New Republic Exodus: Dozens Of Editors and Journalists Resign

[CountDeMoney]

You can say what you want about TNR and the state of political commentary and long-form journalism today

I think the people have already said enough with their wallets.

More money than attention span?  That's not new. 

[Neil]

You can say what you want about TNR and the state of political commentary and long-form journalism today

I think the people have already said enough with their wallets.

Except now, they're not even voting with their wallets.  The money is coming in from the gullible fools who advertise on the internet.

[garbon]

You can say what you want about TNR and the state of political commentary and long-form journalism today

I think the people have already said enough with their wallets.

More money than attention span?  That's not new. 

I'm not sure what's so great about having a long attention span. So you can read Tim-length articles that no one in their right mind finds relevant?

[Scipio]

Dancing on the grave of the New Republic would be more fun if I hadn't already done it when the little shit bought the thing two years ago.

TL;DR;DGAF.

[garbon]

You can say what you want about TNR and the state of political commentary and long-form journalism today

I think the people have already said enough with their wallets.

Except now, they're not even voting with their wallets.  The money is coming in from the gullible fools who advertise on the internet.

It may not have found itself in that situation if people had been interested in purchasing/subscribing.

[Neil]

The price of information has already been set, and that price is nothing.

[Ideologue]

Neil is wise.

[garbon]

The price of information has already been set, and that price is nothing.

Overly broad. There is a lot of information that can command quite a premium.

[Sheilbh]

It may not have found itself in that situation if people had been interested in purchasing/subscribing.

Yep. I think we're starting to see media brands that are making money out of the internet with different approaches. The Atlantic's turning a profit, so's the Economist and the Times - in each case I think because the content's good enough. The precious martyr approach doesn't work.

On the other hand it is sad to see any magazine brought low with a letter like this:

Though I'm going to describe myself as a straddle generation legal professional

Oh and I liked Dan Drezner's piece on this:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/05/is-there-a-peter-principle-for-investors/

Is there a Peter Principle for investors?
By Daniel W. Drezner December 5
Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at Tufts University and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.


A decade ago, when I was just a wee blogger, the New Republic asked me to write a monthly online column for them. At the time, TNR's imprimatur functioned like a bat signal to other mainstream media outlets, opening up other nonscholarly writing opportunities for me. And for this, I've always had a soft spot for that magazine. Indeed, after leaving Foreign Policy earlier this year, I came very close to blogging for TNR instead of creating Spoiler Alerts here.

So I share the sadness that a lot of reporters and opinion writers are feeling with the bloodletting that happened Thursday at the New Republic:

• n Thursday, [TNR's] editor, Franklin Foer, and the veteran literary editor, Leon Wieseltier, abruptly resigned in the face of a disagreement over the magazine's direction. Mr. Foer was replaced by Gabriel Snyder, a former editor of The Atlantic Wire. The magazine will reduce its publication schedule to 10 issues a year, from 20, [TNR chief executive Guy] Vidra said in a memo, and would be reimagined "as a vertically integrated digital media company."

I've got some training in economics, and I'm fascinated to know what Vidra thinks he means by "vertically integrated digital media company." Because, using the standard textbook definition of that term, it means that TNR will be going into the silicon mining business and tablet-building business.

Vidra's general vision of what TNR will look like going forward does read like someone went to a TED talk in Palo Alto and mined every business cliche possible, as Dylan Byers (who broke the story) explains in Politico:

Vidra's vision for TNR was radically different than that of Foer and Wieseltier. In meetings with staff, he spoke of the magazine as though it were a Silicon Valley startup, sources said. He talked about "disruption" and said he wanted to "break shit." He referred to himself as a "wartime CEO." At one point, he proposed giving every employee shares in the company, suggesting that he had plans to make it public.

Apparently, "disruption" means acting in as douche-y a manner as possible toward existing employees, as Lloyd Grove explains over at the Daily Beast:

According to informed sources, [TNR owner Chris] 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. Yes, it's true, Hughes sheepishly admitted, notwithstanding that he and Vidra had given Foer repeated assurances that his job was safe.

There are already a whole mess of eulogies for the TNR-that-was, but what's striking to me is that this is hardly the first clash this year between a billionaire titan and the new business venture that he's running. Think of the culture clashes over at First Look Media, or even the Wall Streeters' dubious management plan for reviving the Philadelphia 76ers.

These clashes go beyond the for-profit realm.Peter Thiel keeps yammering about how there's gonna be a revolution in higher education, but I'm not really seeing it. Similarly, in my Ideas Industry conferences, I've heard a lot of nonprofit sector folk complaining that Silicon Valley investors want to revolutionize their field without really understanding it.

The pattern in each of these cases is that a fabulously wealthy and successful investor enters a new and not-terribly-successful sector and tries to apply the lessons learned from the investor's past successes to this new area. Except that there's not a ton of evidence that those lessons are truly generalizable. One almost wonders if there is an extension of the Peter Principle for investors.

To be clear, I'm actually a big fan of the "creative destruction" that should come with a properly functioning capitalist economy. Usually, however, that creative destruction emanates from real technological innovations. What's going on at TNR sounds more like a successful investor moving into less successful areas of endeavor... and finding that disruption for its own sake is not necessarily a formula for success.

The irony of all of this is that while TNR was never good at producing a profit, it really excelled as an incubator for journalists and writers. As Ezra Klein points out, there are a lot of TNR-like entities out there now, so perhaps this isn't that huge of a blow. Still, the way that Hughes has botched his handling of this TNR shakeup suggests that maybe billionaire investors should pause once or twice before thinking that they know how to revolutionize every sector of the economy.

[Ideologue]

The price of information has already been set, and that price is nothing.

Overly broad. There is a lot of information that can command quite a premium.

I think Neil meant media content, as opposed to the kind of stuff we work with.  Now quit selling your company's secrets.

[garbon]

Now quit selling your company's secrets.

???

[Ideologue]

Just joking.

[CountDeMoney]

The precious martyr approach doesn't work.

Save the English superiority complex.

From the get-go, The New Republic struggled to make a mark on Washington and Hughes struggled to generate ad revenue. By 2014, Hughes was thinking of ways to restructure the magazine for digital growth, even at the expense of its legacy. In September, he hired Vidra, the former general manager of Yahoo News, to serve as TNR's first-ever chief executive.

Vidra's vision for TNR was radically different than that of Foer and Wieseltier. In meetings with staff, he spoke of the magazine as though it were a Silicon Valley startup, sources said. He talked about "disruption" and said he wanted to "break shit." He referred to himself as a "wartime CEO." At one point, he proposed giving every employee shares in the company, suggesting that he had plans to make it public.

Don't root for the internet start-up millionaire nouveau riche.  It's unbecoming of an Englishman, even a straddle generation legal professional.

[Sheilbh]

I'm not rooting for them

[Martinus]

I think it's less the case of rooting for one side than finding both sides equally detestable.