Along with the other onslaught of reactions to The New Republic’s mass resignation, George Packer offers his own response at the New Yorker, suggesting that the “collapse” (along with the recent Rolling Stone debacle) shows a “crisis” in journalism:
The crisis in journalism is a business crisis, and it’s been going on for twenty years; the outcome remains far from obvious. Writers and editors at magazines and newspapers live with a perpetual sense of foreboding, which leads to plummeting self-confidence in their own work and a tendency to overestimate the new digital enterprises, or the new digitally rich owners of the old enterprises. It’s easy to feel that the very task of reporting and writing in depth, at length, and in complex detail is somehow to blame for their problems.
