Ross Douthat and the Destruction of the New Republic Thoughtful essay by Ross Douthat about why the New Republic has just imploded. He seems to be essentially on target. Not that I know all that much about New Rep, but at least I have peered inside its pages now and than and have done so since about 1960. There is something to add to what Douthat says, however. He implies -insists may be a better word- that the choice in opinion magazines has now become make money by pandering to people with a lot of it OR accept fate that while you may keep your head above water (or maybe not) the liberal arts and its values are a losing proposition because the reading public is now polarized between e-format and its mostly superficial outlook vs. the mostly irrelevant realm of 'classic' print opinion journals (which may also be found in e-format but retain their -as if it matters- character) based on a Liberal Arts view of the world. With all due respect, that kind of analysis -to be kind to Mr Douthat- is not very perceptive. Those with less interest in Douthat's feelings might say it actually is "stupid" but I choose not to go there. What it takes is a vision of what could be and should be, plus -to refer to the hoary old figure of speech- having printer's ink in your veins instead of the more customary alternative. That is, any kind of successful journalism requires passion, a love for the profession, and deep feeling for its mission. Absent these things and you get accountants looking at bottom lines as if that was the crux of the field, or tech whizzes trying to force fit a news magazine / opinion journal into some new version of what Silicon Valley does by way of communicating in e-print. "All Power to the [high tech] Soviet," in other words. Sorry, that's not the way to go. HL Mencken had it right when he was editor of American Mercury years ago. Seek out the best, promote the best, stand for something, and act like a crusader. To some extent this is also happening at C-Span, which, during its weekend programs, promotes books (on television!) and features lengthy talks by authors, from 30 minutes to an hour, and one show that is 3 hours long. What is your objective? No-one says that money is some kind of evil, that isn't true at all, but is profitability what journalism is all about or is it being a missionary and winning people over to principle, decent values, and inspired new ideas? It may come as a shock to tech folk but there actually are a lot of people in the world who are attracted to principle, decent values, and inspired new ideas. And, for that matter, who may also be attracted to "old" ideas that are very much still worth serious consideration, whether Plato or Confucius or the Bible. What really is the #1 goal? Making lots of money, therefore content matters only if it contributes to this objective, otherwise it can be almost anything, OR Making lots of converts to a way to thinking that you are convinced, deep down inside, is necessary "medicine" for the ills of modern society? In this case content is everything and making money, while that needs to be in the picture, is secondary. If the message is compromised it is time to walk away and start over somewhere else. This is not some kind of paean of praise to poverty. I fail to see where poverty is some kind of virtue. What this is, is a matter or perspective. Alas, some people seem to think that if making lots of money isn't your first priority then you -whomever- must admire or even love poverty. Which is absurd and simply is a comment on someone's mindset. The new owners of New Rep seem to think that what the magazine means to its readers matters far less than re-inventing it as a cash cow. The word that first comes to mind when thinking about such people is that they are a**holes. It isn't every day that an influential (if not very profitable) magazine loses virtually its entire editorial staff and still others, sufficient so that it has become necessary to cancel the December issue. The owners never believed in the magazine, is what this says, and which might also be asked of Bezos at the WaPo. In any case, they have done to the magazine what a Taylorite efficiency expert would do to a marriage, totally screwed everything up by not understanding what really is going on and the meaning that people get from the experience. Who is "God" in this story? Your favorite Silicon Valley hero or Mencken? Again, not to disparage Silicone Valley's incredible accomplishments, au contraire, who isn't impressed? The question is what do you live for? Douthat, in the following article, laments the fact that all-too-many people sing the Dollar Serenade as their national anthem. But the remedy isn't dusting off tradition and presenting it as the Real Good, no debate possible, but creating a new and vibrant worldview which takes the best from tradition but isn't one more variant of tradition -and that, in its newness, captures people's imaginations. Some day, I know not when, the Bugle will do exactly that. The idea, all along, has never been to be one more (but slightly different) e-newspaper, but a publication with a mission that is worth believing in. Unless you believe in this mission -whole heartedly- it would be impossible to see the value in it. But I haven't stopped believing, not for one minute even if, for now, there are other things that need to be done first. Billy ======================================= NYT Dec. 6, 2014
