The Observer first reported in Dec. 2006 (2nd item) that CanWest was taking a majority stake in the company. That was confirmed on Feb 23. Instead of just majority interest, CanWest now owns 100% of the company.

Marty Peretz, who no longer owns part of the magazine, for the first time since 1974, will remain as Editor in Chief.

-Michael Calderone

Full release after the jump

NEWS RELEASE
For Immediate Release:
February 27, 2007
CanWest Buys The New Republic

Toronto, ON: - CanWest Global Communications Corp. ("CanWest") today announced that a wholly owned subsidiary has acquired a 100% interest in The New Republic, a 93 year old United States based political magazine. This acquisition follows the purchase by CanWest in 2006 of a 30% interest.

"The New Republic, similar to CanWest's other publications, has a strong foundation and a proud history. We look forward to seeing it become even stronger" said Tom Strike, President of CanWest MediaWorks International. "In today's media environment, we need to place a priority on delivering quality content to readers when, where and how they want it. The New Republic is well-positioned to do just that".

The magazine and its website are currently undergoing a major overhaul. The makeover includes a new frequency of publication, bigger issues and a new reader-friendly design. The enhanced website will be launched soon with more daily digital content.

Greg MacNeil, a well-respected veteran of Canadian publishing, is acting as Interim Publisher. Marty Peretz will continue as Editor-in-Chief.

It was the first time, Mr. Caro said, that he had heard from anyone connected to the massive three-part exhibit opening next week, “Robert Moses and the Modern City,” which includes among its backers noted historian Kenneth T. Jackson.

And yet Mr. Caro had written the book on Moses, hadn’t he? Since its publication in 1974, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York has sold 315,000 copies through its 30 printings (and counting), and can be found on the bookshelf of every self-professed New York–ophile the world over.

So deep is Mr. Caro’s influence—only one book has even attempted to approach the subject since then, and it is out of print—that anything written on the subject of Robert Moses, who died in 1981, must struggle to do anything else besides affirm, sidestep, build upon, fill in the holes left by, question or rebut the 700,000 or so words that Mr. Caro has already written. In other words, everything comes back to Mr. Caro’s Moses.

A Moses who, Mr. Caro wrote “built parks and playgrounds with a lavish hand, but they were parks and playgrounds for the rich and the comfortable.”

A Moses who “tore out the hearts of a score of neighborhoods, communities the size of small cities themselves, communities that had been lively, friendly places to live.”

A Moses who “practiced McCarthyism long before there was a McCarthy.”

Yes, Mr. Caro told Mr. Hertog, he would speak at the Museum of the City of New York’s part of the exhibit. But he’s since been wondering why he wasn’t invited earlier; why he wasn’t invited to submit a paper to a conference that Columbia will hold in March; why he wasn’t even told about the exhibit by one of its organizers, but instead by one of its sponsors, Mr. Hertog.

Mr. Hertog told The Observer that he suggested inviting Mr. Caro because he could no more imagine an examination of Robert Moses without his input than he could the City of New York itself without Robert Moses.

Last week, Vintage sent out paperback copies of The Power Broker—all 1,246 pages (and three pounds, nine and a half ounces) of it—to newspaper editors, inviting select interviews with its author.

Within a day, Mr. Caro interrupted himself in the middle of writing a scene about the Cuban missile crisis—he’s working on the fourth of four volumes on Lyndon B. Johnson—to tend to a more personal crisis.

“It’s always useful—and, in fact, inevitable—to re-evaluate a major historical figure,” Mr. Caro said in his spare West 57th Street office, dressed in a brown sweater with a burgundy tie peeping out at the bottom. “But I would be more hopeful about this exhibit being a disinterested historical re-evaluation if they had shown any interest in asking someone they had disagreed with to participate in a serious discussion.”

