Chris Hughes, Facebook’s Gay Co-Founder, Purchases Dead-Tree New Republic

It seems that today too many media institutions chase superficial metrics of online virality at the expense of investing in rigorous reporting and analysis of the most important stories of our time. When few people are investing in media institutions with such bold aims as “enlightenment to the problems of the nation,” I believe we must.

Many of us get our news from social networks, blogs, and daily aggregators. The web has introduced a competitive, and some might argue hostile, landscape for long, in-depth, resource-intensive journalism. 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. Although the method of delivery of important ideas has undergone drastic change over the past 15 years, the hunger for them has not dissipated.

In the next era of The New Republic, we will aggressively adapt to the newest information technologies without sacrificing our commitment to serious journalism. We will look to tell the most important stories in politics and the arts and provide the type of rigorous analysis that The New Republic has been known for. We will ask pressing questions of our leaders, share groundbreaking new ideas, and shed new light on the state of politics and culture.

Hughes will serve as publisher and editor-in-chief of the 98-year-old magazine, which has been steadily losing readers and ad revenue.  He told the New York Times, “Profit per se is not my motive… The reason I’m getting involved here is that I believe in the type of vigorous contextual journalism that we, as a society, need.”

Sounds good, but we guess it’s pretty easy to poo-poo profit as a motive when you’re worth a cool $700 million.