New Republic: Who controls the media, controls the future

The drama is enough to leave you groggy. Even as prominent Indian journalists launch their own properties (Shekhar Gupta, Raghav Bahl, et al), the churn within the American media scene continued unabated. Last week brought a fresh twist in this ongoing story, with the mass resignations at that venerable American media institution, The New Republic.

The New Republic is one of those globally recognised American publications, which list also includes The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, that have been synonymous with quality reportage and a consistent editorial stand for decades. Before the era of online journalism dawned, these magazines not only captured the zeitgeist but also charted the course of American destiny, their pages read avidly by both the laity and the powers that be.

Since the advent of the internet, things have never been the same. Local newspapers have shut down at alarming rates, as statistics indicate that the young mostly get their diet of news on the screen, not from paper. The penetration of technology in the newspaper business isn’t restricted to news consumption. The Washington Post, which broke the Watergate story that took down Richard Nixon, is now owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.

So, it came as some sort of an expected shock (pardon the oxymoron) when Chris Hughes, the young owner of The New Republic, announced last week that he was looking to convert the publication into a “vertically integrated digital media company”. To achieve this aim, he brought in a former Yahoo News general manager, Guy Vidra, to head the editorial team.

It was galling, not just because of concerns over the direction the company would henceforth take. Franklin Foer, the magazine’s erstwhile editor, learnt of his firing only when Vidra started taking editorial calls. He put in his papers, obviously, as did Leon Wieseltier, the magazine’s books editor who had been with the company for over three decades.

As news of the resignations spread, the shit really hit the fan. A slew of well-known names disparaged Hughes for his decision. Writing in New York magazine, Jonathan Chait decried Hughes’ belief that The New Republic could be, and should be, converted into a listicles website:"The problem… is that Hughes and Vidra are afflicted with the belief that they can copy the formula that transformed the Huffington Post and BuzzFeed into economic successes, which is probably wrong, and that this formula can be applied to The New Republic, which is certainly wrong."

Ross Douthat of the New York Times was even more scathing:

"Since today’s liberalism is particularly enamored of arc-of-history arguments that either condemn or implicitly whisk away the past, this may be a particular problem for the Internet-era progressive mind.The peril isn’t just that blithe dot-com philistines will tear down institutions that once sustained a liberal humanism. It’s that those institutions’ successors won’t even recognise what’s lost."

It is by now a cliché that the media landscape is undergoing massive changes. If the image of media at one time evoked only news, now everything from YouTube DIY videos to Buzzfeed-like “10 things you did not know…” websites make up the media firmament. The media is changing, and of course, those who run it must change with it. No one knows what will emerge from this flux, and The New Republic controversy only highlights this battle.

To be fair to Hughes it is as yet unclear what precise vision he has for The New Republic - even he would see the foolishness of completely shifting the magazine from its long-form roots. Even so, there are no easy answers to the questions raised by this latest episode. Media needs money, and the technology company is flush. No wonder several storied properties are today owned by tech moguls. Chris Hughes himself made a killing from the Facebook IPO (he was a roommate of Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard.)

Such debates end up as “us-versus-them” while it is abundantly clear that what the media needs is to find a middle ground. The British magazine the Economist is one example of a media property that has grown from strength to strength even as it continues to be a predominantly print publication. What works in its favour is a combination of great writing and a studied focus on the news. There is opinion, but little of that.

Besides, not every tech takeover of a media house may be bad. An unexpected but perhaps welcome fallout of The New Republic controversy is the possibility to check how far traditional newspapers were willing to go in reporting views from both ends of the spectrum. And here, Bezos’ Washington Post takes the prize. It ran “The New Republic is dead, thanks to its owner, Chris Hughes” by opinion writer Dana Milbank as well as “Crafting a Sustainable New Republic” by Hughes himself. The New York-based publications, expectedly, stuck to disparaging Hughes.

The Post also did some important fact-finding that led to the Rolling Stone retracting a story on an alleged rape that took place on the University of Virginia campus in 2012. Due to the Post’s work, it turned out that the victim may not have been completely true about the incident. Last week, Rolling Stone apologised for running the story.

It is difficult to say how much of this activism is driven by Bezos, who is famous for the missionary zeal that he harbours for his products. What can be said for certain is that good leadership is paramount as winds of change rock the media terrain. Hughes may not be that leader but to assume so before he has had a chance to put his ideas to practice would be presumptuous.