It's a good thing Chris Hughes likes to break things, because he's irreparably broken The New Republic.
The people who read TNR (myself included) do so specifically because it's been a bastion of traditional journalism, and moreover we read it for specific writers & contributing editors, and since they've all resigned now, TNR is dead.
Outside of a very small sliver of the population nobody's ever even heard of the The New Republic — it's not a brand name that Hughes can gut and remodel. The New Republic is not a brand that anyone cares about; we cared about the content, the writers and the editors.
I can see no way for TNR to carry on as a viable operation. As a TNR reader for more than 30 years, it makes me rather sad.
Not being a regular reader, I was a bit startled go there for the firsttime in a while and find a website that looks like Buzzfeed. I hope the existing editorial team or some more thoughtful soul can pony up enough capital to launch The Even Newer Republic or something along those lines.
That quote from Guy Vidra about how he can't bring himself to read past 500 words of any article should haunt him for the remainder of his career.
The friction escalated with the arrival of Vidra, who is said to have complained to Foer that the magazine was boring and that he couldn’t bring himself to read past the first 500 words of an article.
The more likely meaning here is that Vidra couldn't read more than 500 words of a boring TNR article.
Thanks for the correction - I typed that in a hurry and you're quite right that he was making a comment about the journalism at TNR rather than articles in general. All the same, I don't think it speaks well of him to make such a comment to a staff that specializes in long-form journalism.
This is a good clarification. The other issue is that Vidra's previous employer was Yahoo (Head of Yahoo News). This may have limited his ability to read beyond 500 words, too, who knows.
That is especially scary. Several years back, I could get decent news from yahoo, and they had a balanced group of opinion writers....., then poof! After reading this article I am guessing Vidra might have orchestrated that change too.
I wouldn't worry about it; I'm sure they'll pivot, build mobile-first something that people want, scale like a startup, and then be validated by the market when they profitably exit.
Ahh yes... mobile first... because Mobile Is The Future(tm) this week. Last week Cloud Was The Future(tm). Tomorrow it'll be Internet of Things and mobile will be old and busted and nobody will ever pitch a mobile startup again.
too slanted to be journalism, its like reading the opinion page of any local newspaper. So if that is the last bastion of journalism then journalism died a long time ago.
> The friction escalated with the arrival of Vidra, who is said to have complained to Foer that the magazine was boring and that he couldn’t bring himself to read past the first 500 words of an article. According to witnesses, Vidra did little to hide his disrespect for TNR’s tradition of long-form storytelling and rigorous, if occasionally dense, intellectual and political analysis--to say nothing of his lack of interest in the magazine’s distinguished history--at an all-hands meeting in early October.
Why run a magazine if you're not even interested in the type of journalism it produces?
>Why run a magazine if you're not even interested in the type of journalism it produces?
Well, if your husband is a politician, owning a venerable institution has a cache that creating a media outlet from the ground up doesn't. You get Bill Clinton and Ruth Bader Ginsburg to show up for last month's 100th TNR anniversary. Doubt that would be the case for the one year anniversary of verticallyintegratedbuzzword.com
> Why run a magazine if you're not even interested in the type of journalism it produces?
And poof, "problem" solved! With the staff gone and only 10 issues of print a year left (which I doubt actually will happen), that sort of pesky journalism will no longer be a bother to the young guns in charge.
"According to informed sources, Hughes and Vidra didn’t bother to inform Foer that he was out of a job. Instead, the editor was placed in the humiliating position of having to phone Hughes to get confirmation after Gawker.com posted an item at 2:35 p.m. reporting the rumor that Bloomberg Media editor Gabriel Snyder, himself a onetime Gawker editor, had been hired as Foer’s replacement."
Yikes. Reading about your replacement's hire on Gawker has got to be one of the worst ways to find out you're fired. I'm not surprised to see a shakeup at TNR, but to see it handled so badly is shocking.
