EXIT STAGE RIGHT
Weekly Standard closing
The Weekly Standard — the right-leaning magazine that has remained doggedly anti-Trump since the president’s election — is shutting down after 23 years.
Staffers got the news at an all-hands meeting Friday morning that they were to clean out their desks by 5 p.m. The weekly will publish its last issue Dec. 17.
Beforehand, Editor-inChief Stephen Hayes had met privately with Ryan McKibben, chief executive of the magazine’s parent company, Clarity Media Group.
“The Weekly Standard has been hampered by many of the same challenges that countless other magazines and newspapers across the country have been wrestling with,” McKibben said.
“Despite investing significant resources into the publication, the financial performance of the publication over the last five years — with double-digit declines in its subscriber base all but one year since 2013 — made it clear that a decision had to be made,” he added.
The publication was launched in 1995 by News Corp., which publishes The Post, with founding editor-in-chief Bill Kristol. In 2005, it was sold to Colorado-based conservative billionaire Philip Anschutz. The publication in recent years was one of the few conservative outlets that was sharply critical of many of the policies of President Trump.
Kristol, most recently an editor-at-large, was an unabashed “Never Trump” pundit. Years earlier, Kristol was a staunch backer of George W. Bush and the Iraq War.
“This is a volatile time in American journalism and politics,” Hayes wrote in a letter to staffers. “Many media outlets have responded to the challenges of the moment by prioritizing affirmation over information, giving into the pull of polarization and the lure of clickbait.”
Initially, Anschutz and MediaDC, the subsidiary of Clarity that ran The Standard, said they would allow Hayes to search for a new buyer. But CNN reported earlier this month that Hayes was told the company was no longer interested in selling.
Around that time, MediaDC was unveiling plans to take its weekly Washington Examiner from an inside-the-Beltway publication and transform it into a national conservative weekly. The Examiner has been generally more supportive of Trump in its editorial slant.
The closure drew immediate criticism in some conservative media circles. Writing in Commentary, columnist John Podhoretz — who also writes for The Post — said he did not believe the criticism of Trump was the main reason its owners decided to kill off The Weekly Standard. “Rather, I believe the fissures in the conservative movement and the Republican party that have opened up since Trump’s rise provided the company man with a convenient argument to make to the corporation’s owner, Philip Anschutz, that the company could perhaps harvest the Standard’s subscriber-base riches and then be done with it.”
Staffers are being paid to the end of the year, but their severance packages are said to be contingent on signing non-disparagement clauses.