November 13, 2013

The New Republic

Oddly, when Facebook rich guy Chris Hughes bought The New Republic early last year, he says he “shared the widespread worry that the web is the enemy of the style of writing and thinking that we practice.”

That fuddy-duddy view didn’t keep Hughes from launching a slick redesign on the iPad and in print — and a responsive website with a bizarre story layout that tends to obscure dominant images with headlines.

Today’s update from Hughes indicates TNR’s reinvented relevance and doubling of its staff has the company on the right track. (He doesn’t mention the magazine’s women problem.)

Underscoring our belief that first-rate journalism can make for good business, our numbers have shown solid improvement. Our circulation base grew by 20 percent in 2012 and is on track to grow by another 20 percent in 2013. Our web traffic has climbed from 800,000 monthly unique readers in February 2012 to an average of 2.4 million unique monthly readers over the past three months. Meanwhile our monthly advertising revenue has doubled since our transition, with half of it coming from our digital products.

The magazine just joined the Alliance for Audited Media, so it’s serious about its numbers.

Hughes invites you to bookmark the page — heh — for updates on the company.

Correction: The headline on this story initially said web traffic to TNR had doubled, not tripled.

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Sam Kirkland is Poynter's digital media fellow, focusing on mobile and social media trends. Previously, he worked at the Chicago Sun-Times as a digital editor,…
Sam Kirkland

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