Speaking at the Dive into Media conference on Tuesday, the 29-year-old Hughes spoke about the state of the magazine but offered no clear answers to questions about its future profitability.

According to Hughes, the New Republic has 44,000 subscribers, which is up from the 34,000 when he bought it. Despite the small number, he said “for the moment, we make money in print” but acknowledged the operation is not making money overall.

“I think we can be profitable, not this year, probably not next year, but there’s a route to it,” said Hughes.

Hughes and fellow panelist Larry Kramer, president and publisher of USA Today, also praised traditional news brands as curators and a source of conversation.

In short, Hughes didn’t appear to have any solid answers about how he will make money from the New Republic — but for now he doesn’t seem to care and appears happy to embrace what host Kara Swisher described as his “do-gooder” and “Lincoln-y”mission.

Hughes did address the role of social media for publishers, saying it brings in 25 percent of website traffic. He also noted that his former employer is not especially helpful for spreading stories.

“Facebook has an interesting challenge when it comes to newsfeed products. They tend to reward images rather than links and the sort of journalism we do. It means we spend more time about Twitter.”

(Want to learn more about monetization strategies for content? Come join us at the paidContent Live conference in New York on April 17).

This story was updated on Wednesday to reflect that the New Republic’s subscriber numbers are 44,000 not 45,000 and that the publication had 34,000 not 38,000 before Hughes purchased it.

“TV on the Web” will appear as a daily online and print listing of what  editors and reporters at the Gannett-owned national newspaper feel are the best web videos and podcasts. The selection will be highlighted by USA Today Pop Candy blogger Whitney Matheson, who will render a weekly viewing recommendation.

Also read: MarketWatch founder Larry Kramer is USA Today’s new editor

While there are numerous other internet video programming guides out there, this is one of the first from a big mainstream newspaper.

“With celebrities such as Tom Hanks and Jerry Seinfeld entering the web-only space, and alternative programming sites such as YouTube, Hulu and Netflix carrying exclusive programming, the time has come to reflect the changing media landscape,” Kramer said in a statement.

In print, the new feature will appear on the TV listings page, and it will have its own dedicated spot online at tvontheweb.usatoday.com.

Kramer, a decorated digital media leader best known for founding MarketWatch and serving as CBS’ first digital chief, took over the top editorial spot at USA Today in May, with the mandate of accentuating the paper’s bubbling digital momentum.

USA Today’s revenue from digital operations was up 25 percent in the first quarter.

I caught up with Larry (no relation) after he moderated a session on The New Publishers at paidContent 2012. We talked about his plans for USA Today, which like other Gannett properties has been battered by layoffs and furloughs.

Will he keep cutting costs? How will his background as an early digital entrepreneur and founder of MarketWatch factor in? What will it take to make USA Today different and relevant as it heads towards its 30th anniversary this September? Where does the international edition come in? One week into the job, he wasn’t deep on details but here’s a good taste of his thinking as he starts this reclamation project.

Vox Media CEO and Chairman Jim Bankoff

In order to tell the story of Star Wars, George Lucas had to create a new technology company that was powerful enough to tell that story. The same thing has to happen in digital news publishing.

That’s the conclusion of Jim Bankoff, CEO and Chairman of Vox Media, whose sites The Verge and SB Nation have shaken up the world of tech and sports journalism.

“Story telling digitally is a native art just like broadcasting,” says Bankoff, who argues that publishers must build themselves in response to the shape of the web and its audiences.

In practical terms, this means building content that is tailored to the fractured, passionate communities that make up the web. The audience isn’t “sports fans” or people interested in “health” but rather New York Rangers fans or those suffering from gout. Bankoff also touted his company’s proprietary tech platform that he says allows writers to better tell stories.

Bankoff was speaking at a paidContent 2012 panel with incoming USA Today publisher Larry Kramer and John Paton, a longtime newspaper veteran who is now CEO of Digital First Media.

Kramer and Paton addressed the familiar challenge for newspapers of how to manage legacy structures while trying to keep pace with nimbler digital natives like Vox. Paton described newspapers’ longtime practice of repurposing existing content as a lousy strategy and predicted that papers’ cost-cutting phase would last another five years.

The upshot is that legacy news companies will remain hard-pressed to leverage their biggest advantage — powerful brand equity — fast enough to be part of the new publishing world.

Check out the rest of our coverage of paidContent 2012. Full archived video on livestream (registration required).

Image courtesy of Angela Waye.

If your responsibility is to make money from content, what should you do next? If the answer was easy, we’d all be on vacation. It’s not — which is why several hundred execs in media, entertainment, information and technology will be at The TimesCenter in New York today for top-level discussion about what’s working, what hasn’t and what’s showing the most promise. We’re hosting a star-studded roster of digital media leaders, including News Corp.’s Jon Miller, Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne; Martha Stewart COO Lisa Gersh; WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg; new USA Today Publisher Larry Kramer; and Condé Nast’s Bob Sauerberg. We’ll talk about making video pay, true cross-platform publishing, discoverability and much more.

Can’t make it in person? Our staff will be writing about it here, you can follow the hashtag #pc2012 — and, even better, you can join us virtually via the livestream of paidContent 2012 here.