The Tribune Company recently shut down a Chicago FM station that was doing poorly in the ratings. The on-air DJs read about their (immediate) termination via Twitter during a break:
This story is almost exactly the plot of The Newsroom (HBO) episode from two weeks ago, where a mega-douchey tech entrepreneur (played brilliantly by BJ Novak) purchases ACN with the intent of turning the network into a crowdsourced, citizen-journalism "digital media company." The real-life story is hilariously similar.
Earlier, I had complained that this was just more of Sorkin's distaste for anything new. My argument was that no real SV billionaire would buy a traditional media company to turn it into the next Buzzfeed, since there's no value there. They'd just start from scratch.
The point of publications like The New Republic isn't to make money; it's to be loss-leaders for political influence. You get that political influence by writing articles that play at the edges of elite opinion, via writers and editors hooked up into the elite.
Dropping writers and editors and attempting to turn it into a mass-market publication throws away every valuable asset they have.
The Daily Beast is engaging in some heavy-duty schadenfreude here.
The New Republic was sold for reason: its business model is failing. While Hughes might be making a mess of this transition (perhaps no surprise for a 30 year old who lucked into getting rich), some kind of hard transition was going to happen in any case. It's not like all these folks were going to have long happy careers at a niche long-form print magazine, if only Chris Hughes had never come along.
It's not that the staff were upset that there were going to be some business model changes (or even cuts in headcount). It's that the new leadership seems to have come in pretty cock-heaeded, and basically clueless as to how to deal with the existing culture there -- or just how to treat the staff as human beings, generally. Accomplished, senior-level people don't just resign en masse, and say things like this:
“Leon said he’s never seen any editor be so disrespected and dicked around--I’m paraphrasing--as Frank has been treated for the last couple of months,” said senior editor Julia Ioffe, describing the meeting Thursday afternoon in the newsroom, at which Wieseltier and Foer announced that they’d quit.
or this:
“It was cowardly, the way Chris and Guy went about this,” Ioffe said. “Media reporters have been calling for months, asking, ‘Is Frank fired?,’ and they’ve been lying to everybody, including Frank.”
or this:
At least the king in the Red Wedding had the balls to stab everyone in person.— Ryan Lizza (@RyanLizza) December 5, 2014
That tweet irritates me. It doesn't make any sense. What King killed people at the red wedding? The only king there was the one getting stabbed. And none of the murdering at the Red Wedding required or featured any substantial display of 'balls'. It was actually quite a cowardly act. You would think an editor at a prestigious (I'm assuming from the article - I've never read TNR) magazine would either be aware of what actually happened in the fictional event he is referencing or be above shoehorning in pop culture references for their own sake.
Certainly none doing the stabbing in person as described; there's certainly instances in GoT of people claiming the title King killing people personally in GoT, but the Red Wedding is equally certainly not one of them. A key aspect of the Red Wedding was that the Lord directly overseeing the killing (who also wasn't doing it personally) was (perceived up to that point to be) an ally of the targets who were his guests, and (again, perceived) opponent of the King (Joffery) whose cause was served by the killing.
Gabriel is ideally suited to bridge traditional journalism and digital media... He truly reflects the “straddle generation” of journalists and editors who remain deeply rooted in the qualities of traditional journalism – having worked with brands such as the New York Observer and The Atlantic – but also understands what it takes to create content that will travel across all platforms.
"Straddle generation"? Seriously? The phrase practically drips with condescension, both for Snyder and the man he's replacing. "I'm completely digital, of course; but unlike Frank, Gabriel at least has one foot in reality."
I don't find that particular phrasing condescending. It reads to me as though the writer values traditional journalism as something worth preserving and combining with new ideas.
Try replacing the context but keep the structure:
"He truly reflects the “straddle generation” of devops who remain deeply rooted in the qualities of traditional system administration – having worked with brands such as AT&T and IBM – but also understands what it takes to create applications that can scale across all platforms."
