Inside the Collapse of The New Republic

Ruth Bader Ginsburg gave the toast at The New Republics centennial gala in November. Last week twothirds of the people...
Ruth Bader Ginsburg gave the toast at The New Republic’s centennial gala in November. Last week, two-thirds of the people on the magazine’s editorial masthead resigned.PHOTOGRAPH BY TERESA KROEGER/GETTY

Last Friday morning, Chris Hughes, the owner of The New Republic, and Guy Vidra, the magazine’s C.E.O., presided over a meeting at the publication’s Penn Quarter offices in Washington, D.C. It had been a busy twenty-four hours: a day earlier, Hughes had forced out the magazine’s editor, Franklin Foer, and Vidra had announced that the hundred-year-old opinion magazine, which was founded to “bring sufficient enlightenment to the problems of the nation,” would be reduced from twenty to ten issues a year and would move to New York, where it would be reinvented as a “vertically integrated digital-media company.” Minutes before the Friday meeting began, most of the magazine’s writers and editors had resigned in protest.

Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook with an estimated fortune of more than half a billion dollars, bought T.N.R. in 2012, and the Washington headquarters was a reflection of his ambitions. The office is bright, with an open floor plan for writers and a row of well-appointed editors’ offices with windows overlooking the National Portrait Gallery. Bound volumes from the magazine’s history line a long wall, and a small library decorated with photographs of T.N.R.s founders and early contributors serves as a retreat for quiet reading. Hughes signed a ten-year lease and told his writers that the magazine would stay in Washington for a long time.

As the remaining staff gathered around a long conference table, Vidra set up a computer with his notes on it. Hughes joined from New York via a video-conferencing system.

Vidra read from his laptop. Hughes had hired him in October from Yahoo, and he spoke in a Silicon Valley-inflected jargon that many of T.N.R.s journalists found grating and bewildering. As soon as he arrived, he embarked on a project to transform the modest-circulation journal of politics and culture into something more like a technology company. In conversations with Foer, he deemed it necessary to rid the staff of old-timers who he believed were ill-suited for the transformation.

That problem had now been solved. Foer, who spent fourteen years at T.N.R., was gone. Leon Wieseltier, the magazine’s literary editor, who worked there for thirty-two years, left with him. So did the executive editors Rachel Morris and Greg Veis, who were responsible for editing the magazine’s in-depth journalism; nine of the magazine’s eleven active senior writers; Jeffrey Rosen, the longtime legal-affairs editor; Hillary Kelly, the digital-media editor; and six of Wieseltier’s culture writers and editors (covering film, art, music, poetry, dance, and architecture). Thirty-six out of thirty-eight contributing editors, who are a mix of contract writers, semi-regular contributors, and T.N.R. alumni, resigned or asked to have their names removed from the masthead (including me: I am hardly an impartial observer). In all, two-thirds of the names on the editorial masthead were gone. “I wish I could have walked out, too,” a junior staffer who is still there and couldn’t afford to quit told me. In a letter to Hughes, twenty former writers and editors, including several who now work at The New Yorker, said that Hughes and Vidra had brought about the “destruction” of The New Republic.

At the meeting in the conference room, Vidra addressed the depleted staff. “I feel like there’s been a lot of misperception, and maybe some of that is my fault,” he said. “Undoubtedly a lot of it is.” He mentioned the incoming editor, Gabriel Snyder, who had previously worked as the editor of Gawker and the Wire. Snyder did not know many people on staff, and had never edited a magazine. But Vidra said that Snyder “was eager to get into the role, and he wants to meet with all of you.”

Hughes, speaking from the video screen, sounded angry and emotional. Staffers in New York told me that he welled up as he spoke. He told colleagues later that he was unprepared for the scale of the resignations and depth of the protest, especially from people who he had spent the past two years cultivating. In the meeting, Hughes described the changes in the magazine’s frequency and editorship, but insisted that a radical transformation into a digital-media company with a greater emphasis on profits did not mean that The New Republic, which was co-founded by Walter Lippmann, would devolve into a click-bait factory. He explained that he had studied history and literature at Harvard. “It’s always been a surprise to the rest of the world that I care about tradition and about institutions,” he said, “because we live in a cultural moment which very much rewards the language of startups and Silicon Valley.”

