New Republic's Chris Hughes Strikes Back at Critics

If you follow a journalist on Twitter or subscribe to any of the nation's more progressive periodicals in your RSS feed, you might be inclined to believe there was no other news of note besides a maelstrom of change at The New Republic and the subsequent resignation en masse of most of the editors on the iconic liberal policy and cultural magazine's masthead.

For days, the talk of the journalism with a capital J circles and the Washington and New York twitterati has been laser-focused on the implications of upheaval at this century-old institution, owned since 2012 by gay Facebook wunderkind Chris Hughes, who is now the target of much criticism. And he is hitting back.

On Thursday, two top editors were either pushed out or resigned, and the magazine 's CEO, Guy Vidra, subsequently announced that the December issue now in the works for next week would be shelved and that only 10 issues would be published a year instead of 20. In addition, the magazine announced plans to move from Washington, D.C., to New York City.

Then on Friday, about a dozen full-time members of the editorial staff resigned and more than 40 contributors asked to be dropped from the masthead, all in a show of support for executive editor Frank Foer and veteran literary editor Leon Wieseltier.

"It's as if the owner wanted to kill it, and the staff decided to commit pre-emptive suicide instead," wrote Andrew Sullivan on his site, The Dish.

The Washington Post reported that Foer emailed the New Republic staff, telling them, "Chris and Guy have significant plans for this place. And their plans and my own vision for TNR meaningfully diverge."

"Frank Foer isn't leaving TNR because he wasn't a good enough editor," wrote former New Republic writer Jonathan Chait in New York magazine. "He's leaving because Chris Hughes is not a good enough owner."

And Seth Stevenson wrote in Slate, "Foer is respected and beloved by the TNR diaspora. Chris Hughes, the 31-year-old Facebook tycoon who bought the magazine in 2012, is not."

The New York Times noted that all this criticism signaled a different tone than two years ago, when Hughes was praised for recruiting Foer, a former New Republic editor, back to the magazine. He said his acquisition was motivated by an interest in "the future of high-quality long-form journalism."

Former staffer Ezra Klein, editor in chief of Vox, wrote that many TNR staff and alumni "feel Hughes promised, explicitly or implicitly, to preserve the TNR of yore, even if it lost money indefinitely (as it has in the past). Hughes believes his charge is to make it a viable web publication, in a world where viability -- and arguably, influence -- requires web traffic."

Klein observed that "for many at TNR, becoming a webbier publication feels like losing TNR's soul. For Hughes, watching TNR fall further and further behind its competitors feels like accepting the institution's death."

In a statement to the Times, Hughes said he was "saddened by the loss of such great talent" but that he felt the magazine had a choice: "to embrace the future or slide towards irrelevance, which is something I refuse to allow."

He responded further in a Sunday op-ed in The Washington Post. When the departing staff members describe the problem as "a clash of cultures: Silicon Valley versus tradition, and everyone must choose a side," he wrote, it "dangerously oversimplifies a debate many journalistic institutions are having today."

He continued, "I didn't buy the New Republic to be the conservator of a small print magazine whose long-term influence and survival were at risk. I came to protect the future of the New Republic by creating a sustainable business so that our journalism, values and voice -- the things that make us singular -- could survive." Technology, he said, "should be used not to transform it but to develop and amplify its influence."

Journalistic observers, though, noted the disharmony between the newsroom and the leaders of what Klein called the journal famous for its "hawkish, contrarian neoliberalism," which arose largely in September when Hughes hired Vidra from Yahoo! as The New Republic's CEO.

Foer was opposed to Vidra's hire from the beginning and did not hide his discontent. Writer Jason Zengerle told Bloomberg's David Weigel following his resignation that Hughes and Foer had been inseparable, and that "everything was fine until that moment Guy was hired. That was the first indication that Chris's thinking had changed."

That was clearly evident at the magazine's centennial gala, according to Michael Calderone of The Huffington Post. "Foer and Wieseltier spoke of the magazine's traditions and the journalists who steered it through the past century, while Hughes and Vidra emphasized the need to experiment with the publication and increase page views."

But ultimately, this was not a clash of old journalism versus new, Zengerle and senior editor Julia Ioffe told Calderone. She instead blamed what she called a "cultural disconnect."

