74 thoughts on “Did The Internet Kill the New Republic?

  1. I consider it unfortunate, though not for exactly the same reasons. Unsurprisingly, I appreciated TNR most when it was more eccentric, and when Hughes bought it, it seemed to lose a lot of its eccentricity. It’s kind of drifted into being not-very-distinguishable from the New Yorker and other urban-progressive outlets. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I have other sources for that sort of thing. It’s not solely ideological – that I liked TNR because I agreed with it more – as I enjoyed my subscription to Harper’s for its differentness. Anyway, even after the change TNR still had some good articles of the sort it looks like they are uninterested in producing anymore.

    I have no opinion on Buzzfeed because I almost never read it. It’s just… not in my orbit. Like you point out, though, we don’t particularly need another Buzzfeed because we already have Buzzfeed. It’s outside of their niche. With the multitude of publications and outlets out there, it sometimes seems like there’s nonetheless actually less choice. Where I can go for this perspective, where I can go for that one. Instead it seems more writer-by-writer, and the writers jump around a lot.Report

    1. I think they did have a bit of a justified reputation for being the home of the original #slatepitch and being rather conservative for a liberal mag for a while. “Even the liberal New Republic…..” was a pretty common joke for a while.

      The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books can cover seriously highbrow stuff but I wonder how much of that is because of their names. They are rather associating themselves with New York as not only a place but a kind of intellectual-bohemian idea.Report

  2. British television has more historical documentaries like Meet the Romans because the BBC has a certain immunity to commercial pressures from its design. It has a dedicated stream of revenue from license fees and for a long time, had a monopoly or near monopoly on broadcast in the United States. From what I understand, there are multiple BBC channels and radio stations and each has its own particular flavor. Some are like network TV in the United States or your average commercial radio station. Others have a more high brow flavor to them.

    The Simon Schama imitation was pretty damn funny. My guess is that the average European is no more cultured than the average American but just goes along with the government funding of things they don’t like more willingly.Report

    1. Lee,
      I think the english have a more educated (varied) vocabulary, judging by the folks I see on TV (cops and such). Maybe they just have more literacy standards for “top cop”.Report

  3. I also think there is something strangely generational where the culture writers of my generation and younger are very capable about writing on nostaligic pop culture and current pop culture but potentially not stuff with less than mainstream releases.

    I understand you’re writing about culture and cultural commentary, which I’m poorly equipped to comment on. However, when I see claims that one generation or another is peculiarly–or “strangely”–different from another or all others, that’s a sign someone is overgeneralizing differences. To the extent that we can talk about generations in the aggregate usefully at all–and I’m not sure we can (and by “we,” I include myself, too)–to say that one generation does such and such and it’s “strange” requires one to look at the practices of prior generations and control for, in today’s case, the greater number of people participating. Maybe middle-brow literature of ca. 1956 was more incisive, but there were more barriers to participation.

    None of which really is to say the OP is wrong. As I said, I’m not too acquainted with cultural commentary, and my own bias is to err on the side of recognizing persistence instead of change, which if carried too far can lead to me denying change more than I ought.Report

  4. I cut my teeth on TNR when i was a teenager- it was my first internet home. I’m stricken that it’s suffering though I am unsurprised since it has noticably drifted downhill in the last couple years. No surprise, of course, that I agree with Chait.Report

  5. TNR going the way of Buzzfeed? Translate: going to crap. BF is crap. It’s only value is to click on cute animal pics. Bye TNR.Report

  6. I’ll miss it if it really does die. I’m not convinced it will. Nor am I convinced it’s destined to become Buzzfeed. The owner must find editors, and those editors must find writers, who believe there is a market for original and substantive content, which there is. The Atlantic, for instance, proceeds apace.Report

    1. As I see more of the content producing people bail out, I will temper my above opinion a bit: the job of finding good editors and writers to replace them is going to be pretty challenging for the new ownership. The new broom appears to be sweeping clean with the active assistance of people wanting to get out of the way of said sweep, but something has to fill the vacuum thus created.Report

