The New Republic’s New Boss

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http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/03/the-new-republics-new-boss.html



Yesterday, Chris Hughes, the twenty-eight-year-old Facebook co-founder, was at the airport in Washington, D.C., on his way back to New York, where he lives upstate, in Garrison. He’d spent the day at the offices of The New Republic, schmoozing with his new employees. “I just had a great meeting with the editorial and business staffs!” he said, with authoritative enthusiasm. As one of the original Facebook few—his millions number around seven hundred, according to a recent estimate—Hughes stands to go over the billion mark when the company I.P.O.s this spring. That some tiny fraction of this fortune might trickle down to the beleaguered realm of print journalism has left the Internet reeling. One Twitter post: “Chris Hughes saves The New Republic.”

The arrival of Hughes at TNR is fortuitous in more ways than one: it also puts an end to an extended drama centered around Martin Peretz, a Harvard social studies lecturer who bought the magazine, in 1974, with funds from his wife, Anne Labouisse Farnsworth, an heir to the Singer sewing-machine fortune. The price, three-hundred and eighty thousand dollars, included a house, a rambling Victorian near Dupont Circle that then served as the magazine’s editorial and business offices. According to legend, Peretz soon sold the house for more than it had cost him to buy the whole package. But he picked up the hefty tab for its chronic financial shortfalls. And as its self-appointed editor-in-chief, he had an eye for talented young writers and editors, most of them plucked from Harvard. His protégés appreciated his personal loyalty, gestures of generosity, and willingness, most of the time, to brook disagreement. However, they regularly grew weary of his heavy-handed meddling, his increasingly right-wing views on Israel and the Middle East, and a bombastic writing style that all too often edged toward the racist. The New Republic’s core liberal readers admired its witty iconoclasm and its sharp debunking of conservative economics, but they were less pleased when it provided full-throated editorial support to Ronald Reagan’s intervention in Nicaragua and, later, George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. There were further strains, internally and with readers, when TNR gave a platform to Charles Murray’s “The Bell Curve” and published an influential—and eventually thoroughly discredited—attack on Bill Clinton’s health-care plan. Some complained that the magazine had become more reliably neocon than liberal. Circulation declined, and so did the magazine’s influence.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/03/the-new-republics-new-boss.html#ixzz1ooTOigfc



*** we have a young gay man at the head of this important publication ... let's see what he does with it.

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1. let's hope he does better than the last young gay man who was in charge (Sullivan)

he is who published both the Bell Curve excerpt and the anti health care screed.

[joeybee12]

2. Well, if Hughes has at least one functioning brain cell...

It's a step better already than Sullivan