December 8, 2014

Understanding the new New Republic won't be easy

[TNR's] editor, Franklin Foer, and the veteran literary editor, Leon Wieseltier, abruptly resigned in the face of a disagreement over the magazine’s direction. Mr. Foer was replaced by Gabriel Snyder, a former editor of The Atlantic Wire. The magazine will reduce its publication schedule to 10 issues a year, from 20, [TNR chief executive Guy] Vidra said in a memo, and would be reimagined “as a vertically integrated digital media company.”

Daniel W. Drezner, Washington Post -  I’ve got some training in economics, and I’m fascinated to know what Vidra thinks he means by “vertically integrated digital media company.” Because, using the standard textbook definition of that term, it means that TNR will be going into the silicon mining business and tablet-building business.

Vidra’s general vision of what TNR will look like going forward does read like someone went to a TED talk in Palo Alto and mined every business cliche possible, as Dylan Byers (who broke the story) explains in Politico:

   "Vidra’s vision for TNR was radically different than that of Foer and Wieseltier. In meetings with staff, he spoke of the magazine as though it were a Silicon Valley start up, sources said. He talked about “disruption” and said he wanted to 'break shit.' He referred to himself as a 'wartime CEO.' At one point, he proposed giving every employee shares in the company, suggesting that he had plans to make it public."


Apparently, “disruption” means acting in as douchey a manner as possible toward existing employees, as Lloyd Grove explains over at the Daily Beast:

 "According to informed sources, [TNR owner Chris] Hughes and Vidra didn’t bother to inform Foer that he was out of a job. Instead, the editor was placed in the humiliating position of having to phone Hughes to get confirmation after Gawker.com  posted an item at 2:35 p.m. reporting the rumor that Bloomberg Media editor Gabriel Snyder, himself a onetime Gawker editor, had been hired as Foer’s replacement. Yes, it’s true, Hughes sheepishly admitted, notwithstanding that he and Vidra had given Foer repeated assurances that his job was safe." ...

What’s striking to me is that this is hardly the first clash this year between a billionaire titan and the new business venture that he’s running. Think of the culture clashes over at First Look Media, or even the Wall Streeters’ dubious management plan for reviving the Philadelphia 76ers.

These clashes go beyond the for-profit realm. Peter Thiel keeps yammering about how there’s gonna be a revolution in higher education, but I’m not really seeing it. Similarly, in my Ideas Industry conferences, I’ve heard a lot of nonprofit sector folk complaining that Silicon Valley investors want to revolutionize their field without really understanding it.

The pattern in each of these cases is that a fabulously wealthy and successful investor enters a new and not-terribly-successful sector and tries to apply the lessons learned from the investor’s past successes to this new area. Except that there’s not a ton of evidence that those lessons are truly generalizable..

2 comments:

Strelnikov said...

Vidra has sunk his own ship.

Albert Krauss said...

In the world of "enterpreneurship", where glitz and return on the investment dollar must instantly be compounded at multiple interest rates, there is absolutely no respect for embedded cultural contents or values. The New Republic (choosing to spell out its full name here rather than its acronymic label TNR) has a monumental and historic core presence. This idiotic tampering, the disrespect, the back-stab as usual, the argument from monetization, the catering to entertainment and short-cut thinking, is assassination, pure and simple. It reeks of nazi bookbkurning, in disguise.