    2. The new EE (or whatever the top editor’s title is) apparently ran The Atlantic Wire. Which is an aggregation blog, but it’s at The Atlantic, so maybe it’s too early to tell. (Probably is, obviously. Doubtful they really know their plan yet.)Report

    1. That’s Freddie, no enemies to the left of him and measured dislike of right wingers but hellfire and brimstone for the left wingers who are to the right of him. I’d expect nothing less.Report

      1. I have a college friend who is facebook friends with a lot of bloggers and internet writers including Freddie. He is just as strident there.

        I find it amazing that so many people can be so strident in their beliefs without any doubt.Report

    2. Is this the same Freddie that talks about how social activists need to abandon “Magic Words Theory” and learn how to talk to people who disagree with them?

      Oh Freddie…..Report

    3. Freddie is the author who, long ago, led me to (a previous iteration of) this blog. I hold his writing skill in high regard, and this piece does not disappoint. I’ve long been a partisan of the intentional run-on sentence deployed for comedic effect.

      Doesn’t mean, and never has, that I agree with him.Report

      1. His writing, as you might expect given his field of study, has really, really improved over the years I’ve been aware of him, and that’s not to say it didn’t start out good. I’ve certainly been impressed (as has, obviously – and, today, somewhat ironically – Andrew Sullivan).Report

    4. I’ll say this, he’s right, at least for what it used to be. What a racist, war-mongering piece of shit that publication has been in the past. I haven’t read it for years, though, so perhaps it had gotten better?

      I will say that TNC, the centrist’s favorite, made a similar point onTwitter yesterday, though less stridently.Report

      1. No, but centrists seem to love him, which I take to make him a good contrast for Freddie. That is, if you think Freddie’s just saying this because he’s being all “leftier-than-thou,” as Saul likes to say, then how do you write off TNC saying basically the same thing?Report

      2. @chris

        TNC made very good arguments and I find him to be a challenging writer. He is also capable of introspection, back tracking, and admitting when there is another plausible explanation or he did not get something quite right. His tweets on TNR are worthy of pondering as is this piece from VOX:

        http://www.vox.com/2014/12/5/7339473/new-republic-race

        DeBoer is sometimes capable of those things but usually not and I am not the only person here to note his level of virtriol for anyone slightly dissenting from his brand of leftism.Report

      3. Saul, I honestly don’t care what people think of Freddie, except insofar as it affects their opinion of what I think is a valid point, in this case about TNR. My point in bringing in TNC is that a large subset of the population who is disinclined to believe Freddie is inclined to believe TNC, and therefore pointing out that TNC and Freddie were saying similar things might cause some people to consider the point who would not had it been made by Freddie only.Report

      4. TNC is a brillian writer and he is understandably unfond of TNR for at least partially publishing some very unsympathetic racially slanted pieces. He ignores, of course, that the same articles of TNR that featured those articles on the cover usually had rebuttals of those same articles published within the magazine. So I think he’s being perhaps a little uncharitable but I completely understand his position.Report

      5. @chris

        “My point in bringing in TNC is that a large subset of the population who is disinclined to believe Freddie is inclined to believe TNC, and therefore pointing out that TNC and Freddie were saying similar things might cause some people to consider the point who would not had it been made by Freddie only.”

        I think this has everything to do with being persuasive, which is an astoundingly undervalued skill and virtue on the intertubes. Especially on the left these days, I notice that the very idea that you might wish to persuade someone is much derided.*

        Part of what TNC does is to think out loud, but part of it is also to persuade — and he’s damn skillful at it. (If you doubt this, go back and read his reparations piece.) I never have a sense that Freddie is trying to persuade me to see things his way when I read him, just that he’s trying to tell me very firmly what I am supposed to believe.