Hughes insisted that deep reporting and ideas would still be important to the magazine. “That’s not enough,” he added. “We also have to do videos. We also have to do interactive graphics. We also have to be increasingly smarter—we’ve already made good progress, but even more—about how we use social media.” The session finished abruptly with Hughes banging on the table and declaring, “This institution has been around for one hundred fucking years,” and promising that it wasn’t dead.

Vidra and Hughes had another problem on their hands. The next issue of T.N.R. was scheduled to close the following Wednesday, and writers had begun to withdraw their articles. Vidra, two of the remaining editors at the magazine, and two members of the business staff gathered in the library. Former editors told me that, as far as they know, the magazine has never missed an issue in its history.

Hughes addressed the group by speakerphone. “How are we going to produce the issue?” he asked.

I spent nine years at The New Republic, from 1998 to 2007, before I joined The New Yorker. Franklin Foer is a close friend, and I know almost every individual involved in this story, including Hughes, who last year made me an offer to return to T.N.R. This account is based on internal e-mails, recordings of meetings, contemporaneous notes, and conversations with about two dozen people, most of whom would not speak for attribution. On Sunday night, I interviewed Hughes for forty minutes.

Hughes bought T.N.R. two years ago in what was essentially a fire sale. The magazine has almost always lost money, and for the previous five years a small team of wealthy friends of the magazine had been sustaining it. But by the fall of 2011, the losses deepened and the owners were ready to sell. Richard Just, the editor at the time, had the unenviable choice of trying to find a savior for the magazine or watching it die slowly. Just, who now runs _National Journal _magazine, started as the online editor in 2004 and had worked his way up the print masthead to the top position, where he garnered T.N.R.s first National Magazine Award nomination for general excellence in twenty years. He was determined to find a new buyer and save the institution. A mutual friend connected Just and Hughes via e-mail. They had breakfast in New York, and when Just returned to Washington he told Wieseltier that he thought they had found their buyer. Just, Wieseltier, and Hughes spent the next four months discussing the details.

“In retrospect, it was too good to be true,” someone with knowledge of the talks said. “Chris said all the right things about not wanting to control.”

Days before the sale was finalized, on a conference call about the announcement, a public-relations consultant Hughes had brought in to manage the transition made a passing reference to Hughes becoming T.N.R.s new editor-in-chief. Hughes had never told Just that he was taking the title.

Just, who was on the call, was blindsided. He told Hughes that it was a mistake, explaining that under Martin Peretz, the magazine’s highly controversial owner and editor-in-chief from 1974 to 2007, T.N.R. was seen as a rich guy’s plaything, and that Peretz’s personal politics and vituperative writing and management style had often overshadowed the good work of the magazine. Peretz had been known for discovering talented young writers, but his history of failing to hire many women or African-Americans and his increasingly disdainful writings on race and the Middle East marred his legacy and was, for his former colleagues, a recent and painful memory. Just argued that Hughes, a major Democratic donor whose husband would later run for office, might be accused of turning the magazine into a vanity project. Hughes listened, but said that he would keep the editor-in-chief title. Just, worried they had made a terrible mistake, took his concerns to Larry Grafstein, a Wall Street banker and the chairman of the magazine’s group of investors. He told Grafstein that they should consider blocking the sale, but it was too late.

Two days after Hughes purchased T.N.R., he informed Just that, as editor-in-chief, he would now write half of the magazine’s editorials. Just could write the other half, but Hughes would clear them. A few days later, as the first issue under the new owner was being printed, Hughes learned that the cover included a headline with negative language about private equity: “Attack of the Crybabies: Why Hedge Fund Honchos Turned Against Obama.” Hughes stopped the press run and the headline was changed to simply read, “Why Hedge Fund Honchos Turned Against Obama.” Two months later, Hughes fired Just and replaced him with Foer, who was beloved by the staff and who had edited the magazine from 2006 to 2010.