Does that somehow imply that traditional system administration is a bad thing? I don't think so.
Frankly, it's not insulting: it's absurd. If someone told me they were part of a "straddle generation" who know system admin and also create scalable apps, I'd laugh in their face.
> It's not that the staff were upset that there were going to be some business model changes (or even cuts in headcount). It's that the new leadership seems to have come in pretty cock-heaeded, and basically clueless as to how to deal with the existing culture there -- or just how to treat the staff as human beings, generally.
Good sir I am a man of great reputation and standing in my community. For you to have stabbed me with a common kitchen knife -- rather than a bejeweled, ivory handled stabbing dagger as I deserve is a great insult to me and my name. A pox upon thee and I shall die forthwith to spite you.
I think the existing culture there was already dead, it just hadn't run out of money yet. Maybe the current staff would have been happier with a dignified bankruptcy and final issue, I don't know.
"Given that Hughes’s interests are at least as literary as they are political, I found that many of the people I spoke with suspected the real changes at the magazine would come at the expense of Wieseltier—who had his own charmed life as the oldest young man in the room. As the editors came and went at Peretz’s favor, Wieseltier ruled a sort of archipelago of learnedness in the magazine’s back pages—haunted by its own testy thoroughgoing-ness, dense with type and argument, and deliberately off-putting. [...] His culture section, which often made up nearly half of each issue, was supposed to have nothing to do with the rest of the magazine at all.
"But Hughes wants a single, readable magazine—with photographs!—not two stapled together, and this will entail treating Wieseltier, as one person familiar with the magazine put it, as an employee for the first time.
*
Looks like he got treated as an employee all right.
I thought the descriptions of Facebook guy and Yahoo guy trying to do something grown-up were as cringeworthy as they possibly could be but kept going back to the thought "well, at least Leon Wieseltier got fired." He's that repugnant.
Staff and readers have legitimate concerns about the new direction of TNR. However, I wonder if the outrage would be the same if the organization were to stay in Washington.
For many people who have been at an organization for a long time, being forced to relocate is a very unattractive proposition, especially if spouses' careers and children's schools will be impacted. Moving to NYC means downgrading living space and potentially increasing the commute as well. If moving to NYC is a non-starter for these writers and editors, that changes the dynamics of what’s being portrayed as an old guard/new boss strategy split.
Another question: Are there other employment opportunities for the staff in D.C.? The Post has very deep pockets now, along with an owner who wants to make a national publication. Politico is also doing well. Who knows, maybe some other local or national media startup (or established player) would love to build out their masthead …
> Are there other employment opportunities for the staff in D.C.?
It seems like this would be a good opportunity for First Look Media to bolster their reputation/morale after the very public squabble with Matt Taibbi. First Look probably needs a DC office anyhow, and their goal has/had been to start multiple magazines, and TNR is a turnkey solution at this point.
Good read, but -1 fantasy-geek points for using the Red Wedding as an analogy and then using a photoshopped image from the Purple Wedding as an illustration.
So Vidra is going to break shit. I guess that is what he means by vertical integration. You throw a venerable magazine vertically downwards into the shithole. We are the 100,000 (subscribers) who matter apparently, so cancel your TNR and let's move on. How's that for breaking shit?
I like TNR. My grandmother read it. I look at the website regularly (although I wouldn't subscribe). But I wonder if anyone at TNR is regretting declaring that "the party is over at Amazon" just two days before their own, rather spectacular, collapse.
I think taxes should be raised (on the wealthy) and that artists, journalists, performers, etc. should have easy access to government-funded royalties. And I think this would be a good way to fund open source too, so that projects such as OpenSSL don't wither on the vine.
The royalties could be at rates specific to each niche (adjusted so that pop superstars are compensated similarly to journalists). But within these categories, compensation is proportional to your public audience. (Edit: proportional on some sort of exponential scale, so that every legitimate professional can make a decent living)
Note: this is basically Richard Stallman's idea. +1 internet dollar to him.