The Times reported that at Vidra's first meeting with the staff, he "petted his laptop and told those gathered how important computers were to him," and that Vidra told the staff in a memo the magazine would be reimagined "as a vertically integrated digital media company." Chait chastised Vidra in his article for "saying things like 'let's break shit' and 'we're a tech company now.' His memo to the staff predictably uses terms like 'straddle generation' and 'brand.'"

In Chait's piece, "A Eulogy for The New Republic," he commented, "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."

The Wall Street Journal reported the final showdown came, according to Ioffe, after "Hughes apparently hired former Atlantic Wire editor Gabriel Snyder to be the magazine's new editor without telling Mr. Foer. She said he soon discovered that he was being replaced when he heard Mr. Snyder had been seeking to hire people in New York."

The former editors and staffers issued a statement bordering on a manifesto declaring, "The New Republic is a kind of public trust. ... The legacy has now been trashed, the trust violated. ... The promise of American life has been dealt a lamentable blow."

Others lampooned this dramatic chest-thumping by the overwhelmingly white and male defenders of TNR's legacy. Among them was Gawker's Leah Finnegan, in a piece titled "White Men Wrong White Man Placed in Charge of White-Man Magazine." Snyder, the newest white man in charge at The New Republic, is a former editor at Gawker and The Atlantic Wire and digital adviser at Bloomberg.

Criticism of Hughes did not stop at his decisions at the office. Hughes invested heavily in the failed congressional campaign of his husband, Sean Eldridge, only to see him lose by a nearly 2-to-1 ratio as part of the Republican landslide over Democratic candidates.

Conservatives pounced. Calling the mass resignations a "slaughter," Erick Erickson of Red State attacked Hughes by describing him as "a dot-commer who couldn't get his boy toy into congress this year and now wants to prove he wasn't just a lucky dot-com bubbler, but can actually do what his college roommate did. His college roommate created a small site called Facebook. ... Did I mention he failed buying his spouse a congressional seat? Dude is now bored and searching."

Frequent TNR critic The Washington Free Beacon also piled on, naming Hughes and his spouse Sean Eldridge "Couple of the Year," sarcastically congratulating them on their success at demonstrating their "freedom to fail." Andrew Stiles wrote, "Hughes, for example, has proved that massive financial success can be achieved simply by having a talented roommate at Harvard. Eldridge, on the other hand, reminds us that extraordinary wealth awaits all who are willing to marry extraordinarily wealthy people."

Bloomberg's Weigel wrote that "the knives had been out" for Hughes since he bought the magazine. He remarked that the Beacon, "the most aggressive of the Obama era's new conservative media, ran story after story about Hughes as the ruiner of a once-great magazine, a 'poke button pioneer' who had carpetbagged into upstate New York to let his husband try to win a House seat."

Stiles went on to blast Hughes in the Beacon by suggesting that "if he wishes to purchase a liberal institution with money 'earned' from being Mark Zuckerberg's roommate and subsequently burn it to the ground whilst behaving like an insufferable douche, that is his God-given right as a wealthy American."

And on a site called DataLounge someone anonymously posted that "Chris Hughes is now the most hated man in American journalism. Well done, Chris."

But it wasn't just these products of the new generation of journalism that were up in arms. The editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, told The New York Times, "If the cliches of new media are being used here to paper over the undermining of an institution of real rigor and intelligence, people should describe it for what it is, which is a terrible loss and an outrage."

Tina Brown tweeted, "Gloomy news about #TheNewRepublic. So sick of callow, know all 'innovators.'"

And Ross Douthat wrote in a New York Timesop-ed Sunday that "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 recognize what's lost."

But Hughes, in his Post op-ed, promised that The New Republic won't be lost. "I have and will continue to invest because I care about the strength of journalism in the United States and a national media that serves as a guardian of liberty," he wrote. "The New Republic is much larger than myself or any single individual. Despite what has been suggested, the vast majority of our staff remain. They are eager and excited to build a sustainable and strong New Republic that can endure.

"If you really care about an institution and want to make it strong for the ages, you don't walk out. You roll up your sleeves, you redouble your commitment to those ideals in a changing world, and you fight. This 100-year-old story is worth fighting for."

The next issue of The New Republic under its new editor, Snyder, is expected February 2.