One of the founders of Facebook, Chris “Not Zuckerberg” Hughes has purchased The New Republic:

The newest owner of The New Republic magazine is Chris Hughes, a new-media guru who co-founded Facebook and helped to run the online organizing machine for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

Mr. Hughes’s purchase of a majority stake in the magazine will be announced on Friday, once again remaking the masthead of the nearly century-old magazine that helped define modern American liberalism.

Of course, over the past 40 years, the former owner, Marty Peretz, has done his best to betray American liberalism.

TNR has been reduced to a caricature, endorsing just about every bone-headed ‘Phant idea, particularly in the foreign policy area, and giving Republicans the the refrain, “Even the liberal New Republic.”

That, and the fact that TNR is a petri dish for trustifarian Ivy Leaguer plagiarists, like Glass and Shalit.

This is why it’s circulation has fallen, and its publication frequency has been cut in half,and The Nation has 3 times the circulation.

I don’t expect “Not Zuckerberg” to turn this around though. His brave new idea is to sprinkle Web 2.0 pixie dust to make everything work:

His focus, he said in an interview in advance of the announcement, will be on distributing the magazine’s long-form journalism through tablet computers like the iPad. Though he does not intend to end the printed publication, “five to 10 years from now, if not sooner, the vast majority of The New Republic readers are likely to be reading it on a tablet,” he said.

The problem is that the magazine sucks.  The only thing that tablet, or web based, features can do is lower the cost of distribution, and allow for some multimedia content.

Its employment policy is best described as affirmative action for overpriviliged youth, and its schtick, hippie punching, was old in 1982.