This is very wrong. You're giving the state the power to control journalism. As for the audience deciding what's worthy, you'll get Jersey Shore quality or worse.
ASCAP tracks radio plays and online streams. It's the federally designated company to handle royalty payments to musicians/performers. I don't think the government controls music. If journalists' royalties were based on defined metrics, I don't see this increasing government control.
As far as audience taste, you're certainly right. However, balancing this are the type of people supporting IndieGoGo, Kickstarter, and NPR.
I think it would take a lot of planning and research to design optimal rules for a royalty program like this. But I think the chances of getting good results are better than the current path we're on.
The real New Republic purge happened in 1974. Goodbye articles on Ralph Nader and consumer auto safety, hello articles supporting Contra attacks on the elected left-wing Nicaraguan government etc.
This magazine has fallen to 50,000 paid subscribers. The New Republic had become a sinecure for self-important blowhards with no name recognition, and Hughes is clearing the decks. I mean, people like Michael Moore write for The Nation, Mother Jones broke the Romney 47% comments, what has the New Republic been known for in past decades other than Stephen Glass scandals or Bell Curve black/white genetic intelligence articles?
Hughes is reversing a decline which began 40 years ago. These bloviating fossils are not good for much other than biting the hand which fed their sinecures, and getting their sour grapes into rival publications.
What are you talking about? The New Republic caters to a very specific audience, I didn't realize there was something wrong with that. The magazine never needed to represent the country just the readership. Does this also mean Telemundo is irrelevant because it doesn't speak to the life experience of a majority in the country? so stupid....
From about me:
"I’m a doctoral student in the Rhetoric and Composition at Purdue University. Rhetoric and composition is a subfield within English, dedicated to the study of writing and argument. Rhetoric concerns the study of argument, persuasion, and discourse."
Not sure if he was trying to be funny or he really thinks his response should be taken seriously.
That being said the idiots at TNR who backed the Iraq war deserved to be fired, though not sure who remains from back then.
How exactly does killing off a major liberal magazine make their ideology more accessible? And can you name other members of this trend than Chris Hughes?
They're not killing it off, they're dumbing it down. Other members of the trend are Gawker, Buzzfeed, Vox: tabloid clickbait used as a vehicle for leftist ideology.
Vox and Gawker have vaguely liberal editorial positions, but I don't think there's anything remotely leftist or ideological about either of them.
Buzzfeed is the outlet that published a damning expose of the folly of big government that consisted of photographs of cracked and stained concrete and ugly sculptures around government buildings. The author of said piece eventually got fired, but only for blatant plagiarism.
As a leftist, I have to confess to being baffled as to what aspects of my ideological position are being promoted by Gawker, Vox, and Buzzfeed.
Leftist is a pretty broad term. I'm talking more the flippant "pop leftism" that's emerged that de-prioritizes traditional class-based analysis and implies that a big state is a potential vehicle for enforcing leftist ideals. Not sure the best name for this variant. Example of the kind of Rupert Murdoch-level analysis pop leftism pumps out:
"Up yours, squares!" is not a leftist position, though. I don't see any ideological content there you couldn't find on South Park.
And Gawker sells "up yours, squares" because that's what sells, not because Nick Denton is interested in promoting some kind of agenda. The only agenda Nick Denton promotes is filling his wallet.
The people who read TNR (myself included) do so specifically because it's been a bastion of traditional journalism, and moreover we read it for specific writers & contributing editors, and since they've all resigned now, TNR is dead.
Outside of a very small sliver of the population nobody's ever even heard of the The New Republic — it's not a brand name that Hughes can gut and remodel. The New Republic is not a brand that anyone cares about; we cared about the content, the writers and the editors.
I can see no way for TNR to carry on as a viable operation. As a TNR reader for more than 30 years, it makes me rather sad.
This is all so stupid and sad.