Getting on the same page
The New Republic fiasco and lessons for product managers at legacy media companies
Old journalism and new journalism collided in a supernova of mistrust at The New Republic last week. Many editors resigned, upset that their owner, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, mistreated them and was peddling “Silicon Valley mumbo jumbo” as he sought to revitalize the 100-year old magazine. No one comes out of this looking great. Hughes has been exposed as a bad manager/motivator and, by quitting en masse, the editors look every bit as intransigent as they don’t want us to think they are. To oversimplify and hyperbolize it: it’s the “dilettante” vs. the “dinosaurs.” Perhaps. But at its core, this seems to be a failure of communication. The two sides don’t appear to have been speaking the same language.
Watch how, in an open letter posted to Facebook, a group of former TNR editors use scare quotes:
The New Republic cannot be merely a “brand.” It has never been and cannot be a “media company” that markets “content.” Its essays, criticism, reportage, and poetry are not “product.” It is not, or not primarily, a business. It is a voice, even a cause. It has lasted through numerous transformations of the “media landscape” — transformations that, far from rendering its work obsolete, have made that work ever more valuable.
Sorry, but The New Republic—and all journalism outlets—already is a “media company” (a money-losing one) and has a “brand” (“tailored for smart, curious, socially aware readers,” according to TNR’s about us page). It creates “content” (stories, commentary) and that content is bundled into an overall “product” (a print magazine and digital site). Re-read the paragraph above, except with The New Yorker — another old, liberal magazine—in mind and you’ll see how silly it sounds. The New Yorker is unafraid to be a media company with a brand, content and and a product. And they’re stronger for it.
“Product” is a particularly troublesome word. As a product manager at The New York Times — no stranger to these old journalism / new journalism challenges — I know how difficult this word can be (try explaining to your mom what it means to be a “product manager.”) It’s even more challenging being a product manager at a content company, where ownership over the “product” is not always clear, as NYU’s Jay Rosen made clear in a ten Tweet barrage. Here are the key points:
Getting editors on the same page as the “product” and technology folks is where Hughes failed in spectacular fashion. He’s right when he writes that TNR must be a self-sustaining business and that it must “experiment now” or else cease to be relevant. Unfortunately, Hughes couldn’t communicate that vision to TNR’s staffers effectively enough to get them to buy in. And/or, if you take the jaundiced view of Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank, a former TNR writer, Hughes is just not a good business man:
[Hughes is] a callow man who accidentally became rich — to the tune of some $700 million — because he had the luck of being Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s roommate at Harvard. Hughes seemed intent on proving he could be a success in his own right, but it hasn’t happened. He created a “cause-oriented social network,” Jumo, in 2010, but when it didn’t take off, he was done with it in 2011. He turned out to be no more devoted to TNR.
(I should disclose here that I interned at that “cause-oriented social network” and worked with Hughes for a few months leading up to Jumo’s 2010 launch. I was inspired to join Jumo after hearing Hughes speak at a charity event. He really is a great communicator in spotlight settings like that. Unfortunately for Jumo—and maybe for TNR, too—he seemed far less comfortable running our small team.)
Not that building product at a legacy media company is easy! At The New York Times, product and the newsroom failed to speak the same language for a long time—and that’s when we were talking to each other at all. But the silos are breaking down. Product managers like me are working closer than we ever have with our colleagues in the newsroom and our products are better for it. The Upshot, NYT Now, NYT Cooking, and our revitalized Real Estate app are all examples of products in which product, design, developers and the newsroom worked very closely together. We may not have agreed all the time—I assure you we didn’t—but we’re talking, instead of making assumptions about our colleagues. To wit: “the newsroom would never go for that” is a phrase you rarely hear anymore.
The divide between product and the newsroom was already breaking down, but that effort got a turbo-charged in May with the leak of the Innovation Report. Commissioned by the newsroom and never meant to be released beyond a small group of senior leaders, it contains 96 pages of self-flagellation for falling behind digitally, along with recommendations on a path forward to expand our reach and engage our audience. Mind you, I didn’t leak it, but I’m really glad someone did, because instead of a small clutch of newsroom leaders reading the report and deciding on a course of action, everyone at the company read it and talked about it. It’s sparked a dialogue around “product” that seems to have been sorely lacking at The New Republic.
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