Though many editors at the New Republic expressed dismay that the once-proud magazine may be shifting to produce more “clickbait” content, that hasn’t stopped some of them from heading for jobs at the Huffington Post, a website that features an entire section dedicated to celebrity “sideboob” photos.
The New York Times reported Sunday that Greg Veis, Jonathan Cohn and Rachel Morris, all former editors at TNR, were joining the Huffington Post to “oversee a push … into longer articles and investigations.”
Editors at TNR, including Veis, Cohn and Morris, resigned en masse in December after it was made public that the publisher, Chris Hughes, was replacing the well-liked editor in chief, Franklin Foer.
Several reports on the fallout cited the magazine’s supposed drift from in-depth journalism to “clickbait” as another reason for contributors fleeing the publication.
It’s notable, then, that some of the departed would then join an outlet that more or less invented modern-day “clickbait,” a term used with some negative connotation to describe news sites that use racy or silly headlines and content to attract readers.
Hughes denied at the time that TNR would dramatically change the journalism it was historically known for, but still said changes would need to be made to adapt to a changing media landscape, one that is increasingly subject to the immediacy of the Internet.
Foer has not yet announced any news for his own career. Leon Wieseltier, TNR’s former literary editor, joined the Atlantic this month as a contributing editor and critic.
