The triumph of slick and flashy over learned and thoughtful

Clearly, my ideological leanings are the opposite of those that have characterized The New Republic over the course of its 100-year existence.  Still, my main reaction to a couple of brash young hotshots turning it from a journal of ideas into a "digital media company" is not schadenfreude, but rather foreboding.

When Facebook billionaire Chris Hughes, the owner of The New Republic, and TNR’s newly installed CEO, former Yahoo News executive Guy Vidra, visit the storied magazine’s Washington headquarters on Friday morning to meet with the staff, they are likely to be greeted by a skeleton crew of a few editorial interns and junior employees.

Hughes’s and Vidra’s decision to abruptly change the 100-year-old journal of politics, policy, art and culture into what Hughes calls a “digital media company” and relocate to Manhattan--and in the process get rid of top editor Franklin Foer, who has run the magazine on and off since 2006, and literary editor Leon Wieseltier, a major figure at TNR since the early 1980s--has prompted what is expected to be a mass exodus by most if not all of the senior editors and writers.

“Leon said he’s never seen any editor be so disrespected and dicked around--I’m paraphrasing--as Frank has been treated for the last couple of months,” said senior editor Julia Ioffe, describing the meeting Thursday afternoon in the newsroom, at which Wieseltier and Foer announced that they’d quit.

“Frank told people that this would the best job he’d ever have, that he loved working at The New Republic,” Ioffe continued. “Leon said that we shouldn’t be depressed and think this is all about clicks, that we should retain our lofty ideas about journalism and making an impact on the world through journalism, through writing and ideas, and not through ‘digital media companies.’ He said--and this a quote--‘This is the best fucking thing I’ve ever done in my little life.’”

Ioffe--who had yet to pack up her office belongings Thursday evening but was among the TNR staffers not expected to return to the newsroom just above the Spy Museum in downtown Washington--said Foer and Wieseltier received a tearful standing ovation from the two dozen staffers present. “People have been crying all afternoon,” she added. 

The irony is that the end of TNR as we know it comes less than three weeks after the 30-year-old Hughes--who had the good fortune to have been Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard roommate, and helped Zuckerberg launch the social networking behemoth--spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to stage a gala Washington dinner celebrating the magazine’s 100th anniversary. Among the 400 attendees--who supped on “ribbons of beat-cured char,” “beef tenderloin [with] truffled potato crepes” and “apple pecan tart [with] warm bourbon-caramel sauce”--were keynote speaker Bill Clinton, Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi. Wynton Marsalis entertained. Vidra also gave a speech, talking mostly about himself, according to one attendee, and, in a brief mention of TNR’s editor, mispronouncing Foer as “foyer”--a gaffe that provoked gasps and laughter.

“That dinner was like the Red Wedding in Game of Thrones,” a TNR veteran told The Daily Beast. 

The list of those who requested to have their names immediately removed from the masthead is sizable and distinguished.

This nugget is quite telling.  TNR's future, such as it's going to be, lies with the short and punchy rather than the in-depth and incisive.

The friction escalated with the arrival of Vidra, who is said to have complained to Foer that the magazine was boring and that he couldn’t bring himself to read past the first 500 words of an article. According to witnesses, Vidra did little to hide his disrespect for TNR’s tradition of long-form storytelling and rigorous, if occasionally dense, intellectual and political analysis--to say nothing of his lack of interest in the magazine’s distinguished history--at an all-hands meeting in early October.

There is a language barrier between the new regime and the old guard:

Vidra spoke in what one witness described as “Silicon Valley jargon,” and, using a tech cliché, declared: “We’re going to break shit”--a vow hardly calculated to ingratiate himself with TNR’s veteran belle-lettrists, who feared that he was threatening the magazine’s destruction.  Only a few interns dared to ask questions, which Vidra repeatedly dodged. “The senior people were too shocked to speak,” said a witness. “Jaws were dropping to the floor.” Through it all, Chris Hughes nodded approvingly, an unnerving grin on his face.

Of course, the question that arises for someone like me is: could National Review, The American Spectator, The Weekly Standard and Commentary withstand  something like this?  Well, the Weekly Standard ought to be okay, owned as it is by News Corp.  I suppose one remark it would be apt to make here would be to exhort all and sundry to contribute to these magazines above and beyond subscriptions.

But the larger question is:  Do young hotshots like this constitute a critical mass in our culture, with ambitions so flashy that they sideline the traditional pundit?

This has direct repercussions for me.  I'm a freelance writer.  The company that publishes the array of magazines for which I mainly write is unquestionably moving in the "digital media company" direction.  There's a discernible trend toward fare like tips for a healthy lifestyle, profiles of go-getters, and promotion of community events.

Which leads to the biggest question of all: What are the prospects for a nation with an ever-shrinking attention span?