Once again I’m saddened today, this time to learn that The New Republic, a magazine that I’ve long written for in both print and online, is being sold by owner Chris Hughes. Hughes bought it four years ago using money he acquired as founder of Facebook. But after a while it became clear that Hughes was intent in turning the magazine into a PuffHo kind of clickbait e-forum, and the paper edition started coming out less often. With it went the magazine’s reputation as a venue for serious writing about literature, politics, and culture—something that’s hard to maintain online. And online traffic plummeted. About a year ago, editors Frank Foer and Leon Wieseltier (long my own editor in the print version) resigned, along with many others.
According to PuffHo, Hughes still has role models for the new New Republic:
However, Hughes said that he “underestimated the difficulty of transitioning an old and traditional institution into a digital media company in today’s quickly evolving climate.” He also questioned whether The New Republic, which had historically lost money before Hughes took over, could find a sustainable business model.
“There are bright signs on the horizon: Vox, Vice, the Texas Tribune, Buzzfeed, ProPublica, and Mic embody a new generation of promising organizations — some for-profit, others non-profit — that have put serious, high-quality journalism at the core of their identities,” Hughes wrote.
Bright signs on the horizon? More like storm clouds. And “serious, high-quality journalism”? Who is he kidding? Most of those are rotten role models for a serious magazine. Here, for instance, is the latest “e-cover” of Buzzfeed:
The future of serious magazines is dim. The New Yorker still survives, as does The Atlantic. I have confidence that at least the former will go on indefinitely. But everything else? Threatened by the free access of online publication, and by the clickbait that reduces journalism to its lowest common denominator: “Five things you need to know this morning about the Iowa caucus.” Is this the fault of magazines, the public, or both?
Don’t forget that the historically progressive New Republic was founded by, among others, Walter Lippmann, and that Edmund Wilson, the giant among literary critics, graced its pages for years.
Available: Emeritus biology professor seeking good venue to write for. Likes evolution, cats, boots, humanism, atheism, food, and long walks on the beach.
I don’t know whether to congratulate Mr. Hughes in his attempt to keep TNR alive or criticize him for killing it. He certainly didn’t start out so well, imo.
I like what Harper’s Magazine is doing; not free content but you get what you pay for, I guess.
Do you remember the Harper’s death and resurrection? There was something strange/prophetic about what was to be the last cover, but I can’t remember what it was.
I have subscribed to the print version for many years (indeed, long before there was any other version)and have watched with sadness the magazine’s steady decline.
When James Wood left for the New Yorker, the literary half of the New Republic–to my mind much more intellectually solid than the political half–became looser, less trenchant and often boring.
When Leon Wieseltier was fired, I lost someone to argue with from my armchair, sometimes rising from it, pacing the room and raising my voice at anti-science notions, such as the cruelly dismissive review of Alex Rosenberg’s Atheist’s Guide to Reality.
The New Yorker, too, has become thinner, both in pages and content, with the cartoons alone holding up the frame of the magazine.
When books are no longer printed, I’ll know it’s time to move to Oregon.
I think the Maclean’s model is working pretty well.
Per Karl Heinz’s comment, yes, don’t forget Harper’s. That’s probably my favorite magazine next to The Atlantic (The New Yorker comes in third).
I find I’m liking The Atlantic less than I used to, thogh still subscribe. I almost dropped my subscription maybe 3 years ago, but they made me a 2-yrs-for-the-price-of-one offer I coukdn’t refuse. It seems maybe to have moved slightly to the right? Can’t quite put my finger on it. They also dropped the fiction. To me NYer and Harper’s tie for first, then Atlantic. Also love Granta and Paris Review. Too much to read!!
We’ve subscribed to TNR for some thirty years. To be honest, when Hughes took ownership, we maintained our subscription out of a kind of loyalty; someone should pay for this stuff, and we might as well go to the end.
A mentor once pointed out that, if you look at TNR’s circulation numbers, and subtract every public, academic, corporate and government agency library, that leaves you and me unless you haven’t renewed.
It is a radiative diversification brought on by expansion into new web biotope.
If we like the new media clades is besides the point I guess.
Like others posting comments here, I was a long time subscriber to the print version. I started in college and continued for 45 years I would guess. The decline wasn’t all that noticeable until about 10 years ago or so. The change in appearance, frequency of publication and the content became disastrous when Hughes took control and I let my subscription lapse. I literally grew up on the magazine and have missed it for some time, maybe starting when TRB from Washington passed. RIP TNR.
The public buy the race to the bottom.
I can’t remember if Murdoch (and fellow vultures) descended on the British press before the American press, but we were having much the same debate in Britain in the mid-80s as Murdoch and Maxwell fought for the bottom rung on the ladder into the swamp. They have carried on downwards since.
And yet as a nation we are becoming more academically well-educated; a higher percent are graduating from college than ever before.
I am pessimistic about format but optimistic about content. I think magazines like this – that collect good essays and journalistic coverage and give them to you for a small fee – are going to go extinct. But I think the writers of solid content essays will find other homes. It may require more searching to find them, and certainly the screen you read the essay on will have more garish animated crap on the sides of it. But the writing will find a home.
I also don’t think the ad space issue can be wholly blamed on people using the internet to get their news. Sure, that’s where it started. But advertisers always push for more prominent ads anyway. Even without the internet, I think you’d be seeing more page-like print runs in the future. Ads on top, left, and right of every page with only a few column inches in the middle for content are becoming the new normal, and would’ve happened to print media eventually anyway. Just like pay-for-fee cable television was going to eliminate ads, but they crept back in anyway. Internet web pages sped up the process, but I don’t think they can be blamed for the eventual outcome.
