Published in News

Staff quit New Republic

by on08 December 2014



Barbarians at the gates

Staff members of The New Republic magazine have walked out after some changes to the organisation made by New Media managers who have come across from Facebook and Yahoo. The departures of the full-time employees, who represent a significant chunk of the magazine’s 54-member staff, followed the resignations on Thursday of the magazine’s editor, Franklin Foer, and its longtime literary editor, Leon Wieseltier. Some staff members have asked for their work to be removed from the coming issue of the magazine, which will have to be completed without an editor and with a diminished staff.

Foer was replaced by Gabriel Snyder, the former editor of The Atlantic Wire, who will start on December 22. The problem appears to be that the magazine’s owner, Chris Hughes, who was a founder of Facebook, had recently hired a new chief executive, Guy Vidra, against the wishes of Foer. Vidra come from Yahoo and said that he wanted to reimagine the publication “as a vertically integrated digital media company.”

Hughes said he needed to adjust operations to try to make the magazine more profitable. “Over the last couple of weeks, it became clear that Frank had very little interest or excitement about those changes, and I don’t think he would dispute that.”

He said the changes were prompted only by a desire to forge a sustainable business, but he did not expect it to be the next Facebook.

“I don’t have expectations of this as the next Facebook. This is not the next enormous company,” he said. “But I do believe that the way to have institutions like this survive, the most reliable way, is to have them be sustainable, if not profitable, companies.”

However one of the editors who quit said that nobody was against change at The New Republic. There was a hunger for extending our web presence, making stuff more shareable, clickable. But what the Silicon valley lot were doing was trotting out a bunch of Silicon Valley mumbo jumbo buzzwords that did not mean anything.

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