Two weeks ago, Washingtonians gathered to celebrate the 100th birthday of The New Republic, the magazine that helped shape Woodrow Wilson’s views on democracy and torpedo Bill Clinton’s health plan.

On Thursday, the venerable Washington institution announced it is shifting its headquarters to New York, amid a shakeup that saw the resignation of its highest editors and promised to redefine the identity of a century-old institution that once served as liberalism’s leading voice.


Franklin Foer, the top editor, sent a memo to staff in the afternoon announcing that he would be quitting due to differences of vision with the magazine’s owner, Chris Hughes, a 31-year-old Facebook co-founder who bought the magazine in 2012 and now aspires to reposition it as a “digital media company.” The move came, sources said, after Foer discovered that Hughes had already hired his replacement, Gabriel Snyder, a Bloomberg Media editor who formerly ran The Atlantic Wire blog.

In an impromptu address at the magazine’s office in Washington, Leon Wieseltier also told staff that he would be quitting after 31 years as literary editor. His time at TNR, he said through tears, was “the best thing I’ve done in my little life.”

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On Friday, the majority of The New Republic’s masthead resigned en masse to protest the decision. Nine of the magazine’s 12 senior editors submitted letters of resignation to Hughes and chief executive Guy Vidra, as did two executive editors, the digital media editor, the legislative affairs editor, and two arts editors. At least 20 of the magazine’s contributing editors also requested that their names be removed from the magazine’s masthead.

The New Republic will continue to maintain a D.C. office, but be based primarily in New York. It will also cut its publication frequency in half, publishing just 10 print issues a year. Vidra announced those changes in a memo to staff following Foer’s resignation.

Through its history, The New Republic has been a vehicle for progressive thinking, while priding itself on a willingness to challenge liberal orthodoxy, from the left or right. In its early decades, it provided intellectual fuel for the emergence of the United States as an international force. And in recent decades, particularly after the 9/11 attacks, it continued to urge a robust foreign policy, even endorsing the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Whether it can, or even wants to, maintain a similar posture as it plots a radically different future was a matter of speculation among the magazine’s many illustrious readers and alumni.

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Hughes, Foer and Wieseltier all did not respond to requests for interviews and comment on Thursday. The New Republic’s spokesperson, Annie Augustine, also did not respond to requests for interviews with Hughes, Vidra and Snyder.

Franklin Foer, left, and Leon Wieseltier announced they would be quitting. | Getty

In his memo, Vidra wrote that TNR would be making “significant investments in creating a more effective and efficient newsroom as well as improved products across all platforms.”

“Given the frequency reduction, we will also be making some changes to staff structure,” Vidra wrote. “This is not a decision we make lightly, but we believe this restructuring is critical to the long-term success of the company.”

The shakeup has been in the works for months. When Hughes bought TNR in 2012, at the age of 28, he had aspired to restore respectability and influence to the financially crippled magazine. He reinstated Foer, who had served as editor from 2006 to 2010, and gave Wieseltier his backing.

From the get-go, The New Republic struggled to make a mark on Washington and Hughes struggled to generate ad revenue. By 2014, Hughes was thinking of ways to restructure the magazine for digital growth, even at the expense of its legacy. In September, he hired Vidra, the former general manager of Yahoo News, to serve as TNR’s first-ever chief executive.

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Vidra’s vision for TNR was radically different than that of Foer and Wieseltier. In meetings with staff, he spoke of the magazine as though it were a Silicon Valley startup, sources said. He talked about “disruption” and said he wanted to “break shit.” He referred to himself as a “wartime CEO.” At one point, he proposed giving every employee shares in the company, suggesting that he had plans to make it public.

Sources said that Vidra also showed little regard for Foer or his writers. In a meeting held in November, he made it clear to staff that he found the magazine boring and had stopped reading longform articles. Three weeks later, at the magazine’s 100-year anniversary gala — a star-studded, black-tie affair featuring speeches from former President Bill Clinton and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — Vidra mispronounced Foer’s name while introducing him to the audience. (He pronounced “Foer” as “Foyer.”)

In a turnaround that stunned staffers and contributors, Hughes decided to stake TNR’s future on Vidra’s vision rather than Foer’s. In an interview with The New York Times last month, Hughes said he no longer even thinks about TNR as a magazine. “Today, I don’t call it a magazine at all. I think we’re a digital media company.”

Both Foer and Wieseltier were aware of the changes taking place, even if Hughes and Vidra didn’t always tell them. Hughes, sources said, was terribly conflict averse. Foer found out that Gabriel Snyder had been tapped to replace him only after hearing that the Bloomberg Media editor was making attempts to hire people for TNR in New York. Foer then approached Hughes to ask if Snyder had indeed been hired to replace him, and Hughes came clean. Foer and Wieseltier then moved to resign.

Chris Hughes, left, bought the magazine in 2012 and now aspires to reposition it as a “digital media company.” | AP Photo

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Hughes and Vidra’s changes and their handling of the transition have rankled many current and former staffers and contributors.

“I was under the impression when Chris Hughes took over that he understood the importance of and wanted to preserve long-form journalism,” Robert Kagan, a contributing editor at the magazine, told POLITICO. “That’s certainly what he told me when I met with him.”

Kagan told POLITICO that he would be resigning as a contributing editor. The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza also requested, via Twitter, that his name be removed from the list of contributing editors. Jonathan Chait of New York magazine has also asked that his name be removed.

On Thursday night, staffers gathered at Nopa, a Washington bar, to lament the change.

“We won’t be excited to go to work without Frank there,” one told POLITICO. Others described themselves as “pissed” and “devastated.”

Late Thursday, Vidra sent another email to TNR staff assuring them that the D.C. office would not be dissolving.

“We are going to be sending an invite to our all-hands meeting tomorrow momentarily and are planning on holding the meeting at 10 a.m.,” Vidra wrote. “I will be in DC in person to help answer questions. I also want to take this opportunity to clarify something from my earlier note. While I discussed our move to a new, expanded office in New York, by no means does that mean that we are shuttering DC, nor are we asking employees to relocate. We are committed to supporting the DC staff and the vital work you do every day.”

Still, the center of operations is moving to New York, and the widely held belief now is that Hughes plans to use TNR to chase clicks and web traffic, a la BuzzFeed, while sacrificing its reputable brand as a political and literary magazine.

“Assuming Chris really does plan to dumb it down in the name of clicks, what’s maddening is the way he has betrayed the premise on which he bought it. It’s like buying a historic Victorian mansion with the promise of preserving it — and then carving it into condos two years later,” one former longtime TNR staffer told POLITICO.

“I hope Chris realizes how much intellectual firepower he’s losing here — and how hard it is to fake intellectual substance,” the former staffer said. “It makes no sense to publish clickbait under the TNR name (again, if that’s really his plan), you might as well just build a new thing from scratch.”

On Twitter, the Washington media establishment responded with equal shock and disgust.

“Awful to hear @FranklinFoer and Leon Wieseltier are out at @tnr. There are no better journalists out there,” Peter Baker, the New York Times’ chief White House correspondent, wrote. “Time to cancel the subscription.”

“Frank Foer and Leon Wieseltier are supremely talented and will be fine,” wrote The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg. “It’s The New Republic that’s in desperate trouble.”

Hadas Gold contributed to this report.

Correction: This post has been updated to correct the spelling of Kagan’s name.

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CORRECTION: Corrected by: Jennifer Shutt @ 12/04/2014 09:42 PM Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified Robert Kagan.