Over at Slate, Rutgers prof and former TNR managing editor David Greenburg has a fine piece, “What We Lost with the Loss of The New Republic.” We lost a place for what he calls “heterodox liberalism.” RTW–I largely agree with his take, and particularly so with this bit:

The impending transformation of the New Republic from a liberal magazine into a “vertically integrated digital media company” is regrettable for many reasons, not all of them sentimental. Conservatives need a liberal magazine that’s unpredictable enough to make them want to read it. Liberals and leftists need a magazine that will prod them to question their beliefs, and revise or strengthen them. All of us need robust intellectual debate of a high caliber that treats politics and ideas with the seriousness that they deserve.

As for Ezra Klein’s take at Vox, “Even the liberal New Republic Needs to Change,” well, there’s some good points in there, including a nod to Yuval Levin and National Affairs, but basically, as the headline suggests, it’s pretty shockingly cold-fish. See, Klein is just too Spock-like objective and super-informed about contemporary media to lament TNR’s passing, or to protest the manner of it. Unless, that is, he meant his piece to be vindictive, and/or, a bid for future opportunities. Whatever the case, it’s yet more evidence suggesting that had JournoLister Klein been born in another place and time, he would have been well-suited for work at Pravda.

’Course, as interesting as David Greenburg seeems–he has a recent book on Coolidge that’s probably worth reading in tandem with the big Amity Shlaes bio, for one–it turns out he was on Journo-List himself! So my initially intended contrast between him and Klein breaks down quite a bit. I don’t know how involved Greenburg was with the List, but his getting sucked into that tells you a good deal about what went wrong with liberal opinion journalism during the Age of Obama, and the sorts of stands that will need be taken to make it unpredictable and self-questioning again.