        And I don’t mean that as a criticism, really. I’m pretty sure I’m Freddie’s biggest fan here; I don’t think every writer has to be persuasive to be entertaining or informative. It’s just that I don’t agree with you (or at least with what I believe I am reading between your lines) that it’s somehow the fault of centrists that they are persuaded by TNC and not Freddie. If you set out with a goal of drawing lines rather than persuading those who don’t see things from your POV right-now-this-second, I don’t know it’s on your audience when they aren’t.

        *I see the Right saying, “But we said this is the conservative thing to believe, why isn’t everyone persuaded?,” which is different from thinking that having to persuade those who disagree is beneath one.Report

      6. Tod, I agree with everything you say. TNC is a clear, level writer, so that it becomes difficult not to engage what he says. The perfect antidote to Freddie, then.Report

    5. Damn I miss him. Even more so because, yes, his writing has gotten even better as time has gone on. Though I will challenge @north ‘s assertion that he has no enemies to the left or that his dislike of rightwingers is generally measured. He just calls it as he sees it – he respects thoughtful and independently-reasoned arguments of any stripe and holds groupthink of any sort in the highest contempt.Report

      1. He also once described himself as a “take me or leave me” kind of guy when it came to his personality.

        The other term for people who say they call it like they see it or describe themselves as “take me or leave me” is asshole. Freddie is generally more measured and kind in his criticisms of the left than he is to people who are merely liberal or Democratic-moderate. He likes the campus left but thinks they need more than using certain words and wants them to be better communicators. It is pretty clear that he has no respect and absolute contempt for anyone who ever wrote or liked the New Republic.Report

      2. When I say Freddie has no enemies to his left I am literally quoting him on that point which is not the same as saying he never disagrees with them. He also certainly can be quite sharp with right wingers of course since he considers their ideologies abhorrent but it always feels like his harshest vitrol and most savage criticisms are reserved for center leftists, neoliberals, market liberals and the like (often with the swift caveat that he has no alternatives to offer to markets, capitalism etc.. but that what is currently on tap is unacceptable).
        Now since I am a market liberal perhaps his criticisms in that direction may feel like they bite the hardest. YMMV and goodness knows he’s brilliant; the time Ross D was on his fertility kick and Freddie did a comic with Douthat as his spirit guide? I laughed for like 48 hours straight.
        It’d be awesome if he was still around.Report

      3. Oddly, it’s the stridency and vitriol that I think makes him a particularly challenging and interesting read, even – especially, actually – when it’s directed at positions I hold. It’s hard to explain, but it’s an intellectually honest sort of polemicism that demands that you confront what he views to be at stake head-on, and either acknowledge what you’re doing or provide better evidence for why you think he’s just wrong on the facts.

        The fact is that there’s vitriol just about everywhere. But often we don’t recognize it because we tend to read writers who we know we agree with, whose vitriol exists not to challenge the other side but rather to reinforce their readers’ prejudices or, at minimum, to emphasize shared assumptions with their readers.

        I think everyone who writes with any kind of following in the realm of politics and culture has a “take me or leave me” approach. At minimum, good writing demands such an approach. The difference lies in how the writer wants potential readers to decide whether to take him or leave him – is it on whether or not you share my worldview, or is it on whether or not you want yours to be challenged?Report

      4. Rebuttals are fine, but it was irresponsible to publish some of that stuff in the first place. Hell, that cover photo alone was enough to make me stop reading. Nevermind the war shit.Report

      5. Given this country’s history, I doubt there are any. However, TNR published that awful nonsense in the last few decades, including the war stuff recently enough to still sting any anti-war activist pretty hard.Report

      6. it’s an intellectually honest sort of polemicism

        I really can’t agree. I think it’s self-indulgent intellectual dishonesty. Anyone who is so resistant to considering nuance and the possibility of some element of reasonin their opponents’ positions is not intellectually honest. In college, students are–or are supposed to be–taught to take seriously opposing arguments. That’s the essence of intellectual honesty, and I think Freddie lacks it.

