For a small outfit, The New Republic has always gone long on drama. Its changes in leadership have usually arrived in the form of rolling coups or lightning bolts from above. So it is refreshing, if a bit underwhelming, to report that Franklin Foer, a senior editor with the magazine, is quietly taking over the shop next week from the current editor, Peter Beinart, who has a book to promote and ambitions of returning to longer form writing.
"I think this is the first bloodless transition in many years," said Mr. Foer, who was in New York yesterday.
While there is no blood spattering its walls, the magazine that Mr. Foer, 31, takes over is hardly on a roll. The New Republic's circulation has dropped by almost 40 percent in four years; it cut its circulation and staff salaries after aggressively spending on the Web in 2002. Meanwhile, its historical role as a maypole for middle-way Democrats is under challenge from countless Web sites and bloggers. And one of the magazine's major preoccupations -- a search for the soul of the Democratic Party -- would seem to require a lot of patience and a miner's helmet.
But the magazine is financially stable, its owners say, in part because there are now four of them. Roger Hertog and Michael Steinhardt, successful New York financiers with an interest in policy and media, were enticed in 2002 to share in The New Republic's glories and seemingly inevitable losses with its longtime owner and editor in chief, Martin Peretz. More recently, CanWest, a Canadian media conglomerate bought a share as well.
To look at The New Republic, with a weekly circulation of 62,000 and a demure size of about 40 pages, the subject of who might be its editor would seem to be a game that is played in a very small parlor. But among people whose animating force in life is public policy -- there are such folk, and many of them make decisions that affect the rest of us -- The New Republic remains as resonant as it was in the days when Michael Kinsley, Andrew Sullivan or Michael Kelly served as its editor. Others think it has more than lost a step, and perhaps purpose, in a digital age when political argument is abundant.
"I have always enjoyed the myth of The New Republic's golden age," Mr. Kinsley said by telephone from Seattle. "The magazine is still very much in the Washington mix. It doesn't necessarily move the debate, but I think it can stir things up."
Erik Wemple, editor of The Washington City Paper, said, "They are stuck in their own legacy, which is this thing about how, 'You can never pin us down.' But in fact, no one cares to pin them down in the first place."
Mr. Wemple went on to say that The New Republic was "polemical, with all of the pieces built on argument."
"They don't tell stories much," he said.
Mr. Foer would seem to be keen to argue the opposite.
"The New Republic deserves its self-seriousness, in part because it has a long, rich history of argument and a very keen moral sense," he said over coffee at the Cafe Edison in Midtown. "The challenge is to transcend that self-seriousness and produce journalism that people read."
Even when he is deep into policy, Mr. Foer prefers staying grounded in the prosaic. In fact, he used soccer as a lever to explain just about everything in a book called, "How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization."
Still, his enduring interest in wonkiness manifested at a young age, said his brother, Jonathan Safran Foer, the Brooklyn novelist.
"Some of my earliest memories are of Frank sticking me with the business-ends of his political campaign buttons, and lecturing about Reagonomics," Jonathan Safran Foer wrote in an e-mail message. "He might have been the only kid in America from whom the words 'trickle down' elicited anger instead of laughter."
Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic and its most enduring presence beyond the hawkish Mr. Peretz, suggests that Mr. Foer, who has worked at the magazine since 2000, is a good choice.
"He is a substantial man with a crusading temperament, which is very important in leading a magazine like The New Republic," Mr. Wieseltier said.
Mr. Peretz said that when he learned that Peter Beinart planned to leave the position, it was a decision that almost made itself.
"He reminds me of Michael Kinsley because he has an editor's head," Mr. Peretz said. "He thinks about things associatively and analytically."
But Mr. Foer has ambitions for the magazine that go beyond throwing analytical weight and associative power at any particular issue.
"We live in the most politicized age since the 60's, and I don't think that political journalism has been up to the task," he said. "The good old-fashioned things that a political journal does -- the explication of ideas and ideas -- are not in great abundance right now."
Mr. Foer says that he is taking over a magazine that has a great deal of momentum from Mr. Beinart's tenure, which began in 1999, and it is a fine time to be at its helm.
"We are more or less at the end of the Bush era, and I think it will be very interesting to see what happens to the passions that have been built up over the course of this administration," he said. "We are going to be very much a part of that discussion."
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