There is something deeply tragicomic about Vidra's role in this. I know nothing about the man, and it would be too easy to disparage him on this basis of this report; one should presume that he has management and organizational skills well suited to an executive position, and one should not forget that he seems to have been completely hamstrung by the owner's ill-fated activism and engagement with the magazine, whatever his own faults might be.
That said, two items strike me. The first is that he comes across as stunningly tone deaf in this circumstance; unless I am reading pure calumny, it seems that he did not consider what a corrosive effect a jargon-heavy, non-committal communication style would have when dealing with people who were deeply, professionally engaged with the meaning of words. Nor does he seem to have understood that he was in a situation where he was starting with zero social credibility and would need to establish social credibility in order to do his job.
The second is that this was a situation in which he was facing the least fungible workers imaginable. All TNR had, besides the cheques for the current subscriptions, was the culture and society that had built up around it: most specifically that this particular small social network, consisting of these people, had as its central focus, source of wider status, and raison d'etre the writing down of words in exchange for money under the masthead of this particular little magazine. There are no factories, nor even inventories. There are no repositories of source code. There are no patents or significant intellectual property rights. The people he alienated were completely integral to the product he was undertaking to make profitable.
Sadly, I have seen this quite a bit already in my short time in the Valley - how do people get so caught up in the tech industry jargon that they forget how to interact with people? Even worse, this is what seems to be the heart of why management in general is so terrible in the area. True leaders are in short supply here.
The TNR was never profitable though and likely could never be given its current structure.
But I wonder why buy and gut TNR if you could have just started a separate endeavor. TNR isn't that strong of a name - it is just a name is relatively small circles of elitists.
Let's be blunt about it- Buying TNR was an attempt to buy status with the old school intellectual liberal elite. Which is completely valid as far as it goes.
The unimaginably bad mistake is to then screw around with it in a way that makes it no longer what he was trying to buy.
The article makes it sound like it was originally bought when the buyer was feeling successful. As the buyer started to feel less successful due to other circumstances in their life, they started to feel less comfortable with the idea of owning a print magazine that was losing money. Thus the idea of reinventing it to be profitable.
That said, two items strike me. The first is that he comes across as stunningly tone deaf in this circumstance; unless I am reading pure calumny, it seems that he did not consider what a corrosive effect a jargon-heavy, non-committal communication style would have when dealing with people who were deeply, professionally engaged with the meaning of words. Nor does he seem to have understood that he was in a situation where he was starting with zero social credibility and would need to establish social credibility in order to do his job.
The second is that this was a situation in which he was facing the least fungible workers imaginable. All TNR had, besides the cheques for the current subscriptions, was the culture and society that had built up around it: most specifically that this particular small social network, consisting of these people, had as its central focus, source of wider status, and raison d'etre the writing down of words in exchange for money under the masthead of this particular little magazine. There are no factories, nor even inventories. There are no repositories of source code. There are no patents or significant intellectual property rights. The people he alienated were completely integral to the product he was undertaking to make profitable.