Discussion: Facebook Mogul 'Saddened' By Mass Exodus At 'TNR'

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Discussion for article #230859

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Readers of TNR. like myself, are saddened too. However my greatest sadness come from watching Hughes destroy a great institution where one could find some of the best writing around.

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It may not be bigger than than all of them when the smoke clears.

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And this is happening pretty uniformly, whether slowly or near-overnight, to every famous name in publishing. The Internet is the asteroid that killed the media dinosaurs, but the dinosaurs were pretty magnificent in their prime.

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Chris Hughes haz an insincere sad. My heart is wrung.

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And so…why did he buy TNR instead of just starting a website? Seems like he did this the expensive way.

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That media, new and old are at best transitory, a 100 year run for a print icon is pretty remarkable.

The confluence (or is it effluence?) of 21st century electronic reach and 20th century ink is well documented with the latter being relegated to dust bin status in some cases.

Any bemoaning or hew and cry aside, what serves as a reminder of plutocrat design(s) on wealth consolidation is the fear/reality that these uber wealthy, whether of the Fred C. Koch twin varietal, or the Facebook falloff strain, have become so empowered.

Sure, billionaires can serve the common good, but these days, that has proven to be less a bulwark against right wing nihilism than advanced societal thinkers can trust.

Moving the magazine to 10 issues annually, and digging into an editorial talent pool fresh from fish wrapper digital TMZ wanna’ be, is as Roger Waters said(s) “All in all you’re just another brick in the wall”.

Some never trusted this guy to run the NR anyway plus it demonstrates that money buys power and the means of influence, and, that the Peter principle old saw still abounds no matter the wallet.

The staff mass exodus confirms such.

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Calling TNR a liberal magazine is a little off. It should be called a “liberal” magazine.

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Is this an episode the “The Newsroom”?

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I had the same thought.

Can Aaron Sorkin really be that good? I know he writes the best dialog this side of a old-school screwball comedy, but I had no idea he could predict the (near) future!

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But will this astpocalypse cause the news media to become a vast wasteland of dreck?

BWHA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA H AH HAHAH (couch). Sorry, I forget what century I was in.

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or bigger than Chris’ ego…

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Aaron Sorkin does write dialogue and its very entertaining dialogue. But if you took snark out of The Newsroom dialogue you’d be left with less than 100 words an episode. People don’t interact like that. People don’t talk to each other like they do on Newsroom. They don’t slap each other with every word they say and no main character in Newsroom would last a full day in an actual Newsroom.

I love the program. It’s one of the few I watch and Sorkin deserves huge kudos for his part of it. But he is writing fantasy. Actually I think the hero of the Newsroom is its editor that clips and pastes that back and forth of personal and professional mayhem into a coherent story.

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Well, TNR was sold in 2012, so Sorkin had time to craft a story line. I didn’t know about it until this group of stories on TPM, though, so today I’ve been all, “AHA! That’s where Newsroom got its plot arc!”

I wonder if everybody’s going to resign in the series finale? ACM will be a “crowd-sourced” shell of its former self.

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Eh…maybe we’re just not seeing it from across the pond, but it doesn’t seem to be happening at The Economist, which is the only one of those that ever seemed worth reading despite their economic conservative slant. The real problem as I see it is that most of the mainstream mags like Time, Newsweek, TNR, etc. have been shitty for so long (at least the early 1980’s) without any competition from other types of outlets except other shitty magazines, that they got complacent and couldn’t simply switch their content over when the Internet arrived.

This clip from The Onion pretty much nails it (and it’s worth noting that the international version of Time is a lot like “Time Advanced”):

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. “It has been a privilege to work with them, and I wish them only the best.”

opines the FB Mogul as he dreams about the MurKochs and what they will offer.

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fuck facebook.

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I knew people would come up with good examples of survivors, and I can’t argue with you about The Economist, but most of the exceptions involve marketing to the most elite audience possible—very high income, very highly educated, people who don’t hesitate to pay very high subscription rates, and an audience advertisers drool over, and maybe most of all a readership that likes the publication exactly the way it is. (The New Yorker comes to mind as well.) The mainstream mags were vapid and just coasting for decades, and couldn’t make the switch. The big metro newspapers were the same way—skilled at what they did, but unskilled at adapting to a sudden, cataclysmic change. High-end news is already an elite commodity, just as riding horses is an elite pastime, but long ago stopped being a means of transportation.

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I am excited to work with our team — both new and old alike —

I’m guessing he’s the de rigueur ‘passionate’ as well as oblivious to the pain he’s caused?

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didn’t the dinosaurs all go extinct together too? it’s nice that all those people left together. They should make a new magazine called The New New Republic.

honestly, though, it’s surprising to hear so many people unable to accept that time does actually move forward. And with its forward movement, time brings something called change.