Question: How do you reinvigorate a 98-year old US news and current affairs magazine for the digital age?
Answer: Hire a 29 year-old former Facebook executive. Naturally.
Chris Hughes was one of the social media company's co-founders and also spent time advising the Obama campaign. Now he’s publisher of the New Republic and judging by his interview with NPR earlier this week, he’s got plenty of smart and sensible things to say.
You can listen to the whole thing here but here are some extracts:
Depth and heft vs. dash and speed
For us, we're not trying to compete with The New York Times or The Huffington Posts of the world to get that first dash of the headlines in the morning. Where you're much more likely to read The New Republic is at lunch, in the evenings, on the weekends — the moments when you want to try and go a little bit deeper and get some context and analysis on the journalism of the day.
On the future of print
We make money off of print. And in addition to that, I personally love print. I mean, I tend to read on my phone and my iPad, but on the weekends in particular, I love sitting down with a print magazine and going page by page. So, it makes business sense for us, and it also is something that I love. So we're committed to print for the foreseeable future.
There's more from Hughes on the New Republic site here.
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