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Facebook Founder Presents Vision For The New Republic, Many Resign In Protest
SkiTee94 writes: Chris Hughes, one of the original founders of Facebook, is in damage control mode to save his recently acquired, century-old publication The New Republic. In response to Hughes' vision to turn the highly respected, and most would say old school, publication into a "digital media company," about a dozen senior editors and writers simply quit (out of a 54-person staff). One of the editors who quit said, "The narrative that they are putting out there is that it is the 21st century and we have to innovate and adapt. ... We don’t know what their vision is. It is Silicon Valley mumbo jumbo buzzwords that don’t mean anything." Is Hughes a visionary cleaning out dead wood or a clueless tech star leaving destruction in his wake?
got one!
"....It is Silicon Valley mumbo jumbo buzzwords that don’t mean anything."
That made my day!
Who cares? It's a far left wing liberal rag... Always has been.
I've heard Hughes speak. He enjoys pushing new things simply because they're new, not because they'll actually improve the product.
Sad to see this happen to TNR.
Hughes is both a visionary cleaning out dead wood and a clueless tech star, the latter because he bought TNR in the first place.
Same thing is happening to ACN in The Newsroom (HBO) right now.
Some Tech Billionaire screwing up the righteous journalism methodology of the network's senior management.
Interesting!
"....It is Silicon Valley mumbo jumbo buzzwords that donâ(TM)t mean anything"
That made my day!
What those editors have forgotten is, long before Silicon Valley was known as the "Silicon Valley" there were already BUZZWORDS and most of those were invented by pencil pushers, such as themselves!
Without knowing what he means by "digital media company" and what changes exactly were taking place it's impossible to know.
Maybe the staff overreacted to some BS corporate email?
Maybe the publication was being turned into something with typical clickbait articles, because it makes more profits?
I'd say that Hughes didn't do a damn thing.
You had a bunch of journalists who didn't identify with the pablum the new owner was puking. So, to send a CLEAR message, they quit.
An unusually direct show of integrity in today's era of spineless, jellyfish-like hack wannabes.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
People in this country just want to read and hear views that reinforce their World view.
As a result, people are uninformed, lack understanding of the issues and get suckered by propaganda.
As an experiment, watch the news about the protests happening around the country. Some networks just report and show the very few instances of violence, while another network focuses on the violence because their viewers' World view is that black people are violent subhumans - and they want to make them angry enough to keep tuning in.
Lets read what the editors that left had to say in their "Open letter"
"The New Republic cannot be merely a 'brand.' It has never been and cannot be a 'media company' that markets 'content, Its essays, criticism, reportage, and poetry are not “product.” It is not, or not primarily, a business. It is a voice, even a cause. It has lasted through numerous transformations of the 'media landscape'—transformations that, far from rendering its work obsolete, have made that work ever more valuable."
and then...
"The New Republic is a kind of public trust, That is something all its previous owners and publishers understood and respected. The legacy has now been trashed, the trust violated. It is a sad irony that at this perilous moment, with a reactionary variant of conservatism in the ascendancy, liberalism’s central journal should be scuttled with flagrant and frivolous abandon. The promise of American life has been dealt a lamentable blow."
It's not a "Trust" it's a business and if they don't know that, it's about time they woke up. He bought the god damned business from one of those very previous owners they said understood their plight.
I don't know anything about Chris Hughes or his vision, but I doubt he's lamenting the loss of these people. They sound like they're exactly what needs to be removed from a floundering media outlet. It's like they're Andy Rooney going on and on about refusing to give up his typewriter.
No magazine that is a century old should be called new, unless it's readership is mostly vampires.
They already all got jobs in the White House/MSNBC
I am willing to bet that the ages of those who resigned were all over 55. That some of the adaptations were things like rewarding skill not seniority. That new hires might actually be paid as much as someone with 20+ years.
"It's my business so if you don't like it, you can leave" is a legitimate way to do business, but when about 20% your staff - most of whom are very senior - resigns as a result, you are probably doing it wrong.
Just wondering where all the Hughes supporters in this thread stood during the recent Dice-Holdings-foists-Beta-on-Slashdot kerfuffle.
He's just another dickhead with far too much power in his little hands.
When SJWs and Hipsters and click-baiters dog pile into your organisation, if you've failed to keep them aout, the best thing to do is walk away and let them implode things all by themselves. The New Repuiblic editors, the devs who forked Node.js into io.js, both made the right decision. These people do not care about the organisations they co-opt. They are there to push agenda, insanity, stifle competition and above all farm the organisation for kudos and cash until it falls apart.
