Another worthwhile essay about the demise of the New Republic deserves a few comments. First, there is a moral to the story. Unless Chris Hughes, the new owner (actually he has owned the magazine for a couple of years now) can work some magic, by demanding that his publication must earn serious money, instead may well have killed off the New Republic. This is sort of like the witticism from Viet Nam, about how "we had to destroy the village to save it." This should make you wonder why there seems to be general lack of comprehension among many "economic thinkers" these days about the value of "good will." This is a solid economic category, not just a shorthand way to say that people may like something. That is, if you own the name Ford or Westinghouse or Tiffany you can turn that name into capital. The capital may be $$ capital or it may be status capital -access to important people, for example. What is status capital worth? Depends on how you calculate. Literally $ 0.oo However, "access" may, in a sense, be worth millions, the things that money can't buy but that have great meaning. The name New Republic is (or was) a major capital asset. But not in the dollar sense. In the status sense. It was a truism, at least until a few days ago, that if you were a mucky-muck at New Republic this translated into having access to any number of policy makers in DC and other "influentials" elsewhere. What was that worth? Zero if policy influence did not matter to you. An incalculable amount if you had a stake in the workings of government. That's what this is really all about: Access or no access. vs. Serious profitability, or no real profitability. It looks like Mr Hughes is really stupid where it matters most. He is like someone who is a pillar of his church and then uses his leverage to terminate its missionary outreach because it costs money and does not bring any money in. The purpose of missions, after all, is to earn a return on investment of at least 15%, isn't it? And it would be better if the number was 20%. What good are missions if there are less than 50,000 converts, anyway? You do get the sarcasm here, don't you? Not that it would not be a good idea to seek profitability. When I wrote out a detailed business plan for the Bugle, one premise in it was that the publication should seek -with serious effort- to pay its own way and, hopefully sooner rather than later, earn a tidy sum to put it in the black. Indeed, I put a lot of thought into this aspect of the plan. All kinds of ideas were discussed in detail. As would-be editor my feeling was that a newspaper should make earnings a serious priority. It should be a business, not some equivalent of a foreign mission. However, it must also be a "foreign mission," that is, it must live or die for the sake of its real purpose, in this case 'evangelizing' for Radical Centrism. So, there is a paradox. But I never saw where this was a real problem. Accept the paradox for what it is, and work with it. As if any of this mattered. It took weeks of work, about 3 weeks altogether, in finally getting the business plan in final shape. Everything conceivable was thought through as carefully as I know how. In places the text was an inspired as a business plan can get. But nobody actually read it. Gee, that's too bad? May as well roll over and play dead? Actually, no. I'm as much on fire for Radical Centrism as I have ever been, since first identifying with RC in about 1995, making it "my own" by 2000 AD or thereabouts What a tremendous opportunity -creating a totally new political philosophy that has "cross over" potential in other fields as well. Its a way to revolutionize human thought. Apparently, in saying this, not one word registers here. If so, that's everyone's loss. Some day the Bugle will become a reality. Ground floor, "present at the creation" opportunity will, at that time, have been totally lost to RC.org. OK, that's how everyone wants it. I can live with that, no hard feelings, no resentment, RC.org is what it is, or was. I did my best to make the most of it. But I never could build a big enough fire to overcome failure of imagination all around, that much is obvious. We now are witnessing the destruction of a major status-capital journal. Alas, New Republic, for whom the bell tolls. Some day bells will ring for the Bugle, however, and there will be a golden opportunity to see what a newspaper of ideas can really do in the world. Too bad no-one here will be part of it. Mencken ============================== NYT The New Republic’s Rebellion
