Few industries have struggled as painfully or publicly into the digital age as news media, but a mass resignation this week is a particularly dramatic episode in that saga.
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Almost 30 editors quit the venerable US magazine The New Republic, owned by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, because of a new digital strategy and treatment of the head editor.
Dubbed "America's luckiest room mate" after sharing a dorm room with Mark Zuckerberg turned into billions, Hughes had recently hired Guy Vidra, a former Yahoo employee, to turn the 100-year-old political and culture magazine into a "digitally integrated media company".
The split was in response to a digital strategy introduced by new chief executive that caused editor Franklin Foer to resign, followed by 27 other staff including 13 senior editors and digital media editor Hillary Kelly. The 100-year old company had 57 staff.
Mr Vidra mocked Mr Foer's leadership while seated next to him in a meeting. Since Mr Foer's resignation, it has been revealed the company had already hired his replacement, Gabriel Snyder. Mr Snyder has held website editor roles at Bloomberg, The Atlantic and Gawker.
One of the editors who quit was Julia Ioffe. Ms Ioffe took to Facebook after her resignation to label the treatment of Mr Foer and literary editor Leon Wieseltier as "cowardly and hostile".
"The narrative you're going to see Chris and Guy put out there is that I and the rest of my colleagues who quit today were dinosaurs, who think that the internet is scary and that BuzzFeed is a slur. Don't believe them," Ms Ioffe said.
"The staff at TNR has always been faithful to the magazine's founding mission to experiment, and nowhere have I been so encouraged to do so. There was no opposition in the editorial ranks to expanding TNR's web presence, to innovating digitally. Many were even board for going monthly. We're not afraid of change. We have always embraced it."
In a statement, Mr Hughes, 31, said the company had to embrace digital distribution or slide towards irrelevance.
"While our influence has never been greater - and much of the credit for that goes to Frank's leadership - we need to continue to be experimental, just as the founders of this institution said a hundred years ago," Mr Hughes said.
