The New Republic Is for Sale Again | Hacker News Reader

The New Republic Is for Sale Again

vox.com

47 pointspavornyoh25 comments

Seems like Hughes had the resources and opportunity to make the New Republic into a publication which could produce important journalism without being threatened by the increasing commodification of content. His purchase of the magazine could have truly been a significant statement: Good journalism is important, even if it's no longer profitable. He would have been lauded. The world would be a better place.

Instead.

He appears to have treated it like a tech start-up and, thus, seems like a guy who bought his way into a business he knew little about thinking he could turn a profit in a shitty market. And failed. And destroyed a beloved organization in the process. And injured his own reputation. All over a few tens of millions of dollars -- which is a lot to you and I, but is very little to him.

Sigh.

I'd say that I hope another wealthy benefactor could step in and do with the New Republic what Hughes should've done in the first place, but I worry that the New Republic is too damaged by now -- that it can't be what it was before. Which is a loss.

The New Republic was definitely beloved in the sense that some people loved it.

It's not unanimous that The New Republic is a unique jewel in the universe of political commentary publications.

Your points about needing to know good journalism before you can revolutionize a publication is well taken, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Republic#Controversies

Yes, TNR is no longer a special snowflake. Much of the shine has come off, and their brand equity has taken an enormous hit. I hear Buzzfeed is hiring "writers", so TNR staffers shouldn't feel too despondent.

Broken record, maybe, but Buzzfeed does produce what you might qualify as "real" content. My favorite is their look at the passage of the AUMF

http://www.buzzfeed.com/gregorydjohnsen/60-words-and-a-war-w...

Isn't that setting up TNR to meet a standard that no journalistic entity (or entity, period) can meet? (that is, being unanimously beloved)

Read through the wikipedia link. Even if I disagree with someone's views, I should be able to respect the way they express them.

> I worry that the New Republic is too damaged by now -- that it can't be what it was before

Before what? Before was Stephen Glass's invented anti-black stories (and other invented stories). Bell Curve are blacks genetically stupider than whites covers. Or the cover with the smoking welfare queen and her pickaninny - "Day of Reckoning". And on and on. Most of the black writers I follow on Twitter were happy with Hughes changes. Before it was just a bunch of Jewish self-styled intellectuals who liked to dump on the schwartzes.

I think you're unfairly using some of TNR's worst moments to condemn their entire body of work. (And it's a little bizarre to mock them for being Jewish in literally the same sentence that you accuse them of racism.)

Josh Marshall's take is worth reading:

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/chainsaw-chris

Sample:

"As someone who has had to run a media operation at at least break-even levels for many years, I don't buy the idea that The New Republic had to run at a loss forever. But a lot of this is a matter of executive/owner priorities. It's been owned and run by people who had the luxury of sustaining some annual loss. The key is that The New Republic, as anything like what it's been for a century, was never going to be a profit-making operation, certainly not a vertically integrated media cineplex or whatever they were trying to make it."

While I get that sometimes journalism is more about a noble cause than profit, it seems like losing money is a source of pride for the people at The New Republic:

“The New Republic has been a money-losing proposition for 100 years,” said Jacob Weisberg, who once worked for the magazine, and is now the chairman of the Slate Group. “The idea that anyone is going to turn it into a business now, when it has never been harder, is implausible.”

Also this:

Mr. Chait [a contributing editor] said that, to him, The New Republic was fundamentally not a business proposition. “A business is something that is trying to make money,” he said.

Did Chris Hughes do his homework to understand the culture before he bought it?

    "At a meeting not long after he joined in 2014, 
     Mr. Vidra, using a profanity, told the magazine’s staff
     that he wanted to break stuff..."

Well, I guess hie did.

Classic case of someone who was brought along on a ride (by Zuckerberg) and now wants to prove he could have done it himself (he can't). As opposed to Dustin Moskovitz, who proved that he can.

See also: Jerry Jones & Jimmy Johnson.

At this point, Hughes has damaged TNR's brand equity irreparably. And the fact of that matter is that their current stable of young writers aren't as talented and don't rise to the high standards that they used to inculcate under, say, Leon Wieseltier. Many of them would be better off writing listicles for Buzzfeed.

There's not a whole lot of differentiation between the transcript of a Reggie Watts TED talk and a young TNR staffer's latest hot take.

Would love if anyone could help me understand what value is left at TNR. It seems a lot of people left and that sales were around 2000 issues a month.

Not sure how to think about this.

Its brand might have a non-negative value. Lots of brands have fallen into hard times and then reinvented themselves. Years later, people would look at the dip as an anomaly.

Buying TNR at a low price could certainly be cheaper than starting entirely from scratch.

Maybe. But a (valuable) brand is associated with a variety of specific characteristics/values/"promise"/etc. If you want to do something with the brand that is consistent with those, great. But, if it's not consistent, the associations that people bring to the brand can actually be a negative.

With a publication like the New Republic, it all comes down to the editor. They've had some great, often controversial, editors over the years. If the buyer can bring or find someone like that, they have a good chance. Otherwise it will just be another aimless click-baity web site.

I'm not convinced a wealthy buyer couldn't put together something like HuffPo and get a wider audience for less money.

Maybe, but even with HuffPo you have a really strong editor/publisher in Ariana Huffington. You may not like her but there's no question she's been a force in making them relevant.

I'm sure the domain has value. It can re-brand itself as another user-submitted content farm like Forbes and Fortune

I love this explainer on TNRmageddon and especially this note:

http://www.vox.com/2016/1/12/10756786/tnr-meltdown-tnrmagedd... "A note on conflicts of interest

The world of Washington, DC-based magazines and websites is incredibly incestuous, so I have no way of writing about this without stepping all over too many conflicts of interest to count.

But some noteworthy ones include the fact that I applied for a job with the Peter Beinart–era TNR and didn't get it after a disastrous job interview. I was recruited for jobs in both the first and second Foer eras. I used to work closely with Richard Just (who was editor between Foer stints) before he worked at TNR. I dated a TNR staffer for a while, was roommates with Spencer Ackerman at the time Foer fired him from TNR, and am very close friends with a current staffer at TNR. I also lived in the same dorm with Hughes for a year in college.

All of which is to say that while my coverage of this can hardly be objective, it's also pretty well-informed."

Wow, that article is like a magnum opus on this. Since it's so much more informative, we changed the URL to that from http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/12/business/media/chris-hughe....

It's also so much more biased and cranky, to the point where I would've kept the original. C'mon, did Marty Peretz shoot the author's dog?

I didn't read the whole thing, but it didn't sound cranky to me. Biased, sure, but not tendentious, and with lots more information than the NYT piece.

If people feel strongly about this we'll happily change it back though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com