Ad-blocker software. It’s a constant battle, and I do turn it off from sites that I respect (and which respect me by not making the ads too glaringly horrible). I think the exception list is about 10 long.
The auto-run videos (and their constant battle with my computer to use more processing time, slowing down content loading time) bother me a lot more than page space being used for ads. But of course that’s probably why advertisers like them; they’ll pay more for an ad that isn’t easy to ignore.
Blocked. And I don’t have Flash installed too. That gets rid of a lot of crap.
I suggest installing Ghostery, which is available for Firefox and Chrome. Ghostery blocks trackers which are responsible for the slowdowns observed on many web sites. I don’t use ad-blockers and find that Ghostery eliminates the computer slowdowns efficiently. I note that this site has 6 trackers indicated.
One would like to make the simple excuse and say it is all part of dumbing down and the lost of many city papers as well as magazines. After all, it has been going on for years.
But it also does not fit in with modern capitalism – profits have to be maximized and always trending up. The stockholders demand return and look only at the next quarter. Who really cares about quality and spending the money it takes to have it?
Once the advertisers shift over to the internet the mags and papers are on the way out. If not out they become only a small piece of what they use to be. The only thing that matters in money.
Many years ago a product called public TV and Radio was started and I think the idea was to remove the influence on content and quality of what was done. It was the last hope but people just criticize PBS or say it is too boring and go over to fox or cnn. Even if you look at all the new channels, no one is doing anything for journalism, hard news or documentary. If people won’t go for this on TV, how do you make it when they actually have to read it?
Ask the public if they are willing to subsidize good newspapers with taxes. That’s a laugh.
How do you stand on piña coladas?
Let us consider the ramifications the internet has had on high quality journalism, which until about 1995 was reserved solely for print.
1. People expect everything to be free. Some high quality publications, such as The Atlantic, still provide all their content for free. How this is a sustainable economic model for them, I do not know.
2.People now have instant accessibility to almost all magazines that currently publish. Prior to the internet people had to go to a library to read them. Many smaller journals were not even available at local libraries. In addition, people now have access to high quality content in abundance that was not available previously. This site is a prime example. Of course, they are also subjected to an extraordinary amount of junk and outright lies.
What does this mean? In the pre-internet era, people of an intellectual bent may have subscribed to two or three high quality publications. But, yet, maybe only two or three articles in each publication really interested them. Perhaps they read all the articles out of a sense of guilt. But, I would hypothesize that today people are more reluctant to pay for a subscription to a single publication just to read only a few articles when they can still get free content of a relatively high quality from hundreds of other sources. In other words, the abundance of content jeopardizes the financial stability of the traditional pre-internet publications.
How can the financial viability of traditional publications or of new ones that want to get started in this environment be achieved? Here is an idea that comes to mind, although I am not sure if it is feasible or the numbers I propose would actually work out in reality. In any case, suppose 100 “quality” publications get together and form a consortium. For a person to access any of these publications, they would have to pay a yearly subscription amount, but one that is very reasonable, let us say $100. Let us say five million people subscribe. If my math is correct, this equals $500,000,000 (a half billion dollars). Let us also say that a publication like the New Republic gets $.50 per subscription out of this amount. This would give them $2.5 million per year. One source indicated that in 2013, the New Republic had a subscription base of 44,000. It may be less now under the Hughes regime. At $20 per year that would total to $880,000. Thus, the New Republic would be much better off under this proposal.
If my figures are anywhere near realistic, it is a proposal that could work. A lot would depend on what would be the actual yearly subscription rate to the consortium publications, how much each publication would get, plus how many people would sign up. This idea is similar to what people do when they sign up for a cable TV bundle.
To clarify, my proposal would be for online access only to these publications. People who desire print versions of particular publications would pay an additional amount to it.
It sounds good and maybe it would work. But I suspect the money thing still creeps in. The New Republic might be happy for awhile but then thinks, how can I get my profit up. Cut here, cut there, and pretty soon the quality goes.
What happened with many of the cable TV ideas? Went to hell quickly. Things like the history channel, discovery and so on. They started out on subject and had some good things. Then someone else probably bought them, who knows, and the quality went right down the tubes. Today, the history channel is a joke. They could rename it, reality junk tv.
Not the brightest move if he wants to sell the publication for Hughes to publicly question “whether The New Republic… could find a sustainable business model.”
New York Review of Books is still very good.
I’ve always thought of the NYBR as rarefied and variable: too “snooty,” even for an academic like me! But they’ve had a fair number of great articles, but not enough to keep me as a subscriber.
I first met Primo Levi in the NYRB, an essay he wrote, which affected me a lot and so I ended up reading all of his books.
Harper’s is still excellent. I’ve subscribed non-stop since 1964.
This Marilee subscribes to Harper’s as well.
Reblogged this on The Ratliff Notepad.
Oh Buzzfeed…
19 Internet Urban Legends That Will Literally Scare The Shit Out Of You
That’s great. Now I literally won’t have to buy laxatives on my way home tonight.
Yes, the impending demise of TNR is really too bad. The claim by it’s now departing management that it would become a “vertically integrated digital media company” reminded me of what the late David Carr said: “The New York Times has dozens of bureaus all over the world, and we’re gonna toss that out and kick back, see what Facebook turns up? I don’t think so.” It’s also too bad that David is no longer with us to guide us readers through the changing world of media, and also steer the media he wrote for through it.
“Available: Emeritus biology professor seeking good venue to write for. Likes evolution, cats, boots, humanism, atheism, food, and long walks on the beach.”
No, you’re doing it worng.
Should be: “7 amazing things atheist biologist prof is obsessed with”.
There, ftfy.
cr
I can think of a good clickbait headline and the story would get straight to the point:
7 Words George Carlin Would Say to Kids Today About Safe Spaces.