        Of course I also think he has no understanding of how humans actually respond to anything, or how politics and collective devision-making actually work, and all his views are a combination of personal outrage and obtuse ignorance, so I’m bemused at the thought that he provides any value beyond clickbait. Call him outrage porn, and I think we’ve defined him.Report

      7. I wait with great interest your example of a magazine that has operated for a century and never has published any

        “Given this country’s history, I doubt there are any.”

        Are you going to seriously imply that that this is U.S. specific, that there could conceivably be such a magazine in some other country?Report

      8. I’m definitely on the other side of the outrage-as-lifestyle divide from Freddie too. It;s a temperamental thing. But he’s not writing for clicks. That’s just clear to read I’m and observe his utter disinterest in self-promotion (self-regard is another thing).

        That being said, Freddie is a full-on socialist who basically lost all the big fights to be had on the topic almost before he was old enough to blog. I’d be pissed too.

        I think @mark-thompson ‘s basic point was that you know where you stand with Freddie at all times, and there’s an intellectual honesty in that.

        Also, I think Freddie takes on and deals with arguments better than you give him credit for. He’s tenacious in denying them any assumptions they’d like to have to try to help them stick, and uses blistering wit to attack said assumptions. (A bit like some others who have on occasion written here?) But he takes on arguments directly, he does that.Report

      9. @michael-drew Yeah, that’s exactly right. @james-hanley Clickbait is definitely not his thing. While I understand why he may give the impression of not considering nuance and reason in his opponents’ arguments, I think, as one who got into plenty of arguments with him (probably more than anyone else around here, actually), that he’s actually quite excellent at absorbing arguments.

        Sometimes he may miss the nuance in an opposing argument, sure, but he’s mostly just human in that regard. His vitriol tends to come in two forms, and they’re both forms that I fully respect:

        1. Where his opponents reject his normative values; and
        2. Where his opponents claim to have certain normative values as he, but act in a way he views as inconsistent or counterproductive to those values.

        It’s group 2 that gets easily the harshest vitriol, and probably why he’s perceived as being toughest on neoliberals in general. But there’ve been plenty of leftists, libertarians, and conservatives who’ve gotten that treatment as well.

        Thing is, that makes him one of the few people who are clear on what their actual principles are, as opposed to what are just positions of convenience masquerading as principles.

        Basically, my favorite refrain about how “if you have too many principles, you soon have none” doesn’t much seem to apply to him, and if that means he’s going to fight with particular vehemence for his principles (which, again, seem to be actual normative principles rather than just policy preferences), then so be it.Report

      10. I’m not saying he’s personally writing for clicks; I’m saying clicks are the only value of his writing. That’s a subjective valuation, of course.

        He’s tenacious in denying them any assumptions they’d like to have to try to help them stick,

        That’s funny, because just the other day someone (not you, I know) was ranting that Roger and J R insisted in every argument that it had to be wholly on their terms, and wouldn’t grant debate opponents anything. Now the same behavior is presented as something admirable. I wonder who among the various disputants here finds it admirable in both Roger (assuming he really does it) and Freddie, and how many find it acceptable in one, but not the other?

        Freddie is a full-on socialist

        Yeah, as I said, “he has no understanding of how humans actually respond to anything, or how politics and collective devision-making actually work.” I could respect a socialist from 1914, but not from 2014. I can accept it as a wistful ideal (like my communitarian anarchism), but to hold it as an intellectual belief seems to me to require a willful ignorance of most of what social science has learned in the past century.Report

      11. Actually, J R is usually a pretty honest dealer. I think you meant a couple other J’s.

        I have said on this blog many times that I don’t like Freddie, that I think one of his skills is diagnosing himself without realizing it, and also that I think he’s worth reading because he’s going to say things that most people aren’t saying or reading, and there’s value in that.Report

      12. I’m not saying it’s admirable as such. I’m just saying that it’s very much a way to “consider[…] the possibility of some element of reason in [his] opponents’ positions.” He does that with very little charity, but he does it, is what I’m saying. He doesn’t just assume unreason. (Well, sometimes he does, but sometimes we all do. It doesn’t characterize his argument IMO.)