There were other early signs that Hughes would act in a way that editors considered to be meddling. He accompanied Foer to an interview with President Obama, whose campaign Hughes had worked on in 2008, instead of allowing his editor to do it on his own. The resulting piece was the cover story for a newly redesigned magazine, released in January, 2013. Hughes could be a micromanager, too. He capped the length of the articles in Wieseltier’s culture-and-arts section, known as “the back of the book,” where essays were famously long and unabashedly complex. “If Leon went five hundred words over, he would make him cut the piece back,” a senior staffer said.

Despite the initial turbulence, most writers and editors agree that Hughes’s early days running the magazine with Foer were among the best periods to work at T.N.R. “I enjoyed—and felt good about—working for Chris way more than I did working for Marty,” one longtime writer who resigned last week told me. “He did a lot of good things, first and foremost by saving the magazine at a time of mortal financial peril.”

T.N.R.s Web site was spare and understaffed. Hughes seemed focussed on digital journalism, but he also approved and encouraged budgets that were disproportionately geared toward long-form print pieces, which were expensive and time-consuming to produce. Travel budgets were substantial enough to send Julia Ioffe to cover the Winter Olympics in Sochi, the plight of liberal democrats in Moscow, and the revolution in Ukraine. Foer sent Graeme Wood, a young writer, to cover human-rights abuses in Burma and impending genocide in the Central African Republic. Alec MacGillis spent nine months on one magazine piece. Hughes seemed to love the print magazine and would weigh in with T.N.R.s art director about small details, such as the size of the type. “I’ve hit the owner jackpot,” Foer told me and others at the time.

In 2014, Hughes’s personal life and business life became increasingly intertwined, in ways that would coincide with changes at the magazine. His husband, Sean Eldridge, was running for Congress in a district that spanned the Catskills and the Hudson Valley, but his political campaign was not going the way he had hoped. Eldridge and Hughes had bought a two-million-dollar home in a district in which neither of them had ever lived, and Eldridge began investing in local businesses in what was widely seen as a transparent effort to influence the race.

Hughes was hardly distant with staff members. He frequently socialized with them. During a trip to Kiev, where the magazine had organized a conference with Ukrainian activists and thinkers, Hughes stayed out until the early-morning hours drinking with Ioffe and others. In July of this year, Hughes attended a birthday party for Foer at the editor’s family’s house in Pennsylvania. Hughes gave a warm toast to Foer, declaring, according to someone who was there, that their “friendship was a deep and meaningful thing to him” and that the two men “were going to be intellectual partners moving into the next decade.”

But in the late summer, numerous current and former staffers told me, differences between Hughes and his editorial team about the direction of the magazine began to widen. During a meeting with newsstand consultants who were advising T.N.R. on how to sell more copies, one of the magazine’s editors said something disparaging about The Atlantic ’s covers. Hughes yelled at the editor, “The Atlantic sells a lot of newsstand issues and we have to respond to the data!” Hughes wouldn’t talk to the offending editor for two weeks, and their relationship never recovered.

Ioffe dates the abrupt change in mood to late summer, shortly after Foer’s birthday party—the period when, as many current and former T.N.R. employees noted, Eldridge’s expensive campaign to win a congressional seat started looking hopeless. “We all liked him; he seemed to like us,” she told me. “Everything was going great. Then, in the summer, something snapped, and he started talking to me about money and how we’re losing money and he’s tired of it. And then he became just downright contemptuous and hostile toward us.”

Foer and Hughes began a search for a C.E.O., who Hughes hoped would relieve him of some of the daily burdens of management. Foer wanted to hire someone with a strong background in magazine publishing, but Hughes overruled him, selecting Guy Vidra for the job. In a press release announcing that he’d been hired, Vidra described T.N.R. as a “storied brand,” a corporate phrase that rankled some writers there. The release made no mention of Foer and suggested that Vidra now had editorial control of the magazine. “One thing I’ve learned over the past two years is that to preserve and strengthen great institutions, you have to change them,” Hughes said in the same release, which also announced “the establishment of a separate investment vehicle, The New Republic Fund, created to back early-stage technology companies predominantly in the digital media, analytics, and video spaces.” For the first time, T.N.R. was described as a “digital-media company.”

