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Inside the Collapse of the New Republic

newyorker.com

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Re: Inside the Collapse of the New Republic

#21

Post by justin66 »

This struck me as odd management technique:

Hughes tried to contain the damage. As rumors of a second wave of departures circulated, Hughes and Snyder offered several members of the remaining editorial staff one- to two-thousand-dollar bonuses, and in an op-ed for the Washington Post Hughes tried to explain his vision for the magazine.

There are people to whom a two thousand dollar bonus would mean a lot and there are people considering quitting a professional job as a as a matter of principle or out of pique.

Only $2000?

Re: Inside the Collapse of the New Republic

#22

Post by GabrielF00 »

rst wrote: post #11
GabrielF00 wrote: post #4

I think I'm exactly the audience that TNR wants. I'm well-educated, make a good living, largely agree with them politically, enjoy long-form journalism, and am familiar with the brand and its history. Yet I don't think I would ever subscribe to TNR. I just see a magazine as something that's going to pile up in my house. I can read more than enough great content online for free. If I was going to subscribe to a magazi…

No one's doubting his prerogative to shake things up (not even, by this report, the editors he forced out, who had no problem with the concept of digital initiatives per se). But the main reasons to buy an old magazine, instead of starting a new one, are to gain access to its staff and brand equity, and the results so far are that he flushed those assets down the toilet. It's completely fair to judge him on results.

I don't think that Foer and Wiesetlier "had no problem with the concept of digital initiatives per se". I think TNR had a view of the Internet's effect on culture as something to be defended against. For instance, TNR put out an article in October arguing that readers on the Internet shouldn't post their own book reviews: "I can see the value—maybe—for man-on-the-street reviews of cold cream and pots and pans, but books?!"[1] There are many quotes in the New Yorker article of TNR editors and writers sneering at "new media".

If the goal was to give the magazine some relevancy beyond its shrinking, aging, audience, I don't think that Foer and Wiesetlier were the right people for the job.

[http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119875/margo-howard-amazo...]

Re: Inside the Collapse of the New Republic

#23

Post by qq66 »

kyllo wrote: post #15
danso wrote: post #12

> Hughes insisted that deep reporting and ideas would still be important to the magazine. “That’s not enough,” he added. “We also have to do videos. We also have to do interactive graphics. We also have to be increasingly smarter—we’ve already made good progress, but even more—about how we use social media.” The session finished abruptly with Hughes banging on the table and declaring, “This institution has been aroun…

Just an anecdote, but I literally never watch video news online. I can consume information from text many times as fast, so watching a video just feels like slow motion. I doubt I'm alone in this.

I think the major reason for John Oliver's success is his ability to produce videos that are long enough to capture some of the insight of long-form text, with enough gags to meet today's attention spans.

Re: Inside the Collapse of the New Republic

#24

Post by paulsutter »

The article is a reminder that groups of people make decisions like primates, even the most intellectual people. The criticisms are purely subjective (slashes mine):

- "To some staffers, /it felt as if/ Hughes had sent Vidra to scare them into writing more, buzzier Web items"

- "Vidra made his first appearance...It was /just terrifying rhetoric/ about change without any substance to back it up."

However the author couldn't come up with any specific examples where Hughes or Vidra are unreasonable people:

- Hughes removed "Attack of the Crybabies:" from an article title "Why Hedge Fund Honchos Turned Against Obama” (Hughes was going for /less/ "buzzy").

- Foer wanted to make Amazon’s suspension of advertising public, but Hughes insisted that he not. (Again, Hughes is the one avoiding "buzziness")

- Hughes asks questions like, "Has anyone, including this article, said what they did was illegal?" (a reasonable question about objectivity)

- “The only compliment [Hughes] or [Vidra] ever said about a piece was that it ‘did well,’ or it ‘travelled well,’ ”

Just about the only useful takeaway from this article is: don't try to manage a politically sensitive situation by video conference.