Joe Nocera December 8, 2014 I asked Marty Peretz the other day whether his goal during the nearly four decades that he had owned The New Republic was ever to make a profit. “ Absolutely not,” he bellowed. “I think we were profitable maybe three of four years.” One year, he said, the magazine’s staff threw a pizza party to celebrate being in the black — “and the party put us back in the red.” He was only half-joking. No, Peretz owned The New Republic because it gave him a megaphone on issues he cared about, like Israel. Influence accrued to him, as did a certain social status that came with owning a magazine that mattered to the policy elites in Washington, D.C., and Cambridge, Mass. Strange as this may seem, this has long been the “business model” for policy and political magazines. Harper’s Magazine is published by Rick MacArthur, and its losses are covered by the J. Roderick MacArthur Foundation. For years, Mort Zuckerman, the real estate mogul, picked up The Atlantic’s losses. Peretz told me that during his tenure, The New Republic lost an annual sum in the low six figures, which he covered. So long as the losses were manageable, the owner would write a check. If the losses became too onerous, then the owner would look to sell. Thus it was that in 2012, with The New Republic’s losses rising to around $3 million, Peretz sold the magazine to Chris Hughes, who got rich by being one of the original executives at Facebook. (He was Mark Zuckerberg’s roommate in college.) With a net worth said to be around $700 million, Hughes was in a position to subsidize his new toy for a very long time. “I told him that if he wanted to maintain a serious and substantial publication, he should look forward to losses for some years,” Peretz said. In the two years that Hughes has owned it, The New Republic regained its reputation for smart, lively, engaging journalism. But he also appears to have quickly tired of losing money. A few months ago, he hired a new chief executive, Guy Vidra, from Yahoo. Vidra immediately began using words like “ disruption” and “innovation” and “breaking stuff” (though he didn’t use the word “stuff”). The first time many New Republic staff members heard their company described as a “vertically integrated digital media company” was when Vidra made his first big presentation to the writers and editors. In an op-ed article that _Hughes wrote in The Washington Post_ (http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/chris-hughes-crafting-a-sustainable-new-republic/20 14/12/07/2138faf6-7e28-11e4-9f38-95a187e4c1f7_story.html) — after The New Republic’s editor in chief and literary editor had resigned, and most of the staff had walked out with them — he said that The New Republic could no longer be a “charity,” and that his goal was to make it a “sustainable business.” In other words, he wants to make a profit. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It is just hard to see how he is going to get there. The truth is, the jury is still out on the profit-making ability of digital publications. Slate, which has been around since 1996, makes money, but not much. The Atlantic under David Bradley, its current owner, has a terrific digital presence, not to mention 500,000 print subscribers. It also makes money. But, again, those profits are modest. Venture capitalists are throwing money at new online media ventures like Vox, but we are a long way from knowing whether they will ever be profitable. None of the digital media companies have gone public, so their profits or losses are hidden from view. The New Republic, on the other hand, _has a print circulation of around 42,000_ (https://s3.amazonaws.com/newrepublic/pdf/2014/2014+Media+Kit.pdf) . _Its current website_ (http://www.newrepublic.com/) is lively, but clearly it wasn’t generating the number of clicks that its new owner wanted. Even before Vidra joined, The New Republic’s business executives were trying to get the editors to do things that would attract more clicks. One executive suggested that Michael Kinsley — a former New Republic editor himself — come up with a listicle, à la BuzzFeed. (“10 reasons why health care isn’t a free market.”) Is it any wonder that _the staff walked out_ (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/06/business/media/new-republic-staff-members-resign-over-management-chang es.html) when this plan was finally unveiled? Their earnest little magazine is the opposite of BuzzFeed. That’s what they loved about it. Or at least it was. When I spoke to Vidra late Monday, he stressed to me that The New Republic was not going to abandon its heritage of thoughtful journalism and provocative ideas. When I asked him whether he would follow the model of The Atlantic, he demurred. He instead suggested that Vox Media was a more appropriate model for what he had in mind. After we spoke, I went to _the Vox website_ (http://www.vox.com/) . I scrolled down until I saw a headline that stopped me cold. “_Everybody farts_ (http://www.vox.com/2014/12/4/7332411/fart-flatulence) ,” it read. “But here are 9 surprising facts about flatulence you may not know.” Goodbye, New Republic. -- -- 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.