The editors were hardly opposed to giving greater attention to digital media, but they came to believe that Hughes was losing interest in the actual content of T.N.R.s journalism and cultural criticism. “The only compliment Chris or Guy ever said about a piece was that it ‘did well,’ or it ‘travelled well,’ ” one of the staffers who resigned said. “If we had published Nietzsche’s ‘Birth of Tragedy,’ the only question would be, ‘Did it travel well?’ ‘Yes, Wagner tweeted it.’ ”

Hughes, in contrast, told me that he and Vidra were “holding on to the traditional values of the place: its voice of skepticism, provocative argumentation, deep reporting, et cetera, et cetera, and at the same time introducing new elements of experimentation and innovation. I mean, these things get called Silicon Valley jargon or buzzwords, just as ‘long-form journalism’ is also a kind of jargon.”

Hughes also told me earlier this week, “I think Frank had real questions about whether or not he was the right editor for the role.” Foer had told Hughes several months ago, “I don’t want us to become a technology company. I might not be the right person for a magazine geared toward Millennials.” Foer later told people that “the idea of Vidra turning T.N.R. into a tech startup was like a ‘Saturday Night Live’ sketch.”

Hughes’s eroding relationship with the staff took on an ideological edge. On the morning that Tim Cook, the C.E.O. of Apple, announced that he was gay, MacGillis wrote a note to “the Plank,” T.N.R.s internal e-mail listserv for writers and editors. “I see the celebration of his announcement, while entirely justifiable, as another sign of what’s happened to liberalism today, where rights/identity liberalism trumps economic liberalism,” he wrote. “This is, after all, a guy who embodies so much of what’s amiss in the age of inequality—pulling down $378 million in 2011 alone; Apple skirting taxes more brazenly than anyone else—yet those revelations have caused barely a stir.”

Hughes responded to the note six minutes later: “I think those are valid issues, although Apple has acted squarely within the law,” he wrote. “The law itself is fucked up. But I don’t think you can underestimate the difficulty of his decision or how tone deaf that argument would be today.”

The other editorial employees on the list were surprised by the response. It was an internal listserv for writers and editors, and the staffers didn’t realize that Hughes, who had relinquished his title as editor-in-chief when he installed Vidra, was on it. MacGillis responded by saying that he would hold off on writing, but added, “Just for the record, though, it is not so clear that Apple acted squarely within the law. The law’s a mess, but Apple pushed the bounds of it more than anyone.” He pasted text from a piece in the Times that questioned some of Apple’s practices.

“I’m confused,” Hughes wrote back. “Has anyone, including this article, said what they did was illegal? Companies have an obligation to their shareholders to maximize shareholder value, including through strategic tax planning.”

Several months earlier, Noam Scheiber, a senior editor at the magazine, had started to report a story about Andreessen Horowitz, a major Silicon Valley venture-capital firm. It was slated to be a feature in T.N.R.s hundredth-anniversary issue. But Hughes told Foer that he was scheduled to meet with Andreessen Horowitz about investing in another venture. Scheiber was reassigned to work on a profile of Valerie Jarrett. (Hughes denies that he gave orders to delay or cancel the Andreessen story.)

In early October, Wieseltier appeared on “The Colbert Report” to promote a book of essays from T.N.R.s history called “Insurrections of the Mind.” “Chris seemed pretty pissed about Leon’s ‘Colbert’ appearance,” a staffer who is still at the magazine told me. “Editorial people were talking about how great Leon was, and Chris was angry that the first thing Leon said was what’s wrong with American culture is ‘too much digital.’ ”

On the morning of October 24th, Vidra made his first appearance at T.N.R.s Washington offices for a presentation to the whole staff. He opened a PowerPoint slide show and stood up to address the group. “I like to walk around when I speak,” he said. He offered a series of statements intended to describe a transformation that could make the magazine profitable, but it came across to the editors as a jumble of clichés and tech jargon. “We’re going to be a hundred-year-old startup,” he said. The magazine needed “to align ourselves from the metabolism perspective” and create “magical experiences for both the content and the product design” and be “fearless in innovation and experimentation” and “change some of the DNA of the organization.” He said that he wanted to institute “a process for annual reviews” and effect a “cultural change where we need to just embrace innovation, experimentation, and cross-functional collaboration,” and said that the editors, writers, and business side would need to “speak to each other much more effectively and efficiently in our gatherings” in order “to take us to the next stage.”