Re: Inside the Collapse of the New Republic

#25

Post by escape_goat »

There is something deeply tragicomic about Vidra's role in this. I know nothing about the man, and it would be too easy to disparage him on this basis of this report; one should presume that he has management and organizational skills well suited to an executive position, and one should not forget that he seems to have been completely hamstrung by the owner's ill-fated activism and engagement with the magazine, whatever his own faults might be.

That said, two items strike me. The first is that he comes across as stunningly tone deaf in this circumstance; unless I am reading pure calumny, it seems that he did not consider what a corrosive effect a jargon-heavy, non-committal communication style would have when dealing with people who were deeply, professionally engaged with the meaning of words. Nor does he seem to have understood that he was in a situation where he was starting with zero social credibility and would need to establish social credibility in order to do his job.

The second is that this was a situation in which he was facing the least fungible workers imaginable. All TNR had, besides the cheques for the current subscriptions, was the culture and society that had built up around it: most specifically that this particular small social network, consisting of these people, had as its central focus, source of wider status, and raison d'etre the writing down of words in exchange for money under the masthead of this particular little magazine. There are no factories, nor even inventories. There are no repositories of source code. There are no patents or significant intellectual property rights. The people he alienated were completely integral to the product he was undertaking to make profitable.

Re: Inside the Collapse of the New Republic

#26

Post by bluthru »

kyllo wrote: post #15
danso wrote: post #12

> Hughes insisted that deep reporting and ideas would still be important to the magazine. “That’s not enough,” he added. “We also have to do videos. We also have to do interactive graphics. We also have to be increasingly smarter—we’ve already made good progress, but even more—about how we use social media.” The session finished abruptly with Hughes banging on the table and declaring, “This institution has been aroun…

Just an anecdote, but I literally never watch video news online. I can consume information from text many times as fast, so watching a video just feels like slow motion. I doubt I'm alone in this.

And you don't have to put up with "anchor speak". I don't know or where these people pick it up, but I wish they would talk like normal human beings.

Re: Inside the Collapse of the New Republic

#27

Post by chao- »

bluthru wrote: post #26
kyllo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just an anecdote, but I literally never watch video news online. I can consume information from text many times as fast, so watching a video just feels like slow motion. I doubt I'm alone in this.

And you don't have to put up with "anchor speak". I don't know or where these people pick it up, but I wish they would talk like normal human beings.

Agreed. I began to abandoned TV news entirely back in 2006, driven in part because of the (apparently universal) habit of leading and/or closing every story with a pun, idiom or catchphrase. At least when my eyes start to detect it in text, I can jump two lines down and spare myself the groan.

Re: Inside the Collapse of the New Republic

#28

Post by jfoutz »

barkingcat wrote: post #10

Crap. I was expecting a good writeup about how Palpatine screwed things up.

Jesus Christ. If you're going to make a star wars joke at least fucking pay attention. Palpatine was emperor of the empire. The empire that replaced the galactic republic. The New Republic replaced the empire, after Palpatine died.

How about, Looks like Darth Vidra managed to take out the new republic for the emperor.

Or, Looks like the Hutt got their hands in the publishing business.

Or, New Republic veterans fail to embrace the dark side, reject the digital age.

If you're going to make a joke, at least read the fucking cliff notes about what you're making fun of. Even better relate the joke to the actual article, which you apparently didn't read. Puns are like Hacker 101, get better at it.

Re: Inside the Collapse of the New Republic

#29

Post by rpenm »

mynameishere wrote: post #17

The magazine has almost always lost money Magazines like The New Republic are effectively public-facing think tanks, and were never meant to be enterprises. Print journalism as a whole is going in that direction. Billionaires like Carlos Slim and Jeff Bezos will prop up the big papers, and multi-millionaires like Chris Hughes will prop up the little papers. Hughes (bizarrely) confused himself with a businessman, and…

You're not going to have much political influence ("travel") if you don't have readership.

TNR has been floundering for an ideological voice since the end of the Cold War, and took quite a few hits to its credibility under Peretz. Readership was down for a reason.

A sympathetic view would be that Hughes wanted to go for a technical solution - invest in TNR's digital presence - rather than completely purge the staff as Peretz did in the 1970s. Too bad the effect was the same.

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