The Slatest

Mass Resignations at TNR Follow Departures of Foer, Wieseltier

Just writing to say we quit.

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

What started as a trickle has become a flood, as more than two-dozen editors and contributing editors resigned from the New Republic on Friday on the heels of the departures of the magazine’s top two editors, Franklin Foer and Leon Wieseltier.

The full list of resignations is here, courtesy of the New Yorker Washington correspondent Ryan Lizza:

Lizza and fellow contributing editor Jonathan Chait had already expressed their desires to be removed from the masthead following the announcement that former Atlantic Wire and Gawker editor Gabriel Snyder would be replacing Foer in the magazine’s top job and that literary editor Wieseltier would be leaving as well.

Foer’s quitting stemmed from a difference of opinion in the editorial direction for the magazine, with owner Chris Hughes and chief executive Guy Vidra “re-imagining The New Republic as a vertically integrated digital media company.”

“Chris and Guy have significant plans for this place. And their plans and my own vision for TNR meaningfully diverge,” Foer wrote in a staff memo on Thursday.

Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook, took over the 100-year-old magazine in 2012.

The response from several contributing editors and member of staff was swift. On Thursday evening, Chait wrote an NYMag.com post titled “A Eulogy for The New Republic.”

Many of the staffers took to Twitter on Friday to express their reasons for leaving and their admiration for what the magazine has been.

Resigning senior editor Julia Ioffe went into the greatest detail with a Facebook post and series of tweets going after Hughes for mismanagement. From Ioffe’s Facebook page:

“The narrative you’re going to see Chris and Guy put out there is that I and the rest of my colleagues who quit today were dinosaurs, who think that the Internet is scary and that Buzzfeed is a slur. Don’t believe them. The staff at TNR has always been faithful to the magazine’s founding mission to experiment, and nowhere have I been so encouraged to do so. There was no opposition in the editorial ranks to expanding TNR’s web presence, to innovating digitally. Many were even board for going monthly. We’re not afraid of change. We have always embraced it.

…..

But enough polemics about the cowardly, hostile way Frank and Leon and the rest of us were treated. We’ve done some incredible work in the last 2.5 years and I’m proud of every day I ever worked there. I loved The New Republic, and, more than that, I love my colleagues. They are exceptional, earth-movingly good people. I will miss working with them every day.”