Discussion:

Discussion for article #230930

You know, if I owned a magazine whose expenses were outsizing its revenues, I wouldn’t move the offices to NYC.

Usually the old saw “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is too commonsensical to be said out loud. Clearly these guys didn’t get that memo.

I like long form journalism too…I subscribe to the New Yorker. But to be honest, I haven’t read TNR in a long time.

They stopped being a major influence a while ago. Nobody cites their columns…their writers don’t appear on and TV or radio shows…and nobody links to them. They’re pretty much a non-factor in most of today’s political coverage.

Hate to say it, but Chris Hughes is mostly right on this one.

Months? Out of the beltway bubble we all stopped subscribing years ago.

Hughes didn’t by a magazine, he bought a brand. And lets face it, a lot of people get bored if a story goes beyond 140 characters including hashtags.

Why is a traditional magazine somehow exclusive of a digital form?
Or vice-versa?
Seems as if one could be the long-form and the other the Silicon Valley form. And both could promote each other, like siblings, or more accurately, parent and child, working cohesively and in compliment…

Hughes didn’t need to eviscerate the traditional magazine to create his digital version, there may have been some divergence, but there didn’t need to be destruction.

Myopia is infectious.

How is this behavior shocking when, in my experience, it is, more or less, SOP in the media take-over game?

When a tech guy buys a magazine that has never made money, that should signal the possibility of change esp. when he brings in some walking MBA cliche as a manager. TNR died years ago when Sullivan took over–everything from the copyediting to the fact checking to the entire editorial slant changed and not in good ways. yes Wiesltier kept the back of the book going and some good people stuck around, but the circulation numbers began to tank and kept tanking. The Nation, which had been lumbering along with awful columnists (Hitchens obviously wrote his columns drunk) and smug, self-satisfied articles, started to shake things up and began to draw most of the lefty magazine reader. they even made a profit once in awhile. Meanwhile, lots of people only read TNR when linked and often because someone had an example of Jonathan Chait’s stupidity on Iraq. I suspect that the people who stuck around at TNR thought of themseleves as survivors who would always have jobs and something nice for the resume even as it became less economically tenable for the magazine to exist and even as there continued to be editorial turnover. In other words, they were clueless and their cluelessness continued through the tenure of a very new kind of boss.

This piece is much like the pieces on the continuing decline of CNN. Except CNN never had a rich history Even so both CNN and TNR have sucked for years and we’re better off looking at what doesn’t suck than mourning their decline (CNN) or inevitable passing (TNR’s old guard).

I imagine the magazine will now become a right wing rag out of pique.

You know, a lot of the people out there were fine with remaining on the masthead when Marty Peretz spewed racist hate on its web pages (and the whole Bell Curve thing), but now that a white guy gets fired, they are up in arms.

It does not reflect well on you.

Reflect well on them.

Hughes needs to sell TNR. Pronto. A new owner would make possible a fresh start (but with a low probability of success), If Hughes dies not sell, all he’ll own is a dead horse covered with flies.

Most of the notable writers who quit are notable for writing for other outlets (Lizza at The New Yorker, Chait at New York Mag, etc.); I didn’t even know most of them wrote for TNR. And it’s pretty ironic that it’s being referred to as the “Buzzfeedization” of TNR when not just Internet media in general but Buzzfeed itself is increasing its influence and credibility by producing long-form serious journalism.

“The New Republic is a kind of public trust,” said Andrew Sullivan who used the magazine to push “The Bell Curve.”

“The legacy has now been trashed, the trust violated,” said Andrew Sullivan, who gave Betsey McCoughey a platform from which to spread outright lies about the Clinton Administration’s health care proposals.

“It is a sad irony that at this perilous moment, with a reactionary variant of conservatism in the ascendancy, liberalism’s central journal should be scuttled with flagrant and frivolous abandon.” said Andrew Sullivan, who has never been a liberal, who openly despises liberalism, who once described liberals as “a Fifth Column,” and who would have no problem at all with the current Republican party if it were not so virulently homophobic.

TPM:

“If you really care about an institution and want to make it strong for the ages, you don’t walk out,” Hughes wrote. “You roll up your sleeves, you redouble your commitment to those ideals in a changing world, and you fight. This 100-year-old story is worth fighting for.”

Hughes let it leak that an apparently well-respected editor was being fired rather than telling him directly, and now Hughes blames everyone else for not wanting to work for him?

I haven’t been a big fan of TNR since Sullivan tried to legitimize The Bell Curve, but Hughes is just completely oblivious here.

TNR as a liberal flagship foundered and gracelessly sank 20+ years ago. I’m sorry for the staff who lost jobs, but frankly the likes of Wieseltier and Ioffe will be no great loss.

Right? Years ago, I subscribed. Then I stopped and moved to digital. Then I just stopped. They were so “inside the bubble” that reading them was frustrating.

And it really isn’t like we’re deprived of good political commentary these days. If anything, there’s so much available that there isn’t enough time to read it all!

This is very much inside baseball, and possible the death throes of a once-vibrant, but now obsolete publication.

Life moves on.

Exactly! I get Buzzfeed’s long-forms auto-delivered to my Kindle. I find them to be great, thought-inspiring reads. Yeah, puppies, listicles, kittens - and long form.

Now that I think back, I realize that it was during Sullivan’s time that TNR moved from my “must read” to “maybe, once-in-a-while” read category. For some reason, his gayness allowed people to think of him as a “good” conservative, without fully examining what the hell he was actually saying.