Vidra didn’t mention the magazine’s journalism. “Never did he once allude to the history of the magazine,” a former staffer said. “It was just terrifying rhetoric about change without any substance to back it up.” To some staffers, it felt as if Hughes had sent Vidra to scare them into writing more, buzzier Web items or risk being replaced.

Vidra ended his talk with a speech that T.N.R. writers and editors would quote mockingly for weeks. “They say that there’s two types of C.E.O.s,” he said. “There’s the peacetime C.E.O. and the wartime C.E.O. Not to be overly dramatic about it, but this is sort of a war. This is a wartime period. That just means that we need to change a lot of things. We need to just break shit. Sorry to say, we’ve got to break shit and embrace being uncomfortable sometimes. And it’s scary. It’s definitely a scary thing to do. But it’s also fun: you know, lean up against the wall and break it.”

He paused, and then continued in less dramatic fashion. “So, I hope you guys are as excited as I am about it. I think it will be a super adventure! Any questions? I have no answers, but feel free.”

When Vidra arrived in October, he had started talking to potential replacements for Foer. One of the first people he spoke to was Hillary Frey, an editor with whom he had worked at Yahoo News. Vidra and Hughes also started discussions with Snyder, who was working at Bloomberg News as a consultant. Hughes and Vidra insist that the conversations were general, and didn’t involve any offers or promises, though Snyder and Frey believed they were in discussions to replace Foer. But the timing was awkward: Foer was completing the anniversary issue and helping Hughes prepare for an anniversary gala on November 19th, in Washington, at which Bill Clinton was scheduled to speak.

After the meeting in which Vidra made his presentation, Ioffe e-mailed Hughes in a panic:

IOFFE: “Question: Is Frank staying?”
HUGHES: “I should hope so! Why do you ask?”
IOFFE: “I think there’s ... some misunderstanding or something, but I don’t know if you noticed Frank’s face during the meeting and the way he took off as soon as it was over. I think people are a bit confused (and panicked) about what Frank’s role is going to be?”
HUGHES: “That’s concerning. Thanks for the heads up and of course.”
IOFFE: “Yeah. I just had a chat with Frank. He is really upset.”
HUGHES: “I spoke to him. I think there has been some meaningful miscommunication which we are rectifying. Thanks as always for reaching out—can’t tell you how much that is appreciated.”
IOFFE: “Oh, good. For a while there it seemed like Frank was leaving and us senior editors were like, I guess we’re leaving, too! What a crazy day.”

Her intention was to let Hughes know that if he did fire Foer he would face a rebellion. Rachel Morris, an executive editor, also had a private conversation with Hughes that day. “Chris reassured me that Frank was the editor and would remain the editor,” she told me. “He was adamant about that.”

After the meeting, Foer considered quitting, but he ultimately decided that he should stay and figure out what Hughes really intended to do with T.N.R. Maybe it was all a big misunderstanding, and Vidra’s ideas, if implemented correctly, could actually expand T.N.R.’s digital reach, lead to new revenues, and keep the enterprise healthy. Meanwhile, Foer had been cheered by the favorable response to an October 9th cover story he wrote arguing that Amazon, which was fighting with the book publisher Hachette, was a monopoly. But on October 27th, three days after the infamous Vidra presentation, Amazon’s ad agency sent T.N.R. an e-mail concerning a campaign for its new political TV show, “Alpha House.” “In light of the cover article about Amazon, Amazon has decided to terminate the Alpha House campaign currently running on The New Republic,” the e-mail said. “Please confirm receipt of this email and that the campaign has been terminated.” It was signed “Team Amazon.”

Hughes forwarded the note to Foer, and Foer forwarded it to Andrew Wylie, a prominent literary agent, and Douglas Preston, the head of Authors United, which has been leading the charge against Amazon’s book-selling practices. Foer wanted to make Amazon’s suspension of advertising public, but Hughes insisted that he not. But without Foer’s knowledge, Preston had forwarded the note to a reporter, who then e-mailed Hughes.

