Chris Hughes, the Facebook co-founder and owner of The New Republic, expressed regret on Friday over the mass exodus underway at the liberal magazine.
“I am saddened by the loss of such great talent, many of whom have played an important role in making The New Republic so successful in the past,” Hughes said in a statement posted on Twitter by New York Times reporter Ravi Somaiya. “It has been a privilege to work with them, and I wish them only the best.”
Dozens of editors resigned from TNR on Friday morning, less than 24 hours after veteran editors Franklin Foer and Leon Wieseltier resigned amid some landmark changes for the magazine. TNR will scale back its print schedule, going from 20 issues per year to 10, and will relocate its headquarters from Washington, D.C. to New York City. Foer will be replaced by Gabriel Snyder, a former editor at Gawker and The Atlantic Wire who most recently worked at Bloomberg Media.
Hughes, who purchased TNR in 2012, acknowledged that the century-old institution is undergoing some big changes.
“This is a time of transition, but I am excited to work with our team — both new and old alike — as we pave a new way forward,” he said. “The singular importance of The New Republic as an institution can and will be preserved, because it’s bigger than any one of us.”
Readers of TNR. like myself, are saddened too. However my greatest sadness come from watching Hughes destroy a great institution where one could find some of the best writing around.
It may not be bigger than than all of them when the smoke clears.
And this is happening pretty uniformly, whether slowly or near-overnight, to every famous name in publishing. The Internet is the asteroid that killed the media dinosaurs, but the dinosaurs were pretty magnificent in their prime.
Chris Hughes haz an insincere sad. My heart is wrung.
And so…why did he buy TNR instead of just starting a website? Seems like he did this the expensive way.