Geeks need to stop being so trusting of those who try to creep in. Always make certain someone earns their position through merit. It's the only way to keep these people out. Otherwise, you'll need to walk quickly too.
Can they stop calling it "New" York City? It's several centuries old, we all know it's not "New" anymore.
The problem with this purchase, and the NYT pay-to-read-editorial thing a few years ago, is that there's too much free propaganda on the web. Any business model that relies on getting people to pay for propaganda from any perspective is doomed.
Funny, just a few days ago I watched the movie The Secret Life of Walter Mitty..
The open letter from the long-time editors who quit says:
> It is a sad irony that at this perilous moment, with a reactionary variant of conservatism in the ascendancy, liberalismâ(TM)s central journal should be scuttled with flagrant and frivolous abandon.
The very people who make the magazine are very clear that their intention has been that it is "liberalism's central journal". Elsewhere you'll see they honestly and clearly state their intention to promote left-wing liberalism. They aren't pretending to be objective, balanced, or factual.
It sounds like the writers quit wile they were ahead. Could be a good thing because they didn't get fired, but a bad thing because maybe they didn't gamble long enough. Maybe they were just looking for a reason to get out because it wasn't their thing.
Is this where this season's Newsroom plot came from? I assumed they were just trotting out an old trope, not mirroring current events...
I don't know what the new republic is but, I give it two thumbs up and much farm animals!
Hughes was involved in online organizing for Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign on My.BarackObama.com, the campaign's online social networking website.[7]
Look how that turned out.
He is also an invitee of the Bilderberg Group and attended the Swiss 2011 Bilderberg conference at the Suvretta House in St. Moritz, Switzerland.[12]
Laugh
In March 2012, he purchased a majority stake in The New Republic Magazine. He is now the publisher and editor-in-chief of the magazine.[13]
Money makes you an expert in everything.
Under Hughes, the magazine has become less focused on "The Beltway," with more cultural coverage and attention to visuals. It also stopped running an editorial in every issue. There has also been attention to what media observers have described as a less uniformly pro-Israel tone in its coverage (which was a hallmark of Marty Peretz's ownership).[24]
On December 4, 2014, it was announced that Gabriel Snyder, previously of Bloomberg, would replace Franklin Foer as editor, and that the print edition of TNR would be reduced to ten issues a year. At the same time, a letter of resignation was signed by ten contributing editors, Paul Berman, Jonathan Chait, William Deresiewicz, Ruth Franklin, Anthony Grafton, Enrique Krauze, Ryan Lizza, Sacha Z. Scoblic, Helen Vendler, Sean Wilentz, and sent to Chris Hughes. Longtime contributor and the current literary editor of TNR, Leon Wieseltier, also resigned in protest to the changes being made at the magazine by Hughes and CEO Guy Vidra.[25]
My personal opinion is anyone involved in growing Facebook is scum, the antithesis of what the World needs.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I'm having a hard time understanding.
To know the future, you just read the past. One of the strengths of those that consider themselves Digital Citizen is the lack of consideration for resource burning beyond the daily 8:00am status meeting. Graffiti scribbled on the carcases of dead trees is going the way of Cuneiform. People still read Cuneiform, but can one read yesterdays daily 8:00am status meeting; 10,000 years from now? The writers of Cuneiform already know.
Elsewhere, for which you don't have a quote handy.
Performance pay--- how do you measure performance? It is NOT a simple problem and no matter what you come up with humans are naturally talented at adaptation, they will survive and many will thrive by gaming your system. Seniority is the least hackable metric of all and so simple everybody knows it's inherent flaws - but EVERY metric is going to be flawed.
Online performance is largely measured by CLICKS. The result is the trashy click bait we have today. An earth shattering investigative report which might take a year of a senior journalist's time (a REAL journalist) puts them at the bottom of the scale while some twit pushing rumors/gossip who can't spell has tons of clicked of trash gets to the top (and has the nerve to call what they do journalism.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
It is Silicon Valley mumbo jumbo buzzwords that don’t mean anything
Oh, you mean like business buzzwords like "synergy" and "innovation" and "accreditation"? Give me a break.
