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New Republic mass resignations: Any need for ‘restructuring’ now?
WaPo ^ | 12/5/2014 | Erik Wemple

Posted on 12/05/2014 10:49:17 AM PST by mojito

In a memo to staff yesterday announcing a masthead shake-up, New Republic chief executive Guy Vidra wrote that a reduction in the frequency of the 100-year-old magazine would require a staff “restructuring,” a common euphemism for layoffs. Well, that may not be necessary considering that a whole herd of staffers resigned en masse following the defenestration of top editor Franklin Foer and longtime literary editor Leon Wieseltier. Have a look at the departures....

Perhaps the “restructuring” will now come in the form of a hiring spree to fill vacancies created by the newsroom-wide disgust with Foer’s firing. A group of staffers met at Foer’s house last night for a New Republic “wake.” Apparently the resolve for a mass show of force, rumored yesterday, stiffened overnight.

Yesterday’s memo from Vidra promised an “all-hands meeting … to help answer any questions or concerns you may have.”

Okay, but the executives in that meeting, Vidra and Publisher Chris Hughes, didn’t take any questions from staffers, according to an informed source. Instead, Vidra and Hughes made some remarks and then adjourned the session so that management could get to the business of publishing the next print edition of the New Republic — perhaps quite a task in light of the mass-bolting.

(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Culture/Society; Editorial
KEYWORDS: chrishughes; facebook; franklinfoer; guyvidra; leonwieseltier; newrepublic; thenewrepublic; tnr
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The New Republic has been a shadow of itself since at least the coming of the 0bamao era, but in its day it was the voice of a principaled and even yes! patriotic (as shockingly inconceivable as that might be now) liberalism: think back, if you can, to the likes of Daniel Patrick Moynihan for an idea of what I'm referring.

And now the last grownups just turned out the lights.

The techies and the progressive cultists are now in charge.

The New Republic now joins those other bastions of thinking, literate liberalism - the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harpers - on the ash heap of history.

RIP.

1 posted on 12/05/2014 10:49:17 AM PST by mojito
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To: mojito
following the defenestration of top editor Franklin Foer

Did they really throw him from a window?

I've seen that word maybe 3 times since I learned it back in high school by reading slavic 'literature'.

/johnny

2 posted on 12/05/2014 10:51:28 AM PST by JRandomFreeper (Gone Galt)
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To: mojito

This is sort of sad. It’s a signature American periodical.


3 posted on 12/05/2014 10:52:11 AM PST by Borges
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To: JRandomFreeper
My understanding is that Mr. Foer suffered no more than a bruised ego in the fall.
4 posted on 12/05/2014 10:52:46 AM PST by mojito (Zero, our Nero.)
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To: JRandomFreeper

Better than being thrown under a bus, I suppose..............


5 posted on 12/05/2014 10:56:06 AM PST by Red Badger (If you compromise with evil, you just get more evil..........................)
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To: Red Badger
He could be like that guy at Hiroshima who was evacuated to Nagasaki just in time for.... getting nuked again!

Don't be that guy.

/johnny

6 posted on 12/05/2014 10:59:45 AM PST by JRandomFreeper (Gone Galt)
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To: Borges
When bow ties, pipes, and leather patches on sweater sleeves went out of style, the literary genius of the American Left died.

And editing. Lord, did that go away.

/johnny

7 posted on 12/05/2014 11:01:43 AM PST by JRandomFreeper (Gone Galt)
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To: mojito

Like this? BTW, I was born in February 1960.

8 posted on 12/05/2014 11:01:53 AM PST by 2ndDivisionVet (The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me.)
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To: mojito

Soviet agent Michael Straight was publisher of The New Republic in the 1940’s and 1950’s. He recruited Henry Wallace as Editor before Wallace ran for President in 1948 on a Stalinist platform.


9 posted on 12/05/2014 11:08:08 AM PST by iowamark (I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy)
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To: mojito
A pity, really. New Republic veered left and found the market already pretty crowded. Dumbing the thing down as they did, didn't help either.
10 posted on 12/05/2014 11:12:26 AM PST by Billthedrill
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To: Billthedrill

The magazine’s “honest liberal” soul walked out the door with Marty Peretz.


11 posted on 12/05/2014 11:22:36 AM PST by okie01 (THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA: Ignorance on Parade)
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To: okie01

Ah, there’s a name from the past. I’d almost forgotten him.


12 posted on 12/05/2014 11:25:11 AM PST by Billthedrill
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To: iowamark

let me guess...Straight was gay!


13 posted on 12/05/2014 11:26:29 AM PST by gr8eman (Bill Carson...meet Arch Stanton!)
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To: Borges

I always celebrate when commies bite the dust...regardless


14 posted on 12/05/2014 11:27:16 AM PST by gr8eman (Bill Carson...meet Arch Stanton!)
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To: JRandomFreeper

It was highschool for me too. Specifically the section of Western Civ dealing with the Defenistration of Prague.

Its a good word. I like using it (the WORD, not the act!) on my kids occasionally when they act up.


15 posted on 12/05/2014 11:30:54 AM PST by tanknetter
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To: gr8eman

It wasn’t always like that though. Leon Wieseltier is no communist.


16 posted on 12/05/2014 11:37:42 AM PST by Borges
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To: mojito

Someone on our side of the aisle should buy it.


17 posted on 12/05/2014 11:43:18 AM PST by TBP (Obama lies, Granny dies.)
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To: mojito
1 The New Republic has been a shadow of itself since at least the coming of the 0bamao era, ... The techies and the progressive cultists are now in charge. The New Republic now joins those other bastions of thinking, literate liberalism - the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harpers - on the ash heap of history. RIP.

Chris Hughes – aged 30, American entrepreneur who co-founded and served as spokesman for the online social directory and networking site Facebook, with Harvard roommates Mark Zuckerberg (raised Jewish but now an avowed atheist and CEO of Facebook), Dustin Moskovitz, and Eduardo Saverin.

APR 2009 How Chris Hughes Helped Launch Facebook and the Barack Obama Campaign
At age 25 he became the coordinator of online organizing for Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign on My.BarackObama.com, the campaign's online social networking website. Many political pundits attribute BHO’s victory to Hughes by his unleashing of BHO’s voter base over the internet and thereby changing politics and marketing forever.

In MAR 2012, he purchased a majority stake in The New Republic magazine – the flagship political journal of liberal thought in the U.S. for 98 years. He is now the publisher and editor-in-chief of the magazine at age 30. The previous editor-in-chief, Martin Peretz, who served from 1974 until 2011, wrote in FEB 2013 that, “The New Republic has abandoned its liberal but heterodox tradition and embraced a leftist outlook as predictable as that of Mother Jones or The Nation."


July 1, 2012 - Chris Hughes (aged 28) and Sean Eldridge (aged 25) were married at their home in Garrison, N.Y. William J. Corbett, a retired village justice of Floral Park, N.Y., officiated.


2/11/2013 cover of The New Republic

18 posted on 12/05/2014 11:53:15 AM PST by MacNaughton (" If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves." POTUS#16 ALincoln)
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To: mojito

I hadn’t heard before now TNR was going under.

Well.. what a friggin’ shame.

What’s Angela Davis going to do now, with her writing outlet now fallen by the wayside?


19 posted on 12/05/2014 11:58:37 AM PST by ScottinVA (We either destroy ISIS there... or fight them here. Pick one, America.)
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To: TBP
Someone on our side of the aisle should buy it.

Imagine liberating a longtime publication from the clutches of liberalism.


20 posted on 12/05/2014 12:08:58 PM PST by ScottinVA (We either destroy ISIS there... or fight them here. Pick one, America.)
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