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Most of the remaining editors and contributing writers of The New Republic resigned today, following yesterday's departure of editor Franklin Foer and literary editor Leon Wieseltier, who quit in disagreement with tech-oriented new owners who want to change the long-standing journalism and commentary brand into something else. "The New Republic now seems unlikely to continue that legacy in any recognizable sense, since the majority of its longtime writers and editors have left, taking the magazine's institutional memory with them," says Michael Calderone at the Huffington Post. He also has a list of the staffers who resigned, and an annotated graphic of the now-depleted masthead.
Senior editor Julia Ioffe said in a Facebook post that the new owners will try to inaccurately position the mass exodus as the departure of dinosaurs who didn't get it.
The narrative you're going to see Chris and Guy put out there is that I and the rest of my colleagues who quit today were dinosaurs, who think that the Internet is scary and that Buzzfeed is a slur. Don't believe them. The staff at TNR has always been faithful to the magazine's founding mission to experiment, and nowhere have I been so encouraged to do so. There was no opposition in the editorial ranks to expanding TNR's web presence, to innovating digitally. Many were even [on] board for going monthly. We're not afraid of change. We have always embraced it.
Calderone writes that owner Chris Hughes and CEO Guy Vidra announced Thursday they were repositioning the 100-year-old magazine to become a "vertically integrated digital media company." They named Gabriel Snyder the new editor. What's unclear is how the brand remains in any sense the New Republic. Should these guys just have started a new online magazine?