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
It's far more than a dozen that simply packed up and left and there's also a whole slew of contributors, columnists, and other's associated with the publication that have quit and/or asked for their names to come off the masthead. Essentially anyone that was anyone has declared they want nothing to do with the publication anymore. Literally overnight a century old establishment is gone and not because it failed but because all the key people associated with it walked out the door. Even if you don't agree with everything said in the publication, it's a very sad day. Those that left are preemptively saying that nobody was against advancing a digital strategy and pushing more content online, but what they are against is largely the incompetence of the new owner and the fact that Hughes seems clueless in understanding what about the publication allowed it to exist for a hundred years when others failed left and right. It's like someone bought the Royal Shakespeare Company and said "Shakespeare is so old and stale, I think we should like make action movies or something..." Only time will tell, but Right now Hughes comes across looking like someone who stumbled into a lot of money by simply being at the right place at the right time with the right people--not because he's actually a skilled businessman. With The New Republic it's as if he thought "oooh, buying publications seems like a popular thing for rich guys to do... yeah let's do that and then do some cool Silicon Valley stuff with it... like I think I know something about that!" His husband's political campaign in New York this fall was equally a disaster. Voters saw through the fluff and saw someone saying "hey my husband has a lot of money and can pay for me to run for office... vote for me, it would be awesome!" Not surprisingly the voters weren't impressed.
You cannot add figures up like that in radio statistics; if 5-million people listened to ten shows a week each, the "cumulative total" would be 50 million per week, etc.
What is going on here with the lists? Who at Slashdot thought that non-list lists made any kind of sense? How do Slashcode devs not understand the effects of list-style-type: none;? Why does this persist?
Perhaps more salient, why are we, as ostensible tech geeks, not raising more of a fuss about a site that many think represents computer geek-ness, and yet that cannot implement sane (and relatively simple) CSS?
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
this part does not seem true:
> The Republicans tend to be backed more by the wealthy, so they tend to lower taxes on the wealthy
> while borrowing from Social Security that mostly benefits the poor and middle class,
> whereas the Democrats tend to be backed by more of the upper middle class, so they do the opposite.
For decades, the two most wealthy Americans have been W. Buffett and Bill Gates. Apart from being bridge partners, they have been staunch and public Democratic supporters.
Beyond that, the many millionaires in Silicon Valley and Hollywood tend to be Democrat, while the many millionaires in the financial industries tend to be Republican.
The rich have their tastes, but they are neither particularly "Republican" nor "Democratic."
Fox News is conservative, of course. The Fox News Radio tagline is something like "the latest news and conservative perspectives". Similarly, New Republic calls itself a liberal journal. To pretend that either is objective would be silly.
Fox used to have one good show, Hannity and Coomes, co-anchored by a liberal and a conservative who would both acknowledge when the other made a good point.
Is Hughes a visionary cleaning out dead wood or a clueless tech star leaving destruction in his wake?
Why on earth would you think those are mutually exclusive?
Is Hughes a visionary cleaning out dead wood or a clueless tech star leaving destruction in his wake?
Both. He's clueless because he doesn't understand who buys the New Republic. He's a visionary because NP does have a lot of dead wood. The truest example of who Hughes is: On Season 3 episode 4 of the Newsroom Lucas Pruit buys ACN after it is spun off from its parent company Atlantic Media in an effort to save Atlantic Media from greedy asshole cousins who were given shares in their uncle's will that would allow them to take over the company to...sell it to someone who only wants its IP assets. Hughes is Lucas Pruitt who announces his vision of bring ACN into the 21st century by intoducting crowdsourcing media, instagram and twitter links etc. Everything that Charlie Skinner hates.
A liberal editor COULD try to keep his personal beliefs out of it, so the publication doesn't espouse one position or the other. They could, but New Republic has explicitly chosen to avoid objectivity, they TELL US that the magazine is used to advocate certain positions. Consider what their owner and editor-in-chief says the magazine stands for:
"The New Republic is very much against the Bush tax programs, against Bush Social Security 'reform,' against cutting the inheritance tax, for radical health care changes, passionate about Gore-type environmentalism, for a woman's entitlement to an abortion, for gay marriage, for an increase in the minimum wage, for pursuing aggressively alternatives to our present reliance on oil and our present tax preferences for gas-guzzling automobiles. We were against the confirmation of Justice Alito."
â"Martin Peretz, owner and editor-in-chief, The New Republic
Franklin Foer, New Republic editor:
the magazine âoeinvented the modern usage of the term liberal, and itâ(TM)s one of our historical legacies and obligations to be involved"
They've also had editors who worked two jobs, working for TNR while also working for the KGB. You don't get much more leftist than having the KGB editing the magazine.
I've read the comments and even, blasphemously, the article, and I still have no clear idea what's going on here.
Leftists quit because the publication was going right wing?
Talented editors quit because whatever (gawker?) wanted to turn into clickbait?
