
Chris Hughes Purges The New Republic - danielweber
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/05/the-new-republic-implodes.html
======
ColinCera
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.

This is all so stupid and sad.

~~~
anigbrowl
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.

~~~
tptacek
I think you've misquoted Vidra:

 _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.

~~~
001sky
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.

~~~
zafka
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.

------
augustocallejas
> 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?

~~~
msabalau
>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

------
benbreen
"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.

~~~
joezydeco
Oh, there are worse ways.

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:

[http://www.allaccess.com/net-
news/archive/story/135792/tribu...](http://www.allaccess.com/net-
news/archive/story/135792/tribune-to-shut-down-the-game-87-7-fm-chicago-jona)

------
ajsharp
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.

~~~
presty
I thought they had exaggerated a little on the last episode, but reading the
stuff Hughes and Vidra said made me cringe...

~~~
atourgates
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.

Turns out I was wrong.

------
fiatmoney
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.

------
snowwrestler
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.

~~~
dreamweapon
That wasn't the main point of the article at all.

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_

for no reason.

~~~
danw3
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.

~~~
smacktoward
Great, now apparently Renly^H^H^H^H^H Robb Truthers are a thing.

 _(Edited because I 'm an idiot)_

~~~
danw3
I am far too compulsive about reading ASOIAF theories to let this go - What
are Renly Truthers (and how does it relate to the above)?

~~~
smacktoward
It was just an attempt at a joke - but I got my kings confused, Renly for Robb
Stark. Doh! I'll turn in my nerd card at the door.

------
mturmon
For much more (but worth it, if you're interested), see this profile of
Hughes, from Dec. 2012, in NY Magazine: [http://nymag.com/news/features/chris-
hughes-2012-12/](http://nymag.com/news/features/chris-hughes-2012-12/) \--

It basically predicts Wieseltier's ouster:

"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.

~~~
justin66
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.

------
ilamont
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 …

~~~
logn
> 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.

------
georgemcbay
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.

------
elliotyale
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?

------
GabrielF00
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.

------
orasis
The author's repeated ageism in this article is ironically immature.

------
logn
Journalism is the most depressing career lately.

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.

~~~
alvarosm
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.

~~~
logn
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.

------
rossjudson
Time for these editors to get together and build "The Old New Republic". Or
maybe that's "The New New Republic".

------
pastProlog
If they resigned, how were they "purged"?

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.

~~~
jbob2000
As a gawker headline put it; "White Men Upset Wrong White Man Placed in Charge
of White-Man Magazine"

~~~
justathrow2k
And that's sad, because race has nothing to do with any of this.

~~~
untog
It does, though. When your writers cannot speak to the life experience of a
percentage of the US population, it isn't representative of the country.

~~~
sunnylogin
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....

------
GFK_of_xmaspast
Counterpoint: [http://fredrikdeboer.com/2014/12/05/dear-very-serious-
journa...](http://fredrikdeboer.com/2014/12/05/dear-very-serious-journalists/)

~~~
bruceb
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.

~~~
clarkm
He was definitely being sarcastic. Look at his previous posts.

------
mcantelon
This seems part of a trend, by East coast pro-state leftists, of growing
tabloid-y media to make their ideology more accessible.

~~~
djur
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?

~~~
mcantelon
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.

~~~
djur
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.

~~~
mcantelon
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:

[http://gawker.com/white-men-upset-wrong-white-man-placed-
in-...](http://gawker.com/white-men-upset-wrong-white-man-placed-in-charge-of-
whi-1666925379)

~~~
djur
"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.

