Who killed the Weekly Standard?

The Weekly Standard was killed last month, an act that had both a clear culprit and a muddy forensic trail. For twenty-three years, it was the most influential, and often the most interesting, publication of the American right, championing a less dreary and more adventurous conservatism, one that insisted that Washington was the center of human events. But, during the past five years, the magazine had lost about a third of its print subscribers and some three million dollars per year. In the second week of December, the C.E.O. of the Standard’s parent company, Clarity Media Group, told the staff that it would close the magazine and transfer subscribers to a new conservative publication that was already in the works, a weekly supplement to the Washington Examiner.

That Friday, the staff threw an Irish wake at the home of Andrew Ferguson, perhaps the magazine’s most eloquent writer. Bill Kristol, the Standard’s founder, reminded them that his father, the pioneering neoconservative intellectual Irving Kristol, had titled a book “Two Cheers for Capitalism.” Maybe, Kristol said, it should be edited down to one cheer.

In the press, the magazine’s demise was a media story, confined to the inside pages and told in a tone of half-sympathetic reminiscence. But the death of the major intellectual journal of conservatism, at a time of profound transition for the right, is about more than the strategic calculations of a media holding company in Denver.