With the exhibit (which is to be staged at the Museum of the City of New York, the Queens Museum of Art, and Columbia University) still not open, and with the academic conference weeks away, Mr. Caro gleaned what he could about the whole undertaking—especially the sort of re-evaluation of Moses’ life (and therefore his book) that the exhibit would prompt—by studying its 336-page catalog.

In particular, there were four pages written by Mr. Jackson, another great narrator of the saga of New York, that had gotten Mr. Caro’s attention—four critical pages that made him wonder whether this exhibit was going to be an attack on The Power Broker.

MR. CARO'S EDITOR, ROBERT GOTTLIEB, who also read the four pages, told The Observer: “I got this impression that Mr. Jackson, even if he didn’t have a direct animus toward Caro, was suffering from some kind of Moses envy, as if he wanted to own Moses himself.”

Mr. Jackson’s essay calls The Power Broker “extraordinary in conception and execution,” but also asserts it “exaggerates Moses’s influence on American life and makes him too much of an evil genius.”

The Power Broker, he writes, “ignores Los Angeles’s construction of nine hundred miles of highways and twenty-one thousand miles of paved streets in the twentieth century, both totals substantially eclipsing those of New York.”

Far from contributing or causing “the Fall of New York”—as Mr. Caro’s subtitle, written the year before the city’s fiscal crisis, suggests—Mr. Jackson argues that Moses made the city’s renaissance since then possible. “Had he not lived … Gotham would have lacked the wherewithal to adjust to the demands of the modern world.”

If this face-off between two great chroniclers of New York is about two clashing egos, it is also about two perspectives on history.

In one corner stands Mr. Caro, an adherent of the “great man” theory of history, who in The Power Broker (“Surely the greatest book ever written about a city”—David Halberstam) delved into the psyche of an idealistic civic reformer who started his city career by assembling unused city-property parcels into parks; lavished millions of dollars on state-of-the-art public bathhouses; and then, once he had mastered the manipulation of power, turned his considerable influence to building highways that destroyed neighborhoods. Moses, according to Mr. Caro, not only abandoned his idealism, but was powerful enough to impose that lack of idealism on the city.

In the other corner stands Mr. Jackson, the editor of The Encyclopedia of New York City (“Excellent, and as the only reference work of its kind, invaluable”—Alfred Kazin) and the author of Crabgrass Frontiers: The Suburbanization of the United States, a standard entry on university urban-planning reading lists.

A popular professor who leads students on all-night bike tours of the city, Mr. Jackson—just a few years younger than Mr. Caro, who is 71—posits the more Hegelian notion that Robert Moses was just a product of the same zeitgeist that propelled cars to the top of the policy agenda everywhere in the United States. And yet, Mr. Jackson writes, “despite the many miles of roadway attributed to Moses, New York never became as hospitable to the motorcar as other American cities.”

“In Caro’s book, what you need to explain is what went wrong in New York,” Mr. Jackson told The Observer. “The fact is, New York is doing very well. Its public housing is all standing; it is not being blown up like in other cities. New York has far and away the best transit system than anywhere. The question is, again, consider the larger context: If Robert Moses was out to destroy the transit system, he didn’t do a very good job.”

Mr. Jackson, a transit advocate (his next book is called The Road to Hell: Transportation Policy and the Decline of the United States), adds that he wishes that Moses had been in charge of the subways instead of the highways; but, he says, the couple of proposed transit improvements that Moses refused to incorporate into his projects—like running light rail down the center of the Long Island Expressway—would hardly have made a difference over time.

“In the 1940’s, people were leaving New York City as soon as they had enough money,” Mr. Jackson elaborated. “The real question is, did Robert Moses cause the first exodus? No, because it happened almost everywhere in the United States.”

Mr. Caro responded that such a line of reasoning ignores the starting point at which New York began.

“What was New York like before Robert Moses?” Mr. Caro asked. “When he came to power, we had a rapid-transit system, a modern rapid-transit system on which the city relied, and plans to extend that system into new areas that were being developed. You had a commuter railroad that was in relatively good shape. For 40 years, he systematically starved the subway and the commuter railroads.”

