Last Friday morning, Chris Hughes, the owner of The New Republic, and Guy Vidra, the magazine’s C.E.O., presided over a meeting at the publication’s Penn Quarter offices in Washington, D.C. It had been a busy twenty-four hours: a day earlier, Hughes had forced out the magazine’s editor, Franklin Foer, and Vidra had announced that the hundred-year-old opinion magazine, which was founded to “bring sufficient enlightenment to the problems of the nation,” would be reduced from twenty to ten issues a year and would move to New York, where it would be reinvented as a “vertically integrated digital-media company.” Minutes before the Friday meeting began, most of the magazine’s writers and editors had resigned in protest.

Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook with an estimated fortune of more than half a billion dollars, bought T.N.R. in 2012, and the Washington headquarters was a reflection of his ambitions. The office is bright, with an open floor plan for writers and a row of well-appointed editors’ offices with windows overlooking the National Portrait Gallery. Bound volumes from the magazine’s history line a long wall, and a small library decorated with photographs of T.N.R.’s founders and early contributors serves as a retreat for quiet reading. Hughes signed a ten-year lease and told his writers that the magazine would stay in Washington for a long time.

As the remaining staff gathered around a long conference table, Vidra set up a computer with his notes on it. Hughes joined from New York via a video-conferencing system.

Vidra read from his laptop. Hughes had hired him in October from Yahoo, and he spoke in a Silicon Valley-inflected jargon that many of T.N.R.’s journalists found grating and bewildering. As soon as he arrived, he embarked on a project to transform the modest-circulation journal of politics and culture into something more like a technology company. In conversations with Foer, he deemed it necessary to rid the staff of old-timers who he believed were ill-suited for the transformation.

That problem had now been solved. Foer, who spent fourteen years at T.N.R., was gone. Leon Wieseltier, the magazine’s literary editor, who worked there for thirty-two years, left with him. So did the executive editors Rachel Morris and Greg Veis, who were responsible for editing the magazine’s in-depth journalism; nine of the magazine’s eleven active senior writers; Jeffrey Rosen, the longtime legal-affairs editor; Hillary Kelly, the digital-media editor; and six of Wieseltier’s culture writers and editors (covering film, art, music, poetry, dance, and architecture). Thirty-six out of thirty-eight contributing editors, who are a mix of contract writers, semi-regular contributors, and T.N.R. alumni, resigned or asked to have their names removed from the masthead (including me: I am hardly an impartial observer). In all, two-thirds of the names on the editorial masthead were gone. “I wish I could have walked out, too,” a junior staffer who is still there and couldn’t afford to quit told me. In a letter to Hughes, twenty former writers and editors, including several who now work at The New Yorker, said that Hughes and Vidra had brought about the “destruction” of The New Republic.

At the meeting in the conference room, Vidra addressed the depleted staff. “I feel like there’s been a lot of misperception, and maybe some of that is my fault,” he said. “Undoubtedly a lot of it is.” He mentioned the incoming editor, Gabriel Snyder, who had previously worked as the editor of Gawker and the Wire. Snyder did not know many people on staff, and had never edited a magazine. But Vidra said that Snyder “was eager to get into the role, and he wants to meet with all of you.”

Hughes, speaking from the video screen, sounded angry and emotional. Staffers in New York told me that he welled up as he spoke. He told colleagues later that he was unprepared for the scale of the resignations and depth of the protest, especially from people who he had spent the past two years cultivating. In the meeting, Hughes described the changes in the magazine’s frequency and editorship, but insisted that a radical transformation into a digital-media company with a greater emphasis on profits did not mean that The New Republic, which was co-founded by Walter Lippmann, would devolve into a click-bait factory. He explained that he had studied history and literature at Harvard. “It’s always been a surprise to the rest of the world that I care about tradition and about institutions,” he said, “because we live in a cultural moment which very much rewards the language of startups and Silicon Valley.”

Hughes insisted that deep reporting and ideas would still be important to the magazine. “That’s not enough,” he added. “We also have to do videos. We also have to do interactive graphics. We also have to be increasingly smarter—we’ve already made good progress, but even more—about how we use social media.” The session finished abruptly with Hughes banging on the table and declaring, “This institution has been around for one hundred fucking years,” and promising that it wasn’t dead.

Vidra and Hughes had another problem on their hands. The next issue of T.N.R. was scheduled to close the following Wednesday, and writers had begun to withdraw their articles. Vidra, two of the remaining editors at the magazine, and two members of the business staff gathered in the library. Former editors told me that, as far as they know, the magazine has never missed an issue in its history.

Hughes addressed the group by speakerphone. “How are we going to produce the issue?” he asked.

I spent nine years at The New Republic, from 1998 to 2007, before I joined The New Yorker. Franklin Foer is a close friend, and I know almost every individual involved in this story, including Hughes, who last year made me an offer to return to T.N.R. This account is based on internal e-mails, recordings of meetings, contemporaneous notes, and conversations with about two dozen people, most of whom would not speak for attribution. On Sunday night, I interviewed Hughes for forty minutes.

Hughes bought T.N.R. two years ago in what was essentially a fire sale. The magazine has almost always lost money, and for the previous five years a small team of wealthy friends of the magazine had been sustaining it. But by the fall of 2011, the losses deepened and the owners were ready to sell. Richard Just, the editor at the time, had the unenviable choice of trying to find a savior for the magazine or watching it die slowly. Just, who now runs _National Journal _magazine, started as the online editor in 2004 and had worked his way up the print masthead to the top position, where he garnered T.N.R.’s first National Magazine Award nomination for general excellence in twenty years. He was determined to find a new buyer and save the institution. A mutual friend connected Just and Hughes via e-mail. They had breakfast in New York, and when Just returned to Washington he told Wieseltier that he thought they had found their buyer. Just, Wieseltier, and Hughes spent the next four months discussing the details.