to be as topical as possible, on a level that is often small in scale and playful in intention.
Eight o'clock is hard no matter what network you're on because people have to make a decision to sit down and start watching TV. Every other time slot is a time slot that happens after someone's watching something else.
Because the competitive landscape of the web is such that the site which looks and works best gets the most traffic, developers and designers put a premium on the presentation of that content and let structural markup take a back seat.