It started with the purchase in 2012 — started, I’m guessing, when the name of the buyer was announced. It would be Chris Hughes, the Facebook multimillionaire. “Facebook,” they likely thought, “That can’t be good.”
The magazine purchased was The New Republic (TNR) and — after reading comments from some of its staffers in the last few days — one can only imagine the askance looks they cast upon Hughes. “We’re going to watch you like a hawk,” they likely said. “And if you start talking about that Internet thing, we’ll show you a thing or two about a thing or two. You may be the owner, but you just got here, and we’ve been here since Woodrow sent the doughboys to France. Well, not literally, but you know what we mean!”
And so they watched, and so they listened. And, after going on an unwise spending spree for talent, real estate and decorating, Hughes started looking at the bottom line, and after seeing that his loss per year had widened from $1 million when he bought the magazine to $5 million, he started talking about that Internet thing.
And, unfortunately, he (and Guy Vidra, the former Yahoo! exec he brought in to serve as CEO) started dropping the kind of silly Internet speak that scares the heck out of those on the lookout for silly Internet speak — phrases like “vertically integrated digital media company” and having stories that “travel well” on the Web.
He even engaged in other silly speak that had nothing directly to do with the Internet — remarking once that he wanted to “break shit.” One might imagine that “be innovative” would have gone over better.
The poor communication about vision and intentions would only get worse.
It started to become clear to Hughes, we can assume, that he and top editor Franklin Foer did not share enough of a common vision — or at least that Foer was not receptive enough to move toward Hughes’ vision — for the two to continue together. In a move likely done everywhere at all times with high-level personnel changes, Hughes arranged for Foer’s replacement before letting Foer go (Gabriel Snyder, a former editor of The Atlantic Wire, will take over on Dec. 22.) Unfortunately, what only happens once in a while happened — the hire/fire plan leaked; Foer found out someone else had his job at the same time he did, then perceptively realized he soon wouldn’t.
Of course, Foer immediately resigned, and was quickly and emotionally joined by Literary Editor Leon Wieseltier, who had been with the magazine for 31 years.
But that was just the start. The next day, nine of the magazine’s 12 senior editors quit and 20 of the magazine’s contributing editors essentially did the same, asking their names be removed from the masthead. By Friday evening, three former editors of The New Republic — Hendrik Hertzberg, Peter Beinart and Andrew Sullivan — penned one of the most overly dramatic letters I’ve ever read.
“The New Republic cannot be merely a ‘brand.’ It has never been and cannot be a ‘media company’ that markets ‘content’ … Its essays, criticism, reportage, and poetry are not ‘product.’ It is not, or not primarily, a business (my emphasis). It is a voice, even a cause … The New Republic is a kind of public trust. That is something all its previous owners and publishers understood and respected. The legacy has now been trashed, the trust violated. It is a sad irony that at this perilous moment, with a reactionary variant of conservatism in the ascendancy, liberalism’s central journal should be scuttled with flagrant and frivolous abandon. The promise of American life has been dealt a lamentable blow.”
My word! I wonder if Hughes knew he was buying not a business, but a public trust? I wonder if he was aware he’d have to operate under rules that govern such trusts (whatever the authors of that letter determine them to be). I wonder if he knew that by tinkering with The New Republic, he’d be dealing ours “a lamentable blow.”
All in all, it is difficult to find a better “Change Management Done Wrong” case study; one that carries important takeaways for you, who must execute “change” both more complicated and critical.
I mean, this story has it all — an owner whose overspending on things that didn’t matter forced him to cut back on things that did; an owner whose lack of communication skills make it impossible for the folks who needed to be inspired by his vision (if he had one) to understand it; a staff so set in its ways that it had a comically visceral reaction to words like “clicks” and “Web”; a staff so emotionally tied to print — not for what it actually was (a medium for communicating thought), but for what it nostalgically represented to them — that it didn’t seem to care that many customers and advertisers now prefer to consume those thoughts on an iPad.
Well now, thanks to all this botching, those thoughts will not be published either online or print, at least as pertains to its January issue, which was cancelled after the mass resignations. And that’s a shame for all concerned. It’s a shame for Hughes and TNR, which no doubt lost lots of talent, and it’s a shame for all the talent whose protest resignations likely seemed far less romantic immediately after they were delivered.
And what’s more, as Nancy Wilcox (our director of sales and marketing) pointed out when I was discussing it with her, those folks now on the job market are tainted with the anti-change brush. And in this day and age, that’s a tarnish many employers are looking very, very diligently to avoid.
Editor’s Note: Facts from this column first appeared in articles in the New York Times: The New Republic at 100: A Century of Bickering; After Exodus, The New Republic Cancels Its Next Issue & Politico: Implosion of a Washington institution; TNR veterans protest Hughes’ ‘destruction’.
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