Foer was returning from a trip to San Francisco, where he had given a talk at the World Affairs Council about the anniversary of the magazine. Hughes and Vidra wanted to know if he had leaked the Amazon details. The reporter ultimately decided not to pursue the story, and at the end of the day, when he was back in Washington, Hughes sent Foer an e-mail expressing disappointment over the episode.

For the next few weeks, Foer concentrated on the release of the anniversary issue and on the gala. Perhaps, he thought, the success of those two events would turn things around for him. But during that period, Vidra and Hughes continued to hold conversations with other people who could replace him. In the meantime, the magazine sent out invitations to various luminaries in media, business, and government for its centenary event.

“Chris was waiting for the gala to end,” a former staffer said. “It reminds me of ‘The Godfather: Part II’: ‘I don’t want anything to happen to him while my mother is alive.’ ” On October 29th, Hughes and Vidra’s discussions about potential replacements for Foer were almost revealed when several media reporters contacted T.N.R.s communications director, Annie Augustine, to follow up on rumors about an impending switch in editors. Vidra assured Foer that it wasn’t true, but he refused to issue a public statement. According to several staffers, Vidra told Augustine, “I’m not going to let a media reporter back me into a corner.”

The leak drove a bigger wedge between the two camps, and the atmosphere in T.N.R.s Washington and New York offices became increasingly troubled. Meanwhile, Wieseltier, Foer, Hughes, and Vidra were all scheduled to speak at the gala, and they each prepared for it knowing that it might be the beginning of the end of their partnership. Hughes and Vidra barely spoke to the editorial staff anymore. “For the three weeks before the gala, everyone was so anxious,” Ioffe said. “There was no more communication with Chris and Guy. They just ignored us. We saw them at the gala and they were standoffish.”

Bill Clinton gave a long, rambling speech punctuated with occasional moments of real eloquence, and Wynton Marsalis played “Happy Birthday” on his trumpet. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg delivered a heartfelt toast celebrating T.N.R.s history.

While Clinton, Ginsburg, and Marsalis provided a dignified glamour to the proceedings, it was the contrasting addresses of the magazine’s owner and editors that provided the drama. Hughes talked about radical—but unspecified—change, while Foer celebrated the magazine’s intellectual heritage. Wieseltier responded to Hughes with a message about stewardship. “We are not only disruptors and incubators and accelerators,” he said, seemingly mocking the language that Hughes and Vidra often used. “We are also stewards and guardians and trustees.” He went on,“The questions that we must ask ourselves, and that our historians and our children will ask of us, are these: How will what we create compare with what we inherited? Will we add to our tradition or will we subtract from it? Will we enrich it or will we deplete it?”

Hillary Frey told T.N.R. in late November that she was not interested in becoming editor, and Gabriel Snyder was officially given the position on the day before Thanksgiving. T.N.R. now had, in effect, two editors. Snyder began talking to writers, including Alex Pareene, formerly of Gawker and Salon, about joining him at the magazine. Unsurprisingly, those conversations began to circulate. One of T.N.R.s editors was reliably informed that Snyder had been offered Foer’s job, and he told Foer the news last week. Foer prepared a resignation letter and confronted his boss on Thursday, December 4th, to confirm the change. Hughes said it was true. He had been planning to wait until Monday to make the announcement—an odd choice, considering that it was two days before the next issue of the magazine was due to close. (Snyder declined to talk to me on the record.)

Vidra also declined to be interviewed for this article. But he sent me a general statement. “When I started at The New Republic, I was excited to work with Frank, who is an incredibly talented editor,” he wrote. “From the start, I had every hope and expectation that he would continue in this role. After time, however, it became clear that we needed to move in a different direction. While we felt the decision was necessary, I certainly regret the way it transpired.”

After speaking with Hughes, Foer walked into Wieseltier’s office and told him that he was resigning immediately. Wieseltier, who had survived numerous changes in editor, told Foer that he would quit with him. The two men addressed the staff.

