Who cares if the last bastion of pro-Israel American liberals crumbles?
Insiders blame billionaire owner Chris Hughes, 31, for demise of The New Republic, a journalistic institution that punched above its weight
Walk into a coffee shop anywhere in downtown Washington, DC and shout, “Any former writers or editors of The New Republic here?” Chances are half the customers will raise their hands (and the other half will be lying).
If that’s an exaggeration, it’s only just. Sometimes it feels like every notable journalist in Washington or New York has, at one time, been on the payroll of The New Republic. To many lawmakers, lobbyists, and pundits inside the Beltway, the names of current and past TNR contributors like Ryan Lizza, Johnathan Chait, Andrew Sullivan, Michelle Cottle, and Leon Wieseltier are more familiar than the starting lineup of the Washington Nationals.
But, in less than a week, the 100-year-old media mainstay has all but completely unraveled. The center-left publication – which dedicated many of its pages to Jewish thought, culture, and Israel over the years — has been forced to suspend publication after its senior staff staged a mass exodus in protest of the unceremonious ouster of its well-liked and highly respected editor, Franklin Foer, by Chris Hughes, the 31-year-old Facebook billionaire who purchased the publication in 2013.
Hughes and his hand-picked CEO, Guy Vidra, the former Yahoo News general manager, have argued that TNR needs new leadership and direction to stay relevant in the age of digital journalism. Vidra articulated his vision of the future in an all-staff meeting at TNR headquarters with the now-infamous pledge of “re-imagining TNR as a vertically integrated digital media company.”
The New Republic ‘was always a small political magazine that was trying to change the world’
To the veteran reporters in the room, that Silicon Valley kind of rhetoric – all style and no substance – was a warning sign that Hughes and Vidra intended to fundamentally alter the magazine’s DNA away from serious, long-form journalism and toward something more akin to BuzzFeed.
John Judis, a senior editor who was among those who resigned, said The New Republic “was always a small political magazine that was trying to change the world.”
“My impression of what happened is Hughes and Vidra have decided to transform the magazine into a profit-making media center that is entirely different from what the magazine historically has been and what it has represented and entirely different from what The New Republic has been at its core – and this has led to this cataclysm where Frank (Foer) and Leon (Wieseltier) have both left. I liked the old New Republic. I thought it had a really important role to play in America and I’m sorry if it’s no longer going to play that role,” said Judis.
Over the years, TNR was admired as much for its cultural pieces as its policy pages. Until last week, Leon Wieseltier had been the guiding force behind the “Back of the Book” section, which featured poetry and reviews of books, art, drama, television, music, cinema, and architecture. It was also the home of Wieseltier’s own column, in which he would cite Maimonides or Saadiah Gaon as readily as de Tocqueville or Rousseau.
“It is a crime against the culture to see #TNR destroyed by a feckless upstart,” Rabbi David Wolpe of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles wrote in a Tweet.
Jack Smith, a Harvard law professor who says he’s been a TNR subscriber since college, said he is “sad because book reviews are a dying art, Leon’s were the best, and now the back-of-the-book is certainly dead forever – probably along with the magazine as we know it.”
The Washington Post’s pop culture critic, Alyssa Rosenberg, says the most compelling thing about The New Republic, “was the publication’s simple confidence that culture was an important subject that required no justification to sell to readers.”
To Daniel Moshinsky, an observant Jew with liberal political views, TNR was a welcome left-wing publication that didn’t succumb to anti-Israel sentiment.
‘Its articles stood outside the usual echo chambers. They often defended Israel from a position of pragmatism’
“Its articles stood outside the usual echo chambers,” said Moshinsky. “They often defended Israel from a position of pragmatism. It was refreshing to read it in the middle of so much poor reporting by the mainstream media on one hand and the propaganda stream of the ‘hasbara’ industry on the other.”
Among the chattering classes, the demise of TNR is being treated less like a death and more like a murder. The villain: Chris Hughes.
Dana Milbank of the Washington Post called Hughes “a dilettante and a fraud.” In a blistering column, he wrote:
“This is personal for me. I left the Wall Street Journal to join TNR in the 1990s, taking a 50 percent pay cut and a 95 percent reduction in subscribers for the pleasure of joining what felt like a family. I met Hughes earlier this year, and I, too, was fooled by his talk about the resources he was pumping into the magazine. I told him in an e-mail that he was ‘doing the Lord’s work in rescuing this proud old brand’ and called him a ’21st-century Walter Lippmann.’
“But Hughes is no Lippmann; he’s a callow man who accidentally became rich — to the tune of some $700 million — because he had the luck of being Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s roommate at Harvard. Hughes seemed intent on proving he could be a success in his own right, but it hasn’t happened.
“R.I.P., TNR. You deserved better than Chris Hughes,” wrote Milbank.
From a business standpoint, The New Republic was undoubtedly facing an uphill battle for profitability, even before last week’s events. According to the Pew Research Center and the Alliance for Audited Media, single copy sales of the magazine (considered the most objective measure of a magazine’s print appeal) have steadily declined over the past year, dropping to around 1,900 per issue.
They note that, between the first and second halves of 2013, newsstand sales fell by 57%, and fell a further 20% in the first of half of 2014.
But critics of Hughes point out that The New Republic never was – and shouldn’t be – about making money. In fact, when he purchased it, there was a widespread belief Hughes’ fortune would inoculate the magazine from the cruel fate of other publications that couldn’t successfully transition to the digital age.
“Isn’t there a place… for a group of writers and thinkers to put out a publication that doesn’t seek to maximize page views or generate profits, but which dares to believe it has something to say, a point of view to fight over, and just gets on with it and hopes for the best?” asked Andrew Sullivan, the iconoclastic blogger who served as TNR editor in the early 1990s.
Perhaps the most succinct answer to that question was summed up in a Tweet by the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg moments after the news of Foer’s departure was announced:
“So for Chris Hughes, 100 years of The New Republic was apparently enough.”
The Times of Israel Community.