When The Disruption Hits The Fan: Why The New Republic Has To Stop Being So Conservative

"The New Republic is frankly an experiment," its editors wrote in its debut issue, which appeared a little over 100 years ago in November 1914.

The experiment got off to a shaky start. The first issue sold just 875 copies. At the newsstand rate of ten cents a copy, net proceeds were $87.50. While circulation rose in subsequent issues, the magazine persisted largely through the support of its main benefactor, a wealthy heiress and philanthropist named Dorothy Payne Whitney who poured $80,000 a year into The New Republic for the first decade of its existence.

In 1924, struggling to attract new readers, the New Republic offered potential supporters an almost Kickstarter-like deal -- a series of six fine art etchings and a two-year subscription for $12. However many people took advantage of this innovative promotion, it wasn't enough. The New Republic declared bankruptcy that year. (Today, that set of etchings -- including one by Edward Hopper -- goes for around $90,000.)

But Dorothy Payne Whitney continued to support the publication, and ultimately, the New Republic lasted long enough to qualify as an American tradition through a combination of elements – the strength of its content, a succession of patient benefactors who followed in Payne Whitney's wake, and the circumscribed landscape it operated in. If the audience for lively but in-depth public affairs coverage was limited -- the magazine’s circulation never rose higher than a little over 100,000 subscribers -- the number of institutions that both wanted to produce such material and had the capacity to achieve national print distribution on an ongoing basis was limited as well.

That changed radically in the late 1990s. Suddenly, thanks to the web, there was lots of lively but wonky public affairs coverage -- from armchair pundits, from economists and law professors, from campaign staffers. It was timely, it was largely free of charge, and it was often quite good. In the face of this new competition, the New Republic's paid circulation started plunging. On the cusp of the new millenium, it had 101,000 paying subscribers. By the time Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes bought it in 2012, that number had fallen to 34,000.

Long before Chris arrived, the magazine had recognized the need to adapt to the new realities online distribution was creating - a 2007 New York Times article notes its decision to reduce its annual number of print issues from 40 to 20, add web-only staff, introduce more visual elements, experiment with video, and emphasize "buzzy" articles.

But institutions that have been around as long as the New Republic often face what Harvard business school professor Clayton Christensen famously dubbed the innovator's dilemma -- i.e., the tension that arises when longstanding companies confront immature but potentially powerful technologies that don't necessarily fit into their proven and familiar ways of delivering value to their traditional customers. While the New Republic's traditional mode of operation may have kept it on precarious financial ground throughout the course of its history, it did work well enough to keep the publication afloat for 100 years. That’s no small feat and hard to let go of, even when conditions change so much that you must adapt.

After Chris arrived in 2012, he doubled the magazine's staff, added new digital features, and announced his intention to generate enough revenue to compete in an increasingly crowded and technologically driven landscape.

And yet even as the magazine's staff appeared enthusiastic about the possibilities of this new era, they apparently never managed to fully embrace the “permanent beta” mindset you need to stay competitive in today’s fast-changing world. You can see this in the letter that many of its former employees published last week, after quitting in the wake of the news that Chris had been planning to replace the magazine's highly regarded editor, Franklin Foer, with former Gawker and Atlantic Wire editor Gabriel Snyder.

The New Republic "is not, or not primarily, a business," the former staffers wrote.

"It is a voice, even a cause. It has lasted through numerous transformations of the 'media landscape'—transformations that, far from rendering its work obsolete, have made that work ever more valuable. 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."

Or to put it more succinctly, they were comfortable doing what they'd always done, what had always sort of worked.

The problem, however, is that conditions have changed. It’s not just about The New Republic and how things have always been done there. It’s about the entire news media ecosystem in which The New Republic operates. In this new environment of abundant competition, even the most generous benefactor can’t ensure a publication’s survival.

The world of news media is in a tremendous state of upheaval, which means it's also tremendously dynamic. Traditional institutions like the New York Times and the New Yorker are making bold and risky efforts to adapt to the changing realities of the business. Newcomers like Buzzfeed, FiveThirtyEight, Vox, and Vice are pioneering new ways to engage users and develop sustainable businesses in an age of mobile distribution and social sharing.

In this new era of ambitious and abundant journalistic experimentation, stasis guarantees irrelevance. Instead of invoking past legacies, it’s a time for adaptation, new thinking, an appetite for risk.

The kind of substantive public affairs coverage The New Republic has specialized in is an essential part of our national discourse – and no one wants to see that disappear. Instead, the opposite is true. Now, there are opportunities to broaden its readership, amplify its voice beyond the realm of Washington insiders, and increase its overall impact. But that’s not going to happen by adopting a stubborn stagnate-or-die! mindset.

In any era, the best magazines are intensely contemporary phenomena, the ones that capture and define the moods, preoccupations, anxieties, and aspirations that are most particular to a given cultural moment. When magazines invoke their storied traditions, when they prefer to look backward rather than forward, they start to ossify.

"The New Republic is frankly an experiment," its editors wrote in 1914. One hundred years later, the experiment continues, and that is good news for the future of journalism.