“I want to be clear that I’m not resigning because anyone did anything personal to me,” Wieseltier said. “I’m resigning because I believe the principles of my work are being violated. A great cultural institution in America is being vandalized, and I don’t approve of the direction in which this magazine is being taken. In my legendarily long work life at The New Republic, I have never seen someone treated as shabbily as Frank Foer.”

Foer pointed toward the bound volumes along the wall. “You know how Leon and I feel about this place,” he said. “We love it so deeply that you’d have to scrape us off the walls. For us to arrive at the point where we feel compelled to leave tells you everything you need to know about what’s happening.”

After Foer and Wieseltier’s announcement, the New York editorial staff gathered at an editor’s nearby apartment; most of the Washington editorial staff met in the T.N.R. library, and the two groups dialed into a conference call. They talked about their frustrations with Vidra’s seeming lack of interest in the magazine’s content. But most of all they talked about what they considered the dishonesty of Hughes and Vidra. “There was very little sense that The New Republic was something that could be saved,” an editor who was there told me. “After months—literally months—of being lied to and bullied around and made to feel like shit, all the while being studiously jargoned at when we asked for specifics about T.N.R.s future, most people had had enough. It wasn’t just about the way Frank was fired, though that was awful. And it wasn’t just about Gabe’s hiring, though some had misgivings. It was more about: How can we work for these people?” The conversations continued late into the night and resumed early the next morning.

The editors didn’t resent the idea that the magazine had to make money, or break even, and they knew that, in a digital age, things had to change. But they didn’t like the way it was being done, and they particularly didn’t like the new person who had come in to do it. “If you say you are committed to great journalism, then empowering someone like Guy to pick the next editor shows you’re not telling the truth,” another former staffer who agonized over the decision to leave said.

One particularly high-flown expression of the pervasive frustration among the writers came from Cynthia Ozick, a novelist and critic who has written for The New Republic for many years. After Wieseltier resigned, she e-mailed him a poem, inspired by Byron’s “The Destruction of Sennacherib,” that former staffers circulated:

The Siliconian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in wireless gold,
Crying Media Company Vertically Integrated!
As all before them they willfully extirpated:
The Back of the Book and the Front and the Middle,
Until all that was left was digital piddle,
And Thought and Word lay dead and cold.

On Friday afternoon, back in the library, Vidra, Hughes, and the remaining editors scrambled to save the issue. “There’s no content,” Amanda Silverman, the deputy editor, told Hughes. “We can’t do it.” As the day progressed, the situation became dire. One by one, most of the remaining authors who had articles in the issue notified the magazine that they did not want their work published. Almost the entire back of the book, which was already in galleys and mostly finished, collapsed. Hughes, Vidra, and Snyder cancelled the issue. The next one won’t appear until early February.

Vidra gathered several editorial staffers who were confused about the events and angry that he had refused to take questions during the morning meeting. One person asked why Foer had been replaced with “an aggregator.”

“Frank Foer wasn’t bringing forth ideas that would help things travel,” Vidra replied, according to someone who was there.

When another staffer asked if anyone would still want to work at the magazine, Vidra conceded, “This is a P.R. nightmare,” but said that he was already getting some inquiries.

During the next two days, Hughes contacted some of the writers who left. “I wanted to see where they were coming from,” Hughes told me. One of the writers he spoke to told me that Hughes was “contrite.” Another said, “He was shocked. And I’m kind of shocked that he was shocked. He was trying to make sense of it all.”

After a few days, I began to hear some sympathy for Hughes, as staffers reminisced about the romantic period of his first two years as owner. Some former staffers felt bad for him. “There is something tragic about it,” one said.

Hughes tried to contain the damage. As rumors of a second wave of departures circulated, Hughes and Snyder offered several members of the remaining editorial staff one- to two-thousand-dollar bonuses, and in an op-ed for the Washington Post Hughes tried to explain his vision for the magazine. He told me, “I could have done a better job, at times, of making sure that the editorial staff knew that when we talked about experimentation, innovation, it wasn’t to come at the cost of the things that made us special.”

For many longtime friends of T.N.R., the contrition was too late. This week, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who had delivered the toast to the magazine on its hundredth anniversary, sent a private note to one of the departing editors telling him that she had cancelled her subscription.