3 ms·
The magazine has almost always lost money Magazines like The New Republic are effectively public-facing think tanks, and were never meant to be enterprises. P
by mynameishere 12y ago
The magazine has almost always lost money
Magazines like The New Republic are effectively public-facing think tanks, and were never meant to be enterprises. Print journalism as a whole is going in that direction. Billionaires like Carlos Slim and Jeff Bezos will prop up the big papers, and multi-millionaires like Chris Hughes will prop up the little papers.
Hughes (bizarrely) confused himself with a businessman, and confused TNR with a business. No. It's always been a political mouthpiece. You're supposed to lose money.
- rpenm 12y agoYou're not going to have much political influence ("travel") if you don't have readership. TNR has been floundering for an ideological voice since the end of the Cold War, and took quite a few hits to its credibility under Peretz. Readership was down for a reason. A sympathetic view would be that Hughes wanted to go for a technical solution - invest in TNR's digital presence - rather than completely purge the staff as Peretz did in the 1970s. Too bad the effect was the same.
- aridiculous 12y agoWhen you had a Supreme Court justice (Ginsburg) in your readership, you had political influence.
- aphelion 12y agoThe influence journals like TNR and The New Criterion once had were wholly unrelated to their tiny readership numbers and instead depended upon the fact that they were for a time considered required reading for much of the political and cultural elite.
- pfortuny 12y agoExactly: you are eager to lose money because you value the outcome in a different (non-monetary) way. Value is not necessarily convertible to dollars.
- calinet6 12y agoI think that's exactly it: the output is a complex web of societal effects, and thus does not translate easily into dollars. It is possible that money be extracted out of that output if you push it, but it comes at the expense of some part of that complexity that forever lies in a tug-of-war between authenticity and power.