Over at Huffpo it's reported that Chris Hughes, who is one of the Facebook zillionaires, has purchased the The New Republic. Today, Hughes announces his plans for The New Republic:
In the next era of The New Republic, we will aggressively adapt to the newest information technologies without sacrificing our commitment to serious journalism. We will look to tell the most important stories in politics and the arts and provide the type of rigorous analysis that The New Republic has been known for. We will ask pressing questions of our leaders, share groundbreaking new ideas, and shed new light on the state of politics and culture.
The New Republic has been and will remain a journal of progressive values, but it will above all aim to appeal to independent thinkers on the left and the right who search for fresh ideas and a deeper understanding of the challenges our world faces.
I consider the possibilities for a revival of
The New Republic below the Squiggle of Doom.
I well recall the first time I came across The New Republic, I was a freshman, just 18, at my college dormitory when for some reason or other I and some other students were at the apartment of the resident manager, who was then I think the impossibly old age of 24 or so. While the meeting or whatever it was went on, I noticed a magazine I'd never seen before on the coffee table and picked it up and started reading.
This of course was The New Republic. The breadth of coverage, and the quality of the editorials and commentary were amazing to me. Previously the only magazines even remotely political which I'd seen were things like Time and U.S. News and World Report, and I only saw those because my grandparents subscribed to them.
Now, this was at a time before CNN, and before the 24 news cycle. Cable was rare, and most people simply watched broadcast television. There was such a thing as "the news", and it came at designated parts of the day. Newspaper in the morning, Walter Cronkite in the evening. There were weekly magazines, including Time, which did longer analyses of the news, cultural trends, etc.
Of course there was no internet, no cell phones, no voice mail. Ownership of computers was possible if you were really nerdy, but the term "PC" for "personal computer", originally a marketing device for IBM, hadn't even been invented yet. Fax machines existed but were noisy, expensive, and slow. Very few people had them. Long-distance telephone calls were expensive and to a great degree communication was by written letter. This was so much the case that I recall that one of the first assignments in my freshman political science class was to read an article by Eric Broder in the Washington Post called Rise of the Vigueries about the then new "direct mail" method of appealing to conservative voters that was being pioneered by Richard Viguerie, which in the internet age must seem archaic.
The New Republic was a weekly, which meant in those times it was as current as one could be. A matter of weeks between a policy proposal and the analysis and voter reaction to the same was the general rule of those times. I mentioned Viguerie -- his plan was to shorten this window to a matter of days using direct mail, and now, of course with the internet, it is down to a matter of hours.
In those times, I read all the political magazines, especially The New Republic. There really was not anything comparable at the time, as there were very few weekly political magazines, and of the monthlies, both Harpers and the Atlantic were then rather stuffy and moribund. The Progressive, The Nation, and Mother Jones were also published then, but I found their coverage to be narrower than The New Republic and also they were monthlies.
Something happened to the The New Republic in the 1980s, and I'm not quite sure what. When I finished college, I was longer in ready contact with libraries on a day-to-day basis, and so I didn't keep up on the political magazines as much as I had. The New Republic, to which I had actually subscribed for a year at the age of 22, was an expensive magazine, and eventually I started just buying an issue here and there at newstands. By 1990 or so, I noticed it was no longer being offered for sale, even at very large magazine distributors such as Powell's in Portland Oregon. I seldom purchase any magazines of any kind now, but up to about 2000 or so, I used to buy Harpers and the Atlantic quite often, because unlike the The New Republic, these actually were on news stands.
What I hear Chris Hughes proposing is a plan to restore The New Republic to its position of 30 years ago as the au courant journal of progressive thought and literature. I wish him success with that. But I can't imagine that 18 to 24 year-olds are going to be reading The New Republic on-line or in print anytime soon, and without bringing in younger readers, I don't see how a publication or website can really become influential.
Hughes, who is too young to ever recall the times that I am speaking of here, seems however to miss the boat, as the world has changed from the time when a relative small number of people set the terms of the public discourse. The internet has changed all that permanently.
We are no longer readers but writers as well. Daliy Kos is the best evidence of this. The new Vigueries are more likely to be the Jesse LaGrecas who combine journalism (via blog) and activism, they aren't going to be quietly reading a weekly publication and occasionally typing out letters to the editor. If Chris Hughes wants to recapture the former primacy of The New Republic, he needs to abandon the older ideas of progressive journalism.