At the heart of the conflict of the past few days is a divergent view on how the New Republic — and journalism more broadly — will survive. In one view, it is a “public trust” and not a business. It is something greater than a commercial enterprise, ineffable, an ideal that cannot be touched. Financially, it would be a charity....Eh. I'm not that sympathetic with the old guard, but Hughes sounds so hollow and childish. Today’s young people... arrive in the halls of power tomorrow.... Wouldn't you go out of your mind if your 100-year-old journal were taken over by a 30-year-old billionaire who talked to you like that? And to taunt them for not thinking TNR is worth fighting for when they sacrificed their livelihood for the principles they believed in! Even if their principles are elitist and entitled... they are fighting. Hughes, by contrast, is flailing.
Former editors and writers who claim in an open letter that the New Republic should not be a business would prefer an institution that looks backward more often than forward.... Unless we experiment now, today’s young people will not even recognize the New Republic’s name nor care about its voice when they arrive in the halls of power tomorrow....
If you really care about an institution and want to make it strong for the ages, you don’t walk out. 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.
ADDED: When I read what the writers who quit write, arguments for Hughes spring to mind and I lean toward his side. When I read what Hughes writes, arguments for the writers spring to mind, and I lean toward their side. That's kind of funny, considering that they are fighting over who should control a journal dedicated to persuasion.
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Hughes seems like a profoundly unserious person.
...but TNR has been pretty bad for a while now.
Who cares? Really.
He didn't go to B school at Harvard, he's a history major. If he'd gone to B school, he'd know that when he bought TNR, he was paying for 2 things. The IP of his long serving staff and the Good Will of the readership after 100 years.
He has thrown away both. The value of his investment has dropped to zero in a week.
Worse, the venture capital world where he is trying to make his day career is laughing at his incompetence. Absent wanting to do a deal with Zuckerberg through Hughes, why would any person with money ever call him again.
Oh, he'll get lots of calls from people wanting money, because he clearly cant value a deal...
Yeah, he seems like a dick, and fails to see where the value of TNR resides. But the concept that a sinking ship should be purchased and allowed to sink because the holes were bored in the hull a LONG time ago doesn't float.
The New Republic should have changed the sailing vessel to a steampunk spaceship a long time ago.
What makes Hughes think TNR is worth saving.
Given that so many of today's young people seem to find Jon Stewart and Twitter entirely sufficient, I think Hughes should go big and put out the first digital rebus-zine, complete with sound beds from whoever's DJing NPR.
I'm frankly shocked he thinks people TODAY care what they say.
Who has the popcorn?
This guy has no redeeming virtues that I can see. First, he tries to buy a seat in Congress for his wife/ bpyfriend. Then he buys an old magazine and guys it because he wants to pretend to be a thoughtful lefty.
Bad news. There are no thoughtful lefties left.
Well Hughes bought a spavined horse, or a pig in a poke. You bring money to a model that's dead (or running on fumes) and that won't make it viable. Old apparatchiks arguing with each other in a koffee klatsch just aren't that interesting.
And Hughes way overpaid. Didn't Newsweek sell for $1 and assumption of debt, just a year or two before it finally, and mercifully expired?
What made TNR worth reading back in the day was what makes Althouse worth reading now — a willingness to entertain heterodox thinking. A magazine that employed Michael Kinsley, Charles Krauthammer, Fred Barnes, Chuck Freund, Michael Kelly and Hendrik Hertzberg would be interesting by definition. But that was a long time ago now.
Old elitist writers and a young billionaire fight over who gets to be entitled to be a Gatekeeper of Presumed Power. I hope they rip themselves to shreds.
I am Laslo.
It's hard to believe there could not have been some middle ground, or orderly transition. But that would have required real maturity on Hughes' part and more openness and perhaps modesty on the part of the writers. Of course, the front of the book lost its way 10 years ago.
No use for Hughes, precious little use for a magazine that printed 41 stories by Steven Glass and doubled down with the fake Iraq stories. Having said that the mass resignations look like a temper tantrum to me.
"When I read...the writers...I lean toward (Hughes). When I read...Hughes ...I lean toward (the writers)."
Interesting. I often react the same way to political and journalistic arguments---I see the holes and go from there. But when I read legal briefs, I usually find them highly persuasive, even when I start with a strong opinion on the other side.
The story of the change at the New Republic should be interesting but the main characters are not.
I want Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton.
So, worst case he produces a vanity publication that gives us another "Brill's Content."
Best case, he gives us a publication that actually stops lying.
Yeah...this is what happens when a load of money is dropped on someone that just showed up. On a smaller scale, we call it EBT cards.
"1914 is the 100th anniversary of the publication of James Joyce's *Dubliners,* and in order to make it a sustainable vertically integrated media profit-making tool that can survive as a singular outlet for Joyce's values and voice -- one that today's youth can read more than 500 words of -- we're going to break shit. (I'm going to stand up and move around to say this, because it's what Steve Jobs liked to do.) We're going to make it strong for the ages, not walk out on it. We're going to make Joyce experimental, and look forward, not backward. This 100-year-old institution is worth fighting for."
Isn't there anything that these people are willing to keep their hands off?
"He has thrown away both. The value of his investment has dropped to zero in a week."
He can still sell TNR tee shirts and coffee mugs online.
When you buy a business in a shrinking business, the transition to something else has to be gradual and subtle in order to maintain the brand identity and value.
Hughes moves were neither gradual or subtle.
If you buy Kodak and then one year later your are moving from Rochester to Palo Alto and dumping film in order to produce appliances, it may not go over well.