The Old Journalism and the New What the Fate of The New Republic Reveals Ross Douthat SOMETIMES media events synchronize almost too neatly. Last weekend, the entity known as Vox Media, whose array of properties includes this year’s big liberal-journalism start-up, _Vox.com_ (http://vox.com/) , announced that its latest round of investment had raised the company’s valuation to a robust _$380 million_ (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/01/business/media/vox-media-valued-at-nearly-400-million-after-investment.html) . Then on Thursday, The New Republic, a storied liberal magazine that’s emphatically not worth $380 million, saw its editor in chief and literary editor resign amid major conflicts with their superiors, a pair of figures out of a Silicon Valley satire — a tech almost-billionaire, Chris Hughes, who won the meritocracy’s equivalent of the lottery when he roomed with Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard, and Hughes’s digital guru, Guy Vidra, whose plan for vertical integration with the singularity can now proceed apace. Mass resignations followed; eulogies were penned for the T.N.R.-that-was. (And, admittedly, that hadn’t really existed for some time.) But the most interesting in memoriam _came from Ezra Klein_ (http://www.vox.com/2014/12/4/7337491/new-republic-changes) , Vox.com’s editor in chief, because he wrote as a spokesman for a new model of political journalism pronouncing a parting benediction on the old one. “The eulogy that needs to be written,” Klein argued, is actually for an entire kind of publication — the “ambitious policy magazine,” whether on the left or right, that once set the terms of Washington’s debates. With the emergence of the Internet, those magazines lost their monopolies, and the debate “spilled online, beyond their pages, outside their borders,” with both new competitors and specific voices (Klein kindly cites my own) becoming more important than before. < As Klein correctly implies, this shift has produced a deeper policy conversation than print journalism ever sustained. Indeed, the oceans of space online, the easy availability of studies and reports, the ability to go endless rounds on topics — plus the willingness of many experts to blog and bicker for the sheer fun of it! — has made the Internet era a golden age for technocratic argument and data-driven debate. But there is a price to be paid as well. That price, Klein suggests, is the loss of the older magazines’ ability to be idiosyncratic and nonpandering and just tell their readers what they should care about, because more than ever before you need to care about what readers click on first (like the latest John Oliver SMACKDOWN, in the case of Vox) to get the traffic that pays for the ads that subsidize a seven-part argument about health care costs. So as much as the new landscape has to offer, Klein concludes, “something is being lost in the transition from policy magazines to policy websites, and it’s still an open question how much of it can be regained.” All of this is sensible and true. But there’s one large amendment that needs to be offered. The New Republic as-it-was, the magazine I and others grew up reading, was emphatically not just a “policy magazine.” It was, instead, a publication that deliberately integrated its policy writing with often-extraordinary coverage of literature, philosophy, history, religion, music, fine art. It wasn’t just a liberal magazine, in other words; it was a liberal-arts magazine, which unlike many of today’s online ventures never left its readers with the delusion that literary style or intellectual ambition were of secondary importance, or that today’s fashions represented permanent truths. Unlike our era’s ascendant data journalism, it also never implied that technocracy was somehow a self-sustaining proposition, or that a utilitarianism of policy inputs and social outcomes suffices to understand every area of life. (And unlike many liberal outlets, in its finest years it published, employed and even occasionally was edited by people on the right of center — something some of us particularly appreciated.) So when we talk about what’s being lost in the transition from old to new, print to digital, it’s this larger, humanistic realm that needs attention. It isn’t just policy writing that’s thriving online; it’s anything that’ s immediate, analytical, data-driven — from election coverage to _pop culture obsessiveness_ (http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2014/11/totally_obsessed_the_age_of_cultural_manias_from_true_detective_to_serial.html) to rigorous analysis of baseball’s trade market. Like most readers, I devour this material. Like most journalists, I write some of it. I’m grateful that the outlets that produce it all exist. But among publications old and new and reinvented, it’s also hard not to notice that_ John Oliver videos_ (http://www.vox.com/2014/7/14/5897797/john-oliver-explains-wealth-gap) — or, more broadly, the array of food and sports and gadget sites that surround Klein’s enterprise at Vox Media — aren’t just paying for the policy analysis. They’re actively displacing other kinds of cultural coverage and interaction, in which the glibness of the everyday is challenged by ideas and forms older than a start-up, more subtle than a TV recap, more rigorous than a comedian’s monologue. And 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 recognize what’s lost. -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