Plus, Mr. Caro said, Moses diverted money that would have improved the city’s quality of life in other ways.

“In the era right following the war,” he said, “when there was a particularly large immigration of blacks from the rural South and of Puerto Ricans, there was a sense that the city had to reach out to these people, that it wasn’t the same as the Irish, the Jews, and the Italians, that these were not urban dwellers, that the city had to make an extra effort to reach out to these people and to devote to them a heavy share of the city’s revenue. Time and time again, as The Power Broker documents, Robert Moses intervened against that impulse, that humanitarian impulse, and got these funds instead for a share of his huge construction projects.”

Criticizing Mr. Caro must make students of New York history feel like Oedipus killing his father: The Power Broker is where they all learned about Moses in the first place.

“I wish it had my name on it rather than his,” Mr. Jackson said.

Hilary Ballon, a Columbia professor trained in the history of classical French architecture, said it was reading The Power Broker that led her to organize and to curate the exhibit. “It whet my appetite … It is such a dominant work that it controls the subject,” she said. “That is a tribute to Caro, but what it means is that every generation of writers that comes along must somehow contend with its enormous influence.”

The exhibit catalog, published by Norton, shows the apparent contradictions that scholars must face when trying to outdo, or even augment, a seven-year labor of obsession that is based on 522 interviews and countless documents dug out of the darkest corners of municipal life.

How do you declare that Moses was the single most important figure in shaping the New York region, and yet also a mere mortal who butted heads with other powerful figures? How do you exonerate him for engaging in destructive highway-building, saying it was just a product of federal funding, and then praise him for forcing other federal programs toward productive ends, like building Lincoln Center?

The catalog’s contributors strive to put Moses into a broader context and, at times, succeed.

One chapter, by Barnard College professor Owen D. Gutfreund, reproduces a 1928 map by the Regional Plan Association showing a large network of regional highways not unlike what Moses ended up building, persuasively arguing that his vision of highways was, if not inspired by the powerful R.P.A., at least shared with it. And other contributors examine stories that Mr. Caro left pretty much untouched, like the battle for Washington Square, or the role that Moses played in keeping African-Americans out of Stuyvesant Town.

In one case, a contributor went to great—but inconclusive—lengths to find one small detail where she could differ from Mr. Caro.

Investigating whether Moses was racist, City University of New York professor Marta Gutman inspected construction diagrams and determined that an East Harlem pool could have been heated if Moses had wanted. Mr. Caro wrote that Moses kept the pool cold under the outrageous assumption that African-Americans would not tolerate cold water. No one, including Ms. Gutman, may ever know whether Moses heated the East Harlem pool or not: Mr. Caro’s source, the then– City Corporation counsel, has since died.

In the end, Ms. Gutman almost bolsters Mr. Caro’s contention that Moses was racist: She cites a former Brownsville resident who said he saw parks-department employees—Moses was Parks Commissioner, among many other things—enforcing a whites-only policy at swimming pools.

Mr. Caro, then, remains impossible to get away from. The question of just how much deference scholars should treat a living interpreter of the subject they are revisiting is not clear, if only because there are few subjects that one person dominates the way that Mr. Caro dominates the life and works of Robert Moses.

“There was no intention on my part or by any of the sponsors to not include him,” Ms. Ballon said. “I have been very concerned that this project not be taken as a critique of what he did. The exhibit raises a different set of questions about Moses’ impact on the physical character of New York City. I’m really interested in what got built.”

Mr. Jackson, who co-edited the catalog with Ms. Ballon and is co-organizing the academic conference, said that he hadn’t thought that Mr. Caro would be interested in the conference, which won’t pay its participants and will probably have a smaller audience than the museum event. Ms. Ballon said that Mr. Caro was the first person to be invited to the public portion of the exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York.

“I understand his speaking fee is pretty large,” Mr. Jackson said.