        Personally, I find greater charity to be both more pleasant and more admirable rhetorically. But Freddie does give rigorous consideration to the positions he disagrees with. Perhaps more in recent years than in years past. Perhaps you haven’t read him much recently.Report

      13. …Also what’s the value of click to someone valuing someone’s writing who doesn’t care about clicks – if indeed neither the valuer nor the writer, nor anyone else values clicks wrt to that particular blog? No one would even say they value Freddie’s clicks, so how is it relevant to a valuation? Were you just too shy to say his writing is worth literally nothing?

        …And a bit further on assumptions. Assumptions are great as long as they are consciously understood to be assumptions. But if they are really factual claims that are substantive to an argument, then they really need to be questioned on order for analysis to occur. Questioning them might lead from them being assumed as baseline fact, to being labeled as assumptions that might not reflect fact. That’s what I’m saying Freddie does – though he might then go on to argue why those assumptions might not be good ones to make. It seems to me that if Roger was arguing that the baseline set of facts must be X, if the people arguing against him were saying, “why should we assume those facts as facts – we can have a conditional discussion premised on the possibility that’s true, but that can’t be the only set of facts that can be thought possible,” then that reflects Freddie’s mode of argument. So it seems to me like one could quite possibly support both Freddie’s questioning of assumptions and roger’s interlocutors’ questioning of assumptions.

        You seem to be saying that we should assume that Freddie’s mode of questioning others’ assumptions should be seen as the same thing as Roger’s instance on only one set of baseline facts (or causal relationships , or etc.) or assumptions for any given discussion. I think my description of Freddie sounds more like Roger’s interlocutors than like Roger.Report

      14. Chris,
        I’m open to correction if I remember incorrectly, but I think Stillwater specifically mentioned J R. I think he’s a straight shooter, too, but I wasn’t referencing what I thought of him, just what someone else said.Report

  7. Variety covers all of Cannes.
    I don’t know… it seems like covering “my shitty rendition of Carmen” is just asking for bad reviews. And it should be possible to have a bad review site that compiles them from everywhere,and lets you search for your teensy town. [and, by process of elimination, find the good ones]

    I have about 10 reviews in the hopper for OT… they’re not of “American pop-culture” I hope you enjoy them, even if you probably won’t get a chance to watch them.Report

  8. I had the luck to start reading TNR right around the time of the Stephen Glass explosion.

    I admit to TNR not really making a positive first impression. I loved Leon Wiseltier’s essays and criticism but those became the only things in the magazine I read. Turn to the back page, read, say “I wish I could write like that”, throw magazine away.

    Looking at an alumni list, I am pretty impressed. That’s quite a list of names… if that’s an indicator of the editors’ ability to find talent, then I guess not much will change because that talent will still be out there in the wild. If, however, that’s an indicator of how good the editors were at teaching young writers to become better writers… we’ve lost something.Report

  9. I have the impression that under Hughes it had become more partisan. If I’m going to commit to a long article, I don’t want it to be hacky. Note: I don’t read TNR (or Buzzfeed) (or Gawker).Report

  10. “The New Republic often tried to cover local culture on a national and international scale by talking about a dance performance in New York, a new building in Chicago, and something at the Tate but this also seems to alienate most of an Internet readership.”

    I don’t know much about TNR, but from what you’ve written here, it seems to have once catered to a fairly small audience and that this likely became an unsustainable model. Why would I spend much time reading about things I don’t care about in cities I don’t live in?Report

    1. Yeah you’re getting kindof the wrong impression. TNR was always the cultural niche sort of thing, sure, but it was also very heavily a place where policy brains on the left hashed out a lot of arguements and ideas. This has waxed and waned over the century and lord(lady?) knows they had their blind spots (TNR was rabidly philosemetic during my time) but it was one of those valuable places where liberals thought and argued about what it meant to be a liberal and what good liberal policy was. It was never a huge magazine but it had outsized clout for all that, I guess you could say it had a small readership but the right readers.Report

      1. @saul Degraw
        Yeah it’s looking like the magazine has eviscerated itself. I would probably feel the likely death of TNR more keenly if I was still making my internet home there and if I honestly thought that TNR had a future but I’m doubtful that it was capable of sustaining itself in the new media environment.