Live-blogged stories from the event:

• Content, not hardware, have made tablets the current king
• The new digital newsstand: Enabling “pass-along” — and saying no sometimes
• Digital story-telling and the rise of the new publishers
• Fred Wilson: Content owners, don’t fear the future
• New ‘radically simplified’ WordPress is on the way
• HTML5 is a newspaper’s best friend – even if it has a mobile app
• Conde Nast’s Sauerberg: Get busy innovating, or get busy dying
• Don’t think of it as content, think of it as information
• For discoverability, traditional tools still dominate
• Does social beat search, or does “peacocking” get in the way?
• Financial Times exec: iOS apps don’t work for publishers
• Jon Miller: Hulu still essential to broadcasters
• Social media doesn’t speed up the news cycle — it kills it
• Richard Russo: Amazon puts great young writers in “particular peril”
• Is a vast video library worth the time and money?
• Harry Potter’s publishing wand can tame Amazon, pirates

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett may be buying newspapers — a move that is probably as much about cash flow and real estate as it is a long-term investment thesis — but he can’t possibly buy them all, and that leaves the rest of the industry struggling to try and confront the issues that are causing their decline. One of those issues is the ongoing disruption in the advertising world, but another is that the product newspapers offer is arguably increasingly out of touch with what readers want. The monolithic, ruthlessly objective, single-voiced editorial style that newspapers have grown so accustomed to doesn’t work in a world where anyone and everyone can be a publisher, a reporter, a columnist or an editorial writer.

New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen has written often about this problem, which he calls the “View From Nowhere,” and how the attachment not just to objectivity but to a kind of inhuman, artificially-balanced viewpoint is damaging newspapers and their credibility. What’s more, Rosen argues that it is bad for society as well, since it deprives people of the information they need to make important judgments about issues that affect their lives. And what is the “View From Nowhere?” As he put it:

It’s Bill Keller insisting that “torture” is the wrong word for the New York Times to use in describing torture because it involves taking sides in a dispute between the United States Government and its critics. It’s Howard Kurtz suggesting that Anderson Cooper was “taking sides” when he called the lies of the Egyptian government lies… And it’s that lame formula known as he said, she said journalism.

USA Today’s new publisher says more voices are needed

There are signs that at least some newspaper industry insiders are coming to realize this problem: Larry Kramer, a longtime newspaper editor and founder of CBS Marketwatch who was just named publisher of USA Today, has said in interviews that he wants to make the newspaper into much more of a “compendium of multiple voices” rather than one that has a single monolithic voice. As he described it in one interview:

I think both USA Today and CNN for a long time concentrated on the news being the voice. Now I think with Twitter and with all the different ways news is disseminated, people are looking for a little bit more of an interesting take on a story.

In many ways, the “View From Nowhere” developed over time as the newspaper business stopped being about independent voices and became more of a professional phenomenon — in other words, an industry made up of a few large chains owned by corporate conglomerates. Among other things, the practice of objectivity was designed to make these businesses appear less politically controversial and therefore more appealing to advertisers, who were trying to reach a mass market. But just as advertisers seem to be deserting that model, readers are also gravitating towards outlets with strong voices, regardless of whether they happen to be traditional or mainstream sources.

Buzz Bissinger, the reporter and author of Friday Night Lights, put his finger on part of the problem in a recent interview with the Nieman Journalism Lab, when he described how the process of editing that most newspapers still engage in — where a story is read and edited by as many as half a dozen sub-editors — often kills whatever unique voice might have appeared in a story originally:

Newspaper editors are very cautious — too cautious. One of the things that I don’t miss about papers is the constant — as it goes up the food chain, one editor after another, after another, after another, and what happens is it loses its voice. Everyone takes a shot at it. It’s like making a bad movie.

Safe, homogenized, commodity news is not enough

As Kramer and others have noted, the “View From Nowhere” is also connected to another long-held staple of mainstream media, namely the commodity news that makes up much of a newspaper’s stock-in-trade — the story from yesterday, with all the same facts that a dozen other outlets have, with no point of view or added value. This also has to go, says Kramer. “We really can’t survive if all we do is commodity journalism,” he says. “We have to… say things differently [and] help people understand things.”

This is something that others have also argued for some time. Dan Froomkin, a former Washington Post editor and columnist who is now with the Huffington Post, wrote in 2009 that he believed “playing it safe is killing the American newspaper.” With the profusion of sources of information that the internet has created, he said, the last thing anyone needs is another source of voiceless, middle-of-the-road, commodity journalism. Instead of trying to smother or root out personal viewpoints, Froomkin said newspapers should be emphasizing them as much as possible, in order to cut through the noise coming from a thousand other outlets. As he put it:

We’re hiding much of our newsrooms’ value behind a terribly anachronistic format: voiceless, incremental news stories that neither get much traffic nor make our sites compelling destinations. While the dispassionate, what-happened-yesterday, inverted-pyramid daily news story still has some marginal utility, it is mostly a throwback at this point — a relic of a daily product delivered on paper to a geographically limited community.

