Not everyone on the magazine’s staff is happy about the arrival of new editor Michael Tomasky. They seem even more upset about The New Republic‘s decision to move its office from New York to Washington D.C.
Now it looks like the magazine is not requiring staff to move.
Here is Jack Crosbie and Paul Blest at Discourse Blog:
Last week, staffers at The New Republic had their first meeting with incoming editor Michael Tomasky soon after they found out simultaneously via an email and a New York Times story that Tomasky would be replacing their current top editor Chris Lehmann and the magazine would move its headquarters back to D.C.
As far as meetings with your new boss go, this wasn’t exactly a happy one, with one current staffer describing it as “a minor key kind of thing,” as many staffers felt ambushed by the abrupt switch and immediately threatened by the prospect of being forced to relocate to D.C.
But after public pressure from the magazine’s NewsGuild-affiliated union and a Defector story outlining the staff’s displeasure with the announcement, management informed employees this week that Tomasky and owner/editor-in-chief Win McCormack are abruptly dropping their plans to force New York staffers to relocate to D.C., as the New Republic Union announced on Thursday.
And this:
Tomasky represents a shift from the operation built by Lehmann, the former Baffler editor who, since taking the helm of TNR in 2019, helped transform what was once a stuffy mainstay of neoliberalism with a legacy of overt racism into an outlet with a diversity of voices and perspectives spanning the width of the contemporary left. McCormack announced last week that Lehmann would become an editor-at-large and “retain an association with the magazine,” but the impression staffers got was that Lehmann had been forced out of the top job.
“That hasn’t been clarified either,” one staffer said. “Chris is pretty popular and people were pretty happy with what he built. It doesn’t mean TNR was perfect, but people were sad and taken aback.”
Read the entire piece here.
