Early December, the American publishing industry experienced a bit of a shock. The New Republic, that venerable institution of American publishing, was hit with mass resignations, losing most of its senior editorial staff.

This development follows the 2012 purchase of the respected magazine by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, whose stated goal was to turn the company into a “vertically integrated digital media company. This was apparently not a successful or popular move with the staff, who in December 2014 tendered their group resignation.

The New Republic’s influence on and importance to the United States’s cultural and press history is difficult to understate. From the beginning, The New Republic was instrumental in publishing some of the most prominent thinkers of the 20th Century, including W.E.B DuBois, John Maynard Keynes, and many others. Though it wavered a bit from its liberal origins as it aged, it remained one of the most influential political publications in the US.

In 2012, Hughes bought the magazine with the eye of modernizing it a la Facebook. He wanted to bring new authority to digital media and create an outlet for Washington, DC’s cultural offerings.

So how did that go? Judging from the resignations, not well. What happened? In essence, the disagreement that tore The New Republic apart was one we have seen mirrored everywhere across the United States. How to retain journalistic integrity in the face of plummeting journalism revenue? The dispute at The New Republic is just a microcosm of the disputes and discussions that happen every day in meeting rooms of journalistic publications across the US and the world, a fact many on Twitter were quick to point out.

There are two ways to interpret this—as an assault on journalistic integrity by money hungry executives, or as a group of old fogeys tilting at windmills and yelling at neighborhood kids to get off their lawn. So who is right?

Unfortunately for the old fogeys, it seems like the money men might be right. It’s true that the traditional magazine model of the 20th century is probably never coming back. Essentially, all of the success stories to date have managed their transition to digital, and the ones who haven’t are working on it.

Shifting to digital--whether that be using invoice generators, or simply shifting the content strategy to meet the needs of a hyper-aware society--necessitates making compromises to get clicks, and these compromises, to many journalists, look like bad journalism. But as the technology develops, Facebook and Google and other content delivery platforms will be better at getting the right content to the right people.

What will the mass resignation mean for The New Republic? On one hand, it might make the transition simpler for managers, who won’t need to disagree with so many senior editors. However it also signifies a drop in editorial quality, and it remains to be seen if this will disadvantage The New Digital Republic in its new role.

Print media faces a simple proposition these days: adapt or die. The New Republic is not dead, but perhaps a necrotic limb has been amputated. Let’s see what regenerates in its place.