It’s all part of the plan by Chris Hughes, the 29-year-old co-founder of Facebook, former online campaign adviser to President Obama and The New Republic’s newest owner, to turn around the magazine he bought in March.
To Mr. Foer, the sight was thrilling.
“It felt like for the past 10 years, the magazine was just trying to stay afloat,” he said. “There were real limits on our ambitions.”
Sitting in the K Street offices that The New Republic is renting until it relocates to a space above the International Spy Museum, Mr. Foer said that Mr. Hughes had energized the magazine. “He really thinks of it as a start-up, and that’s exhilarating,” he said. On Monday, readers will be able to see the fruits of Mr. Hughes’s investment for the first time when The New Republic unveils its redesigned print magazine, Web site and app.
The magazine, which has long been the journalism equivalent of high-fiber pasta, even for media-hungry political devotees, embraces a broader mix of political reporting and what Mr. Hughes described as “the high and low in the artistic world.”
Mr. Hughes said that while the magazine would continue to have arts critics review subjects like books and visual arts, he is just as interested in covering topics like electronica and the HBO series “Girls.”
The initial issue reflects the effort to offer more diverse fare: it features an exclusive interview with Mr. Obama, an essay by Walter Kirn, the author of “Up in the Air,” about his personal use of guns, and an article by Judith Shulevitz, a former editor at Lingua Franca and Slate, about why society needs grandmothers.
A new feature called “From the Stacks” will highlight pieces from prominent writers who contributed to the magazine in the past; this month’s entry is Edmund Wilson’s dispatch from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first inauguration. The magazine’s redesigned book reviews include a critique by Michael Lewis of Greg Smith’s book, “Why I Left Goldman Sachs: A Wall Street Story.”
The app and Web site have new, technologically friendly features, like audio versions of articles and the ability to let users read pieces on multiple devices, continuing on one at the spot where they left off on another.
“We’re holding onto the heritage of the magazine while trying to make it more responsive to what people are interested in and how they read in 2013,” Mr. Hughes said.
Behind the scenes, Mr. Hughes and Mr. Foer have been engaged in a delicate balancing act: trying to include The New Republic’s rich history in a magazine designed for the modern media age.
In a nod to the past, they not only incorporated “From the Stacks,” but also hired back a longtime editor, Michael Kinsley, to do a series of profiles. To build its future, Mr. Hughes more than doubled the staff, added a New York bureau for the first time since World War II and hired the magazine’s first in-house art department.
Mr. Foer said that Mr. Hughes had gently led the twice-a-month magazine out of its college newspaper culture in which editors pulled all-nighters, and put in place a far more organized system in which articles are planned weeks in advance.
Mr. Hughes and Mr. Foer also added women’s voices to a magazine that has long been short on them, by hiring Julia Ioffe, a former writer for The New Yorker, and Noreen Malone, a former writer for New York Magazine.
Staff members say that working for the revamped magazine reminds them of media start-ups they have worked at like Slate and George, only with the gravity that comes with The New Republic’s past.
“It’s as though you’re expanding and reconfiguring a house that has great bones,” Mr. Kirn said. “There are a lot of cues as to how to go forth that come from the original design. But the world has changed.”
Mr. Hughes acknowledged that he was slower in transforming the magazine’s business side. But he hired a new head of advertising in November and moved most of that business to New York.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/28/business/media/the-new-republic-aims-to-broaden-its-audience.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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