[LINK] Six links on the implosion of The New Republic

[rfmcdonald]

Bloomberg's Gerry Smith described the scale of the event in his "New Republic Editors Resign Following Management Shake-Up".

At least 28 editors at the New Republic resigned today following a management shake-up at the century-old political magazine.

The departures by staff editors and contributing editors were reported in a tweet by Ryan Lizza, a contributing editor, who also stepped down.

The editors stepped down en masse after Chief Executive Officer Guy Vidra announced to staff in a memo yesterday that the print publication frequency would be halved to 10 issues a year and two top editors would leave. The magazine will also move its offices to New York from Washington, according to the memo, which was obtained by Bloomberg News.

“As we restructure The New Republic, we will be making significant investments in creating a more effective and efficient newsroom as well as improved products across all platforms,” Vidra said in the memo.

Franklin Foer, the magazine’s editor, will be replaced by Gabriel Snyder, a Bloomberg News digital editor, Vidra said. Leon Wieseltier, the longtime literary editor, is also leaving.

Megan McArdle, back at Bloomberg View, places this in the context of the difficulty of managing media companies.

[U]nlike most journalists, I've also worked at a bunch of firms that are not media companies, including ones that failed. Both journalists and non-journalists usually fail to understand just how weirdly different media companies are from other sorts of firms, which means they don't understand that experience with one side gives you virtually zero insight into how the other kind works. Without unduly sucking up to current and former executives, let me note that David Bradley succeeded at The Atlantic by hiring people who understood the business -- including Justin Smith, who now works for Bloomberg -- and giving them room to do what needed to be done.

Turning around any money-losing company is difficult, but media companies are especially tricky, because you're not running a normal type of organization; you're running a professional group. Most of the lessons that you learned in another business aren't very relevant.

Prominent among the unique challenges of the media manager: the frequent tension between the actions that build your reputation and audience, and those that monetize it; the difficulty of getting creative types to produce great stuff on demand; the astonishing amount of autonomy that journalists need, because it's impossible to write hard guidelines, and too expensive to supervise long hours of reporting and typing; the fact that great writers are frequently terrible managers and editors, which screws up the normal management pyramid; the simultaneous need for speed and accuracy; the fact that media employment selects for a cluster of personality traits that resists closer management; the professional ethic that will stymie you when you decide to make a different set of trade-offs between competing priorities such as speed, accuracy, and the need to monetize your content; the fact that writers, especially in the digital age, frequently take their audience with them if they leave, making it even harder to impose discipline. These days, add the fact that the whole industry is having trouble figuring out a financial model that works. Not all of these problems apply to every company -- and each of these problems can be found in some other industry. But the collection of all these problems in one place makes media, particularly the glamourous prestige media that most outside owners want to buy, an unusual headache.

At the Bloomberg View, Clive Crook was rather sardonic about the fuss.

Let me see if I understand. The owner of TNR had his own plans for the title, and these didn't include the present editor. What astonishing presumption. Let there be mass resignations. If you're a subscriber -- you almost certainly aren't, but I'm saying if you are -- cancel at once. The New Republic is about to be crippled, which is a disgrace; all that remains is for people of conscience to combine forces and shut it down altogether.

I'm grateful to Twitter for recording this orgy of egotism and entitlement. The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza asked to be removed from the masthead as a contributing editor (a vanity title, in case you're wondering: quite a sacrifice to give that up). New York's Jonathan Chait said me too, "it goes without saying." "Okay, no joking now," said Ross Douthat of the New York Times. "This TNR news is bad for everyone." Well, I hadn't thought of that. Bad for everyone. How will I ever break it to my neighbors in West Virginia? I'm concerned the news has not yet reached them.

Douthat's pointless hand-wringing wasn't enough for Slate's Jacob Weisberg. He demanded action: "Anybody who didn't quit TNR today deserves to be fired." (An hour later, he'd had second thoughts and pleaded irony. I don't think so.) By Friday afternoon it seemed much of the editorial staff had indeed quit or been fired. Weisberg may think that's excellent, but I'd like to go further and suggest that he now resign in solidarity from his own job (running digital titles that aim to disrupt the magazine business and make money in a post-print world). Think of the power of that protest! A shot heard round the world.

