Chris Hughes Purges 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.

Why run a magazine if you're not even interested in the type of journalism it produces?

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.

Dropping writers and editors and attempting to turn it into a mass-market publication throws away every valuable asset they have.

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 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.

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 …

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.

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.