As it turns out, Mr. Caro isn’t getting a fee to speak at the Museum of the City of New York on Feb. 11. He wouldn’t want to pass up a chance to give his side of the story.

On Dec. 15, executive editor Bill Keller mentioned a tabloid “prototype” during one of his occasional “Throw Stuff at Bill” sessions for the staff, a combination state-of-the-paper address and Q&A free-for-all.

“It’s way too early to talk about it,” Mr. Keller wrote in an e-mail Dec. 18, when asked about the tabloid. “It’s one of many projects that are still in the noodling stage.”

The subject arose during the middle of one of Mr. Keller’s three sessions on Dec. 15, in the paper’s ninth-floor auditorium, with publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. and managing editors Jill Abramson and John Geddes in attendance. A staffer asked about local coverage, and Mr. Keller mentioned new or planned electronic products, plus a “possible print product” that would be “aimed at younger readers.”

The noodling about the tabloid, according to a source familiar with the project, has been taking place in a Times committee that first convened this past April to generate ideas about marketing and boosting circulation. After a string of weekly meetings, the group—which includes members from the paper’s editorial and business sides—has settled into a less rigid schedule.

So far, the concepts emerging from the group suggest that Mr. Sulzberger’s “platform-agnostic” approach to packaging content is yielding something more like platform Unitarian Universalism—taking inspiration from whatever tradition is handy. The first of the committee’s ideas to reach the public was Urbanite, a daily e-mail newsletter launched Nov. 3, listing goings-on around the city.

Because a Baltimore-based magazine named Urbanite already existed, on Dec. 15 The Times redubbed the newsletter UrbanEye. A Times spokesperson wrote via e-mail that the company “felt we should create and trademark a name that would be exclusive and distinctive to The Times.”

The tabloid idea hasn’t reached the naming stage, let alone the renaming stage. The source familiar with the project described its condition as more a collection of loose pages than a full prototype. In the question-and-answer session, Mr. Keller said that the new publication could be distributed either inside the paper or on its own.

Whatever form the new project takes, there are plenty of precedents for a broadsheet spinning off a tabloid. The Times itself launched a free publication, MarketPlace Weekly, in June 2005. It was a drab creation—consisting mostly of classified ads and articles taken from the regular paper’s real-estate, jobs and automotive sections—and it got a drab reception. It was killed without fanfare, announced during a Times Company second-quarter conference call this past July.

Other broadsheet dailies have had zippier ambitions for their tabloids in recent years. The Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times went head to head in 2002 with youth-targeted titles called RedEye and Red Streak, respectively (Red Streak shut down at the end of 2005). The papers packaged the news in short bits, tuned to their target audience’s expected attention span. The Washington Post did the same with a commuter-targeted tabloid called Express.

There’s always a new way to distribute Sudoku!

But the proposed Times tabloid would not go head to head with amNewYork or Metro on the stairways to the No. 1 train. The idea is for it to be more like a hard-copy relative of UrbanEye than an easy-read news digest. It would be a weekly, heavy on event listings—like The Village Voice, or the New York Press, or Time Out New York or New York magazine or the front end of The New Yorker, for that matter.

The tabloid will need at least another six months to get off the drawing board, the Times source said. Meanwhile, the committee will stay busy with another outlet for the paper’s newly New York–centered ambitions: a Web site that would gather together city-related stories from various parts of the newspaper, such as the metro and culture desks, and integrate them with service features. Movie reviews, for example, could be accompanied by restaurant reviews of eateries near a particular theater.

—Michael Calderone

The Northern Republic: Frostback Conglomerate Raises Stake in Peretz Mag

Canadian media giant CanWest, which currently owns a stake in The New Republic, is expected to increase its share in the magazine, according to TNR sources.

Editor in chief and part owner Martin Peretz said that negotiations are taking place, but declined to get into specifics.

“I think there’s going to be a change in some percentage of ownership,” Mr. Peretz said by phone from Cambridge, Mass.

