Battle over ‘The New Republic’ challenges new credo of digital media

Suicide by decapitation. In a rash act Chris Hughes, the 32-year-old internet tycoon who owns The New Republic (TNR), decided a week ago to bring the venerable, once-liberal US political journal into the 21st century online age by firing editor Franklin Foer.

In protest, long-serving literary editor Leon Wieseltier packed his bags, followed by a dozen other staffers, howls of protest from the magazine's many well-placed veterans throughout the Washington media and the suspension of publication "until February".

Whether the 100-year-old title will actually rise from the dead is another matter, although Hughes, Mark Zuckerberg's roommate at Harvard and a Facebook co-founder, has deep pockets and says he remains committed to the title and its journalistic ethos. All he and chief executive Guy Vidra, brought in recently from Yahoo News, want to do, as the latter writes in the online edition, is "use technology in the service of journalism" to reach a broader audience. "Change," he insists, "does not mean discarding your principles and vision."

Vidra did not help his case by telling staff that he was in the business of "reimagining the TNR as a vertically integrated digital media company", whatever that may be, and "we're a tech company now", in effect declaring the purge a blow in the war – a caricature – being waged throughout the industry between modernisers championing the online future and those desperately clinging to the age of print.

The TNR's fate is emblematic of the difficult cultural and technical process of transition in the press as it moves to the "digital first" era and which journalists everywhere will recognise only too readily. Indeed. A couple of weeks ago I produced a supplement for this paper about the first World War, Too Much to Hope, whose title was a line from John Redmond. It produced an admonishment to me from one of our online team – how serious I'm not sure – that it would not play well in SEO, search engine optimisation, the dark art of headline writing online that propels our stories to the top of Google searches. This neanderthal of print will not be resigning, but I shared a frisson of recognition with Brother Foer's plight.

‘Joyous bloggers’

But the characterisation of the tussle in

TNR

as one about modernising is also perhaps simplistic. As former

TNR

staffer Jonathan Chait points out: “Foer and the staff, with the exception of Wieseltier, are comfortable with modernity. They are joyous bloggers, and willingly submitted to the introduction of cringe-worthy Upworthy headlines to their stories and other compromises one must make with commercial needs.” “We don’t know what their vision is,” one of the resignees, Julia Ioffe complains of Hughes/Vidra. “It is Silicon Valley mumbo jumbo buzzwords that don’t mean anything.”

Nature of journalism

The problem appears to be not so much with the new tools journalists are expected to use but their deeper sense of unease that the new order is changing the nature of their journalism for the worse.

Another former TNR writer Ezra Klein argues on Vox.com that the price paid is in the loss of the older magazines' ability to be idiosyncratic and nonpandering and just tell their readers what they should care about, because more than ever you need to care about what readers click on first to get the traffic that pays for the ads.

Others warn, despite Hughes's denial, of an inevitable decline in "long-form" journalism in a more literary tradition, for which the TNR is rightly noted, and a "dumbing down" to reach a mass online market perceived, wrongly as it happens, to have the attention span of gnats.

“The eulogy that needs to be written,” Klein argues, is actually for an entire kind of publication – the “ambitious policy magazine”, whether on the left or right, that once set the terms of Washington’s debates. No longer. The online world has produced a proliferation of debate platforms, but “something is being lost in the transition from policy magazines to policy web sites, and it’s still an open question how much of it can be regained”.

Some claims for the TNR and its tradition, however, need to be taken with a pinch of salt. An open letter signed by former writers claims: "It is a sad irony that at this perilous moment . . . liberalism's central journal should be scuttled with flagrant and frivolous abandon. The promise of American life has been dealt a lamentable blow."

But the TNR's liberal pedigree died years ago. Particularly under the of Martin Peretz's ownership from 1974, though notionally Democrat, it became a champion of Israel and US military interventionism that would place it in the camp of neocon Republicans. An "idealism, more often than not, ended up curdling into dogmatism", writes James Heilbrun. In Peretz's largely all-white TNR the only racism that mattered was anti-Semitism.

TNR's demise, however, would be a loss to journalism. psmyth@irishtimes.com