Shannon McLaughlin Rooney

When The New Republic owner and Facebook founder Chris Hughes replaced the magazine’s top editors in December 2014, it set off a round of vociferous commentary declaring “The Death of The New Republic.” Portrayed as a conflict between journalistic tradition and Silicon Valley values, changes at the magazine crystallized lingering anxieties about the future of journalism and its relationship to the demands of the market. This article examines commentary about changes at the magazine through the lens of metajournalistic discourse, arguing that the discourses analyzed established the means by which structural conditions and philosophical challenges in the journalism industry were rendered sensible to the broader public. Though acts of personalized blame and schadenfreude at the publication’s supposed demise characterized much of the discourse, other texts worked to clarify the stakes in the conflict, ultimately creating the terms by which the conflict could be made sense of and its consequence articulated to the broader field of journalism.

KEYWORDS: future of journalism; journalism and technology industries; journalism studies; metajournalistic discourse; The New Republic

The institutional discourses of US journalism display both an ever present sense of crisis and a persistent nostalgia for a mythic golden age when the news was better made and better respected by the public. This article examines discussions hosted by the American Society of Newspaper Editors between 1986 and 2000, what we call ‘the pre-Internet era’, as a site of discursive constitution and relative stability in the news industry. As various actors inside the news industry utilize both nostalgia and crisis as common representational strategies, these discourses circulate and propagate a sense-making regime that is both precise and flexible in its deployment, and thus, helps journalism cohere as a field. Specific discussions around the First Amendment, journalistic identities, and business issues all provide fertile ground for challenging and reaffirming journalism’s binding values, and reveal larger structures of power around who has the authority to both describe threats to journalism and prescribe possible solutions.