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Chris Hughes, once a new-media pioneer, makes bet on old media with New Republic

By Paul Farhi,July 08, 2012

Sean Eldridge, president of Hudson River Ventures, left, and Chris Hughes,… (/Sean Eldridge, left, and…)

Chris Hughes’s first business venture worked out nicely. As a teenager, he helped start something called Facebook. Within four years, working mostly part-time, Hughes vaulted into the ranks of the stratospherically wealthy. He wasn’t quite 23 years old.

His second project met with a different kind of success. Hughes quit Facebook in early 2007 to work for a candidate named Barack Obama. Hughes developed and ran Obama’s social media operations. He was 24 when his boss won the White House.

For his third act, Chris Hughes, prince of the new media, has set his sights on the old media.

On March 9, readers of the venerable New Republic magazine were greeted by a brief essay by Hughes in which he introduced himself as the publication’s new owner and editor in chief. Hughes, who’d never run a magazine or been a journalist before, blandly promised to “aggressively adapt to the newest information technologies without sacrificing our commitment to serious journalism.”

The surprise purchase touched off a low-level buzz in the power and money corridors of Washington and New York. Why was Hughes, now 28, bothering with the New Republic, a magazine with a long and storied history but a dismal present and recent past?

In the magazine’s K Street offices, meanwhile, Hughes was greeted as a kind of liberator and savior. Given that the magazine’s ownership had changed hands four times over the preceding five years, staff members viewed him as a stabilizing force. The optimism has so far been rewarded: Hughes has added more pages to each issue, bulked up the editorial staff and improved the print magazine’s laggardly delivery time.

“We’re young again,” says an optimistic Leon Wieseltier, who has overseen the magazine’s back-of-the-book cultural coverage for three decades. Hughes, he says, “cares about books, about ideas, about the nature of the discourse. I have to tell you, it’s a spectacular relief. The pressures of the present moment in American journalism aren’t just economic; they’re intellectual, or rather anti-intellectual. I feel very confident in saying we’re not going to become quicker, fuzzier, faster. We’re reviving our old standards.”

In fact, Hughes himself has said little about his plans and goals (he declined to be interviewed for this story, pending a “relaunch” of the magazine in the fall). And even after three months, insiders remain a little puzzled by their dashing new publisher. Some wonder if the magazine is a sideline or a lifelong commitment for Hughes, a hobby or a crusade.

They know Hughes has money, brains and time. What they don’t know is whether he has an agenda.

Making connections

As a kid growing up in Hickory, N.C. (population 41,469), Hughes seems to have known exactly what he wanted. He wanted to get out of Hickory, N.C. At 15, he applied to the exclusive Phillips Academy prep school in Andover, Mass., which came as a surprise to his parents, Ray, a sales manager for a paper company, and Brenda, a high-school math teacher. Hughes, an only child, won admission and attended the school with the help of a scholarship.

He quickly became an academic star at Andover, a WASP haven whose alumni include George H.W. and George W. Bush. Hughes won another scholarship, this one to Harvard. His sophomore-year suitemate in 2002 was a kid from the rival Phillips Exeter prep school, a computer-programming whiz named Mark Zuckerberg. Hughes, a history and literature major, didn’t have computer chops, but he was intrigued by the Web project Zuckerberg and two other classmates were developing. He offered suggestions. More important, he offered his personality. In contrast to the intense and focused Zuckerberg, Hughes was articulate and outgoing, and boyishly attractive. He was the group’s natural salesman and, eventually, its spokesman.

The project, of course, was “TheFacebook,” which grew from Zuckerberg and Hughes’s dorm room into an earth-straddling social-media colossus. Hughes would leave Facebook just a few months after graduating from Harvard in 2006. But his co-founding role, and several years of mostly part-time commitment to the company, earned him about 1 percent of its stock, a stake now worth an estimated $850 million.

He also left with a key connection. Before the elections of 2006, Reggie Love, personal aide to then-Sen. Obama, asked Hughes for help in setting up a Facebook page for his boss. A few months after leaving Facebook, he signed on to work as director of online organizing for Obama’s presidential campaign. His personal project was called MyBarackObama.com, which was incorporated into Obama’s site. Unique at the time, it was a kind of Facebook for Obama’s grass-roots organizers, canvassers and donors. MyBO, as it became known, helped raise $30 million for the campaign and engaged millions of Obama’s young supporters.