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While The Weekly Standard's founding editor William Kristol became one of the most prominent faces of the Never Trump movement, the magazine itself was steadily losing readers in the pro-Trump conservative media environment. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The Weekly Standard, conservative outlet that criticized Trump, to shut down

The magazine’s final issue, which was completed Thursday, will publish on Dec. 17.

By JASON SCHWARTZ

 

The Weekly Standard is shutting down, owner Clarity Media Group announced Friday, ending one of the only conservative outlets that consistently stood in opposition to the style and politics of President Donald Trump.

The magazine’s final issue, which was completed Thursday, will publish on Dec. 17, Clarity said in a news release. The decision was communicated to staff members at a 10:30 a.m. meeting.

All staff members were terminated, with pay through the end of the year, a Clarity spokesperson confirmed, saying that the office will be closed on Friday. Severance is being offered by Clarity and its publishing arm, MediaDC, two staff members told POLITICO, contingent on employees signing a nondisclosure agreement — a stringent condition from a media company that states on its website a mission to “inform and enlighten readers.”

“For more than twenty years The Weekly Standard has provided a valued and important perspective on political, literary and cultural issues of the day,” Clarity Media President and CEO Ryan McKibben said in the statement. “The magazine has been home to some of the industry’s most dedicated and talented staff and I thank them for their hard work and contributions, not just to the publication, but the field of journalism.”

The decision to shutter came after more than a week of uncertainty for employees. Amid rumors of its possible demise, Clarity said 10 days ago that it was “exploring a number of possibilities” for the conservative journal, but since then executives have remained silent, including Clarity owner Philip Anschutz, the billionaire conservative donor.

Rumors had been swirling about The Weekly Standard since Clarity announced that its sister publication, the Washington Examiner, would expand with a weekly conservative magazine with national distribution. With the new Examiner product positioned to take over The Weekly Standard’s corner, management decided to shutter the journal, rather than sell it or allow it to exist in some other form that could create a potential competitor to the newly expanded Examiner.

One reason many observers speculated that Clarity might want to shutter The Weekly Standard rather than sell it was to permit the Examiner to make use of its subscriber list. A Clarity spokesperson confirmed Friday that subscribers to The Weekly Standard will now, in fact, receive the Washington Examiner instead. “Clarity Media Group has an obligation to fulfill all active subscriptions to The Weekly Standard. We will do so with the new, redesigned and expanded Washington Examiner that will launch on January 1,” the spokesperson said in a statement. Asked whether Weekly Standard subscribers who preferred not to receive the Examiner would be offered a refund on the remaining portion of their subscription, the spokesperson declined to answer.

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While the Standard has positioned itself against Trump — its founding editor, William Kristol, has become one of the most prominent faces of the Never Trump movement — the Examiner has featured a range of opinions on the president.

Trump cheered the publication's demise, writing on Twitter on Saturday: "The pathetic and dishonest Weekly Standard, run by failed prognosticator Bill Kristol (who, like many others, never had a clue), is flat broke and out of business. Too bad. May it rest in peace!"

After being launched in 1995 by Kristol and Fred Barnes, the Standard became so influential during the administration of George W. Bush — as it cheered on the invasion of Iraq — that it became known as the in-flight magazine of Air Force One. But the journal has found itself out of sync with the conservative movement in the age of Trump.

As recently as five years ago, the magazine’s print circulation numbered more than 100,000, but by last year, that number had dropped to 72,000, according to the auditing group BPA Worldwide. From 2016 to 2017, when Trump took office, paid circulation dropped by about 7,000 or about 10 percent, according to the auditing group.

Editor-in-chief Stephen Hayes and his allies had been seeking potential buyers for The Weekly Standard, but Clarity Media lost interest in a sale by this week, one person familiar with the situation said.

Weekly Standard staff members feared — and expected — the worst heading into Friday morning’s meeting, but they remained in the dark about what exactly would happen. Even though Clarity asked Hayes to arrange an all-staff meeting for Friday, details like the time were not nailed down until a few hours before the gathering started, meaning most staff learned of the meeting first by word of mouth, the person familiar with the situation said.

In Clarity’s news release, McKibben blamed the business climate for media for The Weekly Standard’s demise, though the magazine has never been known as a big moneymaker.

“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 wrote. “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. After careful consideration of all possible options for its future, it became clear that this was the step we needed to take.”

The death of the magazine was mourned across Twitter, on both ends of the political spectrum.

“If you agree that the impact of the fox news alternate universe on American politics is disastrous, the closing of the Trump-era weekly standard, which consciously rejected that alternate universe, is bad,” tweeted Atlantic staff writer Adam Serwer. “You don't have to share their politics to see that.”

In an email to staff Friday morning, Hayes expressed thanks. “This is a volatile time in American journalism and politics,” he wrote. “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. I’ll spare you the soapbox and the sanctimony. To put it simply: I’m proud that we’ve remained both conservative and independent, providing substantive reporting and analysis based on facts, logic and reason.”

Hayes later posted a message to Twitter, again thanking his staff and readers and lauding what he called the magazine’s “fiercely independent voice.” He wrote, “I am profoundly disappointed in the decision to close The Weekly Standard.”

Kristol, who two years ago moved from his editor-in-chief role to be an editor at large, has publicly said he intends to keep the Standard’s voice and style alive in some form. Editorial leaders from the magazine have been in discussion in recent days over what a possible successor publication might look like, two people familiar with the talks said. One possibility could be to expand a small conservative site called The Bulwark, which is published by the Defending Democracy Together Institute, a nonprofit with which Kristol is involved. He and Weekly Standard contributing editor Charlie Sykes already sit on the editorial board of the site, which currently lists just two editorial employees.

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