        So that makes this sad (for a long time reader), worrying (for a liberal concerned about thoughtfulness on the left and especially on the center left) but not necessarily tragic.Report

      2. Lee, Israel is far more good than she is bad but her policies are extremely far from being beyond reproach especially in the last decade- a distinction that was mainly lost on TNR and Marty.

        Saul, that’s just deplorable. If I somehow found myself fantastically wealthy I’d think owning TNR and simply letting it do its thing would be a nice thing to do. It’d be a wonderful vanity item and wouldn’t really cost that much compared to other things billionaires do with their money. It’s a shame TNR ended up acquired for this purpose.Report

      3. North, ownining TNR and letting it do what it will can give you the feeling of being a patron of the arts and humanities. There can be nothing more pleasingly autocratic than being a patron of the arts and humanities.

        As to Israel, there are plenty of publications that slame Israel relentlessly. Having a few prominent defenders on the liberal isn’t a bad thing.Report

      4. Lee, I couldn’t agree more. Being wealthy enough to own TNR and just let it do its thing? That’d be wonderful, I’d be perfectly content to do so!

        I have no beef with TNR being a prominent defender but there is a line between strongly defending Israel and then cheering her on as she careens into a self-destructive spiral of colonialism, jingoism and insularity and I feel that TNR stood slightly to the wrong side of that line.Report

      1. @tod-kelly

        Let me clarify… “Why would I care about the local production of a show I have no interest in seeing being held in a city hundreds of miles from where I live?”Report

  11. It is an interesting business case-study (or it might be) because why pay the premium to acquire TNR only to destroy the brand; better off just starting a new media company with a nonesense name like all the others.

    Or is it… is the destruction of TNR cheaper marketing that trying to make hugheseo.com (or somesuch) known? Was this a purge, or did the ship turn too quickly and cause an accidental mass-man-overboard situation? Or a little of both?

    I confess that I’m more than a little fascinated by the Corporate and Human nexus… at what point to the Humans reject the host?Report

    1. Or is it… is the destruction of TNR cheaper marketing than trying to make hugheseo.com (or somesuch) known?

      It seems to me that’s what’s developed. I think Hughes came on intending to preserve the culture of TNR, but events have interceded, and now he’s doing something else.Report

      1. Well, that’s the question isn’t it? Did he think he could preserve the culture while removing the top leadership, or did he need to remove the top leadership to change the culture?

        I looks to me more like a miscalculation that was not part of the plan… now, whether the new project is a bomb or a success will determine what kind of case study this will be.

        Oh, and I apologize to @glyph for missing the obviously perfect name for Hughes’ new media company: Hugheskerdu.comReport

  12. ” One of the great oddities or not of viral media is that multiple companies release the same content and even have somewhat different names”

    That isn’t as new as you think it is. I remember in the 90s, when I subscribed to both, Newsweek would quite often re-publish what the Washington Post (then owners of Newsweek) had already ran. (and not necessarily stuff that was already more generally syndicated)Report

  13. Yes, how the world will miss the paper that gave us Stephen Glass, throwing Scott Beauchamp under the bus, popularizing The Bell Curve, elevating Betsy McCaughey’s half-truths and lies, crapping all over Sonia Sotamayer while not disclosing relationships, bashing everybody as an anti-semite if they have opinions to the left of folks like Avigdor Lieberman, and of course, throwing a single black mother lighting a cigarette holding a baby on the cover hyping their story about welfare reform.

    At least we might get some cute cat gifs out of the New New Republic.Report

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