Nobody seems to talk about what actually happened here.
Back in the 1980s it occupied a more unique space, offering what seemed to be much more of true centrist position, equally critical of the left and the right. At some point it seemed to slide from that position into a more left wing position and losing the intelligence that the center gave it.
But it's not alone, the National Review has crapped out, too, becoming the print edition of Fox News with a little sophomore-level pseudo intellectualisn sprinkled on top after the death of Buckley.
Welcome, Mr. Kane, welcome!
Gentlemen, you may resume your duties.
It isn't the racist party it used to be and now the Republicans get blamed for being racist. Now all the "ex"-KKK Democrats are dead or dying off they can pretend all that never happened.
TNR has been a wretched hive of pro-government propaganda since its inception. If it goes belly-up, then good riddance.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Maybe we should just start "The Old Republic" and hire the editors who are willing to quit if this happens .
Any takers .
That's centre left, certainly not far left.
Far left is ending personal property etc. There arenewspapers in Europe with that viewpoint.
In between, firmly left publications like http://socialistworker.co.uk/
Welfare state socialism is so 20th century. But don't worry. The new editorial staff will rebrand it and find some more gullible idiots to sell it to.
dgatwood's observations on US political tendencies starts off well, but I think goes off the rails at the bullet points.
Abstracted: “There’s not a dime’s difference between the Democrats and Republicans.” (coined by George Wallace; reused by Ralph Nader)
It's this sort of thinking that led a significant number of useful idiots to play at left-wing politics by voting Nader in 2000. I think the differences in outcomes between what we'd have likely seen from a Gore Administration and what we actually got from GWB are self-evident. It was certainly obvious to voters between '00 and '04, when Nader's national total dropped from 2.8 million to
Underestimating what brownish people are capable of, wasting hundreds of thousands of lives, pissing away trillions in treasure, and scamming via a mirror image of LBJ's guns and butter budget with a Republican guns and diamonds if that's a dime, my da kine is a redwood.
Luke, help me take this mask off
It seems no one on the thread's mentioned how TNR was setup in the World War I era to propagandize Americans into interventionism, because they were too "isolationist" and not enough support existed for empire building. They went on to promote other wars and forms of supremacy. Most recently promoting the war in Iraq. There were a sprinkling of interesting pieces here and there but it was mostly the Robert Kagan style liberal neocon guide to Empire for fanciful 21st century Lawrence of Arabia wannabees. Good riddance and I hope it somehow turns into a radically anticolonialist clickbait site.
--hongpong.com
You do not fire, restructure company in first place when you want to convert them to digital. You have to let it happen naturally.
First of all, new owner should start developing new platforms and products which would enable everyone to be more productive, more accessible. But instead trying to push people to do it (which is bad way), he should propose tools were the can be more productive and more reachable.
In practice it works the way, that basically new development happens completely separately but in the same room, so that there's enough time for journalist to be swallowed by it in natural way.
Simply one journalist will start publish quality stuff because he has tools and publishing platform, others would follow.
But what you should not do is to distract them from writing.
Just a Silicon Valley Douche. An entire staff doesn't just up and quit over something trivial. The buzzword quote pretty much sums it up.
I was under the impression this was a joke post about Zuckerberg proposing to create a grand clone army..
with the classic and pulp science fiction eras.
Because when they are, they realize that all bad things come from placing tech above people.
A guy who uses the word "narrative" has no business complaining that someone else is using "mumbo jumbo buzzwords".
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
They must not know yet that the SV kiddies have all the answers to society's woes.
not informative
http://indianshelf.com
I can only imagine how right wing it must be, and therefore find it hysterically funny that it is going to be ruined by a clueless webrepreneur who probably self identifies as libertarian and innovative.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
What FB should have is an "I sympathize" button.
None at FB, but some as Obamas 2008 social media manager. This abrupt change of company direction probably could have happened better.
I heard a talk from the Washington Post managing editor at Denver University last month. Like the New Republic, Bezos is pushing hard for an "all media" platform. But the WP workers sounded happier, probably becuase Jeff is also pouring money into it and hiring instead of firing.
Doesn't anyone watch "The Newsroom" on HBO?
I only read it occasionally, but it was good, and has been for a long tim.
I think the editors and staff and contributors should get together, scrape up some money (hell, I'd buy a subscription), and start a new magazine. Perhaps it could be called "The Old Republic", given our new oligarchic collective mind Emperors....
mark "A more wretched hive of scum and villany (and I don't just mean Facebook)"