Mr. Peretz said that since The New Republic is a private corporation, he is not obligated to discuss the percentage of each shareholder’s investment.

“There’s certainly no news here,” Mr. Peretz said.

Mr. Peretz, who purchased the magazine in 1974, has a history of dismissing buyout rumors.

“I’m not now in negotiations with anybody,” Mr. Peretz told the Daily News in November 2001. “There is nothing to report and I don’t foresee anything reportable. There’s nothing going on.”

Weeks later, Mr. Peretz sold two-thirds of the magazine to financiers Roger Hertog and Michael Steinhardt.

Mr. Steinhardt and Mr. Hertog, both investors in the right-leaning New York Sun, had their politics placed under a microscope after they bought part of the perpetually rightward-tacking liberal magazine. Mr. Hertog is chairman emeritus of the Manhattan Institute and a trustee of the American Enterprise Institute; Mr. Steinhardt is a prominent Jewish philanthropist and a founder of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council.

According to one staffer, the new owners refrained from micromanaging things on the editorial side. The staffer said they hadn’t been seen around the Washington, D.C., headquarters since a 2002 meet-and-greet session ended with an office evacuation, after a smoldering cigarette butt tossed by senior editor Lawrence Kaplan ignited a garbage can.

Asked whether Mr. Hertog and Mr. Steinhardt will remain investors in the magazine, Mr. Peretz said, “That’s also not clear.”

The CanWest conglomerate—which publishes titles including Canada’s National Post, the Ottawa Citizen and the Saskatoon StarPhoenix—joined the growing ownership group in January of 2006. CanWest’s chief executive, Leonard Asper, joined the other three investors on board of directors. Laurence Grafstein, a managing director at Lazard Frères (and former TNR writer himself), became the fifth member of the board, serving as a tiebreaker, according to a TNR staffer.

At the time the deal was made, Mr. Asper told the National Post that his company was especially interested in the magazine’s archives and Web site.

Mr. Asper, Mr. Hertog and Mr. Steinhardt didn’t return calls seeking comment. Mr. Grafstein declined to comment.

One TNR staffer predicted that employees would be nervous if a huge corporation like CanWest assumed more control of the magazine, which has historically been run as a small shop.

Regardless of any change in ownership, Mr. Peretz said he would remain as editor in chief.

But there is one change on the table: The magazine could move from a weekly publishing schedule to a biweekly one.

“It’s something that we’ve been talking about for a long time,” said Mr. Peretz of the biweekly schedule. “A decision has not been made.”

When might the negotiations be finalized?

“We are still just talking,” said Mr. Peretz. “And I’m not shitting you.”

—M.C.

After Harvard, What? Miller Leaves 02138 for Wolff Start-Up

“It was my idea of fun,” said former New York magazine editor Caroline Miller, of working as editorial director of 02138.

Ms. Miller put in nine months at the new Harvard Hall–of-mirrors glossy magazine, which is principally bankrolled by Atlantic Media head David Bradley. The second issue came out this week with no editorial-director position on the masthead.

Ms. Miller is now working on developing a news Web site with Vanity Fair media writer Michael Wolff.

“It was not intended to be a long-term arrangement,” said Ms. Miller, who spent two to three days a week in Boston, organizing a team that included several staffers recently out of college. She said the young staff had reminded her of editorial stints at New York and Seventeen.

“It was Bom [Kim’s] idea for a magazine,” she said. “It was my role to put lots of things on the table for him. To create lots of possibilities. To help him bring in a team.”

“We envisioned an editorial-director role in the early stages,” Mr. Kim said, by phone from Korea. Mr. Kim said that 02138 had started with a “very lean team,” but he will be adding editorial staff in the future.

The cover of the new issue features a black-and-white photograph of New York Governor-elect Eliot Spitzer and his wife, attorney Silda Wall, eyeing each other lovingly, to illustrate a feature on Harvard “power couples.”

—M.C.