Slate's Seth Stevenson placed this in a broader context of American journalism.

Whence all the handwringing over changes at a teensy political magazine? The New Republic as an institution has a long, storied history. Its pages have been home to deeply considered essays and legendary bylines. But Hughes’ new CEO, the former Yahoo News executive Guy Vidra, seems bent on ditching TNR’s ruminative style. Instead—those close to TNR who read between his lines fear—he’s hoping to emulate modern, quick-hit outlets that thrive on churning out less meaty work from squadrons of inexperienced writers. Hughes’ new editor, Gabriel Snyder, is formerly of Bloomberg Media and the Atlantic Wire, and hails from the whiplash world of reactive Web journalism—not the staid, chin-stroky milieu of a century-old journal of opinion.

In statements to staff, Vidra has vowed to “break shit” and has called himself a “wartime CEO.” At the magazine’s recent centennial celebration, he mispronounced Foer’s name. It doesn’t help that Vidra speaks in jumbly tech jargon that sets many journalists’ teeth on edge. In announcing yesterday’s shakeup, he claimed these changes were part of “re-imagining The New Republic as a vertically integrated digital media company.” Vertically integrated? Are they going to, like, mine their own pixels? It’s one thing for journalists of a certain age to warily watch the BuzzFeeds ascend from afar—it’s another feeling when the insurrection overruns one of your own, formerly impregnable ramparts.

A splinter group—a backlash to the backlash—has suggested that Snyder might be an interesting choice to lead TNR into its brave new digital future. And to be fair, some of the rending of garments is overblown. TNR’s influence had long been on the wane. It will live on, it may modernize in helpful ways, and, one assumes, will continue to publish good work—though at what frequency and just how good remains to be seen. Much of the rage (the majority of TNR’s staff resigned today) probably derives as much or more so from the way Foer was treated as it does from ill ease about the direction the magazine is taking.

Crooked Timber's Corey Robin argues that The New Republic just stopped being relevant a long while ago.

No, the real problem with The New Republic is that for the last three decades, it has had no energy. It has had no real project. The last time The New Republic had a project was in the late 1970s/early 1980s, when it was in the journalistic vanguard of what was then called neoliberalism (not what we now call neoliberalism). That is what a great magazine of politics and culture does: it creates a project, it fashions a sensibility. The Spectator did it in the early 18th century, Partisan Review in the 1930s did it, Dissent in the 1950s did it, and The New Republic in the 1970s/1980s did it. I’m not saying that I like that last project; I don’t. I’m just saying that it was a project, and that it was a creation. Love them or hate them, great magazines gather the diverse and disparate energies of a polity and a culture and give them focus. They shape assumptions, they direct attention, they articulate a direction. The New Republic hasn’t done that since I was a teenager.

At Esquire, Charles R. Pierce argues, with abundant links, that the magazine was in decline for a long while regardless.

As someone who once worked for a paper that folded beneath him, I feel for the people at the magazine who are going to lose their jobs behind this move. And, as someone who suddenly lost the publication at which he learned all his chops, I feel for Jonathan Chait. But, institutionally, the slow destruction of TNR by its new and witless owner doesn't come up for me to the slow and deliberate destruction of its credibility as a legitimate liberal voice during the ownership of the execrable Marty Peretz.

John Cole has helpfully provided a brief list of the atrocities committed by the magazine under Peretz's leadership, and under the editorships of Michael Kinsley, Andrew Sullivan and the late Michael Kelly, among others, whose reputations as thinkers and journalists have survived largely untouched because that's the way it is when, to poach a phrase from the estimable Driftglass, there is a club and you're not in it. It was at TNR where Kinsley pole-vaulted over the line separating being an interesting contrarian from simply being an overeducated dick. It was at TNR where Kelly let loose his unguarded mania against Bill Clinton. The New Republic became the index patient for a lot of terrible stuff that happened to progressivism over the past 30 years.