Mourning The New Republic--at Slate!

At Slate, media professor David Greenberg mourns the effective death of The New Republic, which he attributes not so much to digital-media economics as to the fact that the magazine's one-time  "heterodox liberalism--the willingness (indeed the eagerness!) to test liberal thinking from within the liberal family—is now being squeezed":

Internet journalism has made it easy to find opinions that confirm one’s own beliefs and flatter one’s prejudices... The left and the right are retreating into cocoons of information and opinion, on cable TV and social media....

[The end of TNR is regrettable because:] 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.

I'm glad Slate was willing to publish a piece that scores a bullseye on exactly what's wrong with ... Slate. I'm refusing to read the comments to the piece, but I can only imagine they will validate everything Greenberg says about Internet readers expecting "cocoons of [confirming] opinion."