This is like the Iran-Iraq war or Operation Barbarossa. You want both sides to destroy themselves.
There's this concept that TNR is not able to be saved. I reject that outright. Hughes big move and testing moment wasn't buying TNR or making a speech.
THIS is his big moment: He just cleared out the cobwebs that were driving TNR into a ditch - intentionally or not.
Now he has ~3 months to create a content-product that retains and attracts. It's possible to be done.
The community of people who would read TNR will be interested to see if Hughes can create attractive content in their next issue that resurrects the brand. Many old hats will be poised - pen in hand - to knock it regardless of what it appears to be.
However, he has that one chance where everyone waits to see what the next issue/iteration looks like.
If he bombs THAT chance, then TNR is truly in trouble. However, right now, this is exactly where TNR needed to go - it needed most of it's incumbents to leave. You can see in their mass resignation that they fundamentally didn't see their existing jobs as going away.
W.R.Hearst did exactly the same thing in his day, to many newspapers. He was a wealthy outsider that tossed out the old guard and changed his papers to suit his ideas. And he mainly succeeded in increasing their influence and making them successful businesses.
There is nothing wrong with what Hughes is doing, what matters is whether he will succeed.
Remember that scene in Citizen Kane where Wells takes note of the fact that his paper is losing money and that if he keeps on losing money at that rate, he'll be broke in a hundred years. That was the scenario that the TNR staff wanted to see played out.......Hughes is a billionaire. Billionaires do not flail. They have a serenity that surpasses the understanding of TNR readers or writers. If TNR goes broke, it will be far worse for TNR than for Hughes. I suppose this is a fairly big event for those people at TNR who have lost their job, and I wish them luck in their endeavor to portray their discomfort as the Gotdammerung, but for the rest of us life goes on.
It's like the Iran-Iraq War in the early 1980s. Why can't both sides lose! (Hat -tip to Henry Kissinger)
Sounds as if those leaving voluntarily feared any change. Did Hughes ever advocate a change in the political direction the magazine?
Wiki seems to support his liberal creds. Is the problem that, to their horror, in his attempt to continue longevity through technology and profitability, he has betrayed them in becoming a typical ‘capitalist pig?’
His buddy over at Facebook, Zubckerberg, is pretty good with human trafficking, so Hughes might indeed change the magazine's editorial direction.
"Remember that scene in Citizen Kane where Wells takes note of the fact that his paper is losing money and that if he keeps on losing money at that rate, he'll be broke in a hundred years. That was the scenario that the TNR staff wanted to see played out."
Yeah, I've thought about that in this context, but in "Citizen Kane" he proceeds to make the newspaper sensationalistic and dishonest and makes a lot of money that way. His wealth gives him freedom to take risks, and taking risks, he makes even more.
In my analysis Hughs only bought the mag as a shortcut to influence, not to save the venerable.
Libs don't believe the crap they were spewing for the last 50 years anymore.
The magazine carcass had no nourishment left.
"Remember that scene in Citizen Kane where Wells takes note of the fact that his paper is losing money and that if he keeps on losing money at that rate, he'll be broke in a hundred years."
There is this thing called investor fatigue in the VC market. The investor has to keep throwing a little more money in the pot. Break-even is just around the corner. A slightly new strategy will bring profitability. After a while it gets tiresome. One investor I worked delas for made it quite clear: you only get to ask for more money once.
"...but in "Citizen Kane" he proceeds to make the newspaper sensationalistic and dishonest and makes a lot of money that way"
Kids, let's remember Citizen Kane was a MOVIE... co-written, produced, and directed by a life-long "progressive" born and raised in that notorious hotbed of leftist politics, Wisconsin.
It is a pity both sides can't lose, eh? But I think both can!
The staff did Hughes a big favor. Why did it take 14 editor's to churn out a small thought magazine? Seems to me to be at least ten too many. Maybe now with a leaner, hungrier staff, they have a chance.
So the former TNR editors heroically diluted the liberal opinion writer labor pool by a new dozen or so.
I've dealt with a lot of people who talked that kind of vision and weren't smart enough to pull on a door that said PULL in big letters.
More than a few took a company that was doing okay and wrecked it in a matter of weeks.
our journalism, values and voice
Who is the "our" in this sentence?
Best case, he gives us a publication that actually stops lying.
hahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
I would call quitting "making a statement", not "fighting."
Unless these are the 14 brightest, most beloved writers in the world, in which case they should have gone on "strike", I think their temper tantrum got the better of them.
Poorly played.
The IP of his long serving staff and the Good Will of the readership after 100 years. He has thrown away both. The value of his investment has dropped to zero in a week.
I keep hearing people say stuff like that, and it doesn't make a lick of sense.
The New Republic has completely revamped itself several times in the last fifty years, and there have been periodic exoduses of Outraged Writers and Editors every time. This is nothing new. Pissing off the current staff and having a bunch of them quit is practically a rite of passage for TNR's editors in chief.
Sounds like a ritual cleansing embodied in the words: New Republic. Isn't it precious when the new guard becomes the old guard they railed at in the beginning. The train left their station a long time ago leaving them on the platform. Now that the democrats have lost the senate there will be healthy discourse on their future and how they deal with it. Different movies from Hollywood? A shift to the center of politics? The death of an ideology the citizens voted down? The current despicable and criminal riots are the death throes of their failed" end justifies the means" mantra. Deal with it.
So far we've seen zero evidence that Chris Hughes has any idea what he's doing. There's no reason to think that whatever he tries next will succeed.
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