San Francisco (dpa) – Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes has taken over the political magazine The New Republic for an undisclosed sum, in a bid to apply his digital expertise to the almost 100-year-old liberal publication, he said Friday. In a message to readers on the New Republic's website, Hughes said his goal in taking over the 98-year-old progressive magazine was to use technology to further its mission of “serious reporting and analysis.” “The web has introduced a competitive, and some might argue hostile, landscape for long, in-depth, resource-intensive journalism,” said Hughes, 28, who took on the role of publisher and editor-in-chief of the magazine. “But as we've seen with the rise of tablets and mobile reading devices, it is an ever-shifting landscape – one that I believe now offers opportunities to reinvigorate the forms of journalism that examine the challenges of our time in all their complexity.” Hughes was a roommate of Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard and played a key role in Facebook's early years. He left the company in 2008 to work as an online strategist for the election campaign of Barack Obama and his Facebook shares were estimated to be worth some 800 million dollars before the company filed to go public. BM ShortURL: http://goo.gl/Z9AQ2 Tags: Chris Hughes, Facebook, Founder, New Republic, Purchase Section: Latest News, Media, North America