Larry Kramer’s comments make it sound as though he is considering an end to the “View From Nowhere,” for USA Today at least. Whether any other newspapers choose to take those kinds of steps remains to be seen. But as Jay Rosen points out, changing that kind of decades-old approach to the news “isn’t as simple as hiring a few bloggers or loosening the rules for writers. We’re talking about ideological change within an occupation that sees itself as having no ideology.” And that isn’t something you can fix by putting up a paywall.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Olaf Gradin

Larry Kramer will be moderating a panel featuring Jim Bankoff, chairman & CEO of Vox Media and
John Paton, CEO of Digital First Media at our paidContent 2012 conference on May 23 in NYC.

I’m also thinking about the range of interviews on tap, including two I’m doing. As president of Condé Nast, Bob Sauerberg is managing the translation of some of the magazine industry’s most iconic brands to a variety of devices and formats. In some cases, CN has tried to revive a brand by going pure digital, most famously with Gourmet Live. We’ll talk about what Sauerberg has learned, how committed CN is to app distribution, whether magazine consortium Next Issue Media can gain any meaningful traction and more.

Jon Miller is the chief digital officer of News Corp., the home of tablet tabloid pioneer The Daily, as revolutionary in its own way as USA Today was in 1982, and of a lot of digital experiments and acquisitions with mixed results (including MySpace, an acquisition Miller didn’t make but had to unwind after numerous rescue attempts failed). A current fixation for the former AOL CEO: video across properties, including the Wall Street Journal and IGN, not just the traditional sources of Fox networks and studios. And through it all, News Corp. has to protect its traditional billions and cope with the constant image hits in the UK. The same internet that offers so much potential revenue also makes it easy for every ripple to go tidal wave.

Other one-on-ones include:

• betaworks CEO John Borthwick with GigaOM Founder Om Malik
• VC Fred Wilson with Mathew Ingram, who outlined some ideas here
• Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Russo will talk with our legal writer Jeff Roberts about the challenges facing authors from copyright to consolidation to pricing
• Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne will talk to Laura Hazard Owen about taking a beloved brand digital
• Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg in conversation with Anil Dash about platforms, power and disruption.

And that’s just part of the day. Check out the complete schedule and the full list of confirmed speakers is here.

The remaining ickets are selling fast — so if you want to take full advantage of the opportunities that come with networking from breakfast to closing cocktails, I strongly suggest you register now.

Thanks to our sponsors for their support. If you’re interested in sponsoring paidContent 2012, please contact eventsales@gigaom.com.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Shutterstock user [Joshua Haviv].

• On Friday, Facebook is set to flip the switch from years of hyped speculation to the reality of a mega-hyped IPO. It’s waiting for regulatory approval to spend $1 billion on Instagram. As I write this, the news is breaking that Pinterest is about raise a round that will follow it at $1.5 billion. A quick scan of our own news pages shows hundreds of millions being invested in the digital content ecosystem — often with a firm belief that there is revenue somewhere to justify those investments, but without any real sense of where it will come from. We’ll ask John Borthwick and Fred Wilson, among others, where they are investing and why.
• Cable and broadcast networks have been unveiling new programming slates into a more fragmented video universe than ever before. Discovery Communications bought Revision 3 for $30 million, Turner Broadcasting invested in Funny or Die. At the same time, YouTube’s $100 million investment in original programming is rolling out channel by channel, AOL is finally moving ahead with its major video plans, Yahoo is investing in original programs with Tom Hanks, Katie Couric and others — and so are Hulu, Amazon and Netflix. Brian Bedol, who is trying to replicate his success as a cable network founder with YouTube channels and other efforts; Lisa Gersh, president and COO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, and Rob Burnett, CEO of David Letterman’s Worldwide Pants, will take us inside their thinking as they make their way through The Video Boom.
• Just this week, one of our moderators turned from board member and adjunct professor to active exec again. That means Larry Kramer will be sitting down as president and publisher of USA Today with John Paton and Jim Bankoff to talk about what it takes to lead and innovate, to be a “new publisher.” Since paidContent 2011, Bankoff taken SB Nation, a network of sports sites, to Vox Media and added a tech vertical with The Verge and has a gaming vertical on the way. Paton, meanwhile, has added MediaNews to his Journal Register portfolio, and is now the the CEO of the much-larger DigitalFirst.

As much as things change, one goal remains the same: the creation and evolution of sustainable business models that will support quality media, entertainment and information across platforms.

We’ll be covering the topics that matter to you in our signature one-day, single-stage, 360-degree style. We have a stellar roster of speakers and moderators who are more than up for the task, including:

• Jon Miller, Chief Digital Officer, News Corp.
• Bob Sauerberg, President, Condé Nast
• Vivian Schiller, Chief Digital Officer, NBC News
• Josh Marshall, Editor & Publisher, TalkingPointsMemo.com
• Mark Johnson, CEO, Zite
• Matt Mullenweg, Founding Developer, WordPress and Founder, Automattic

The full list of confirmed speakers is here.

Just as important as the speakers, though, is the fact that we have great attendees with a lot to add to the discussion.

But space is limited and tickets are selling fast — so if you want to take full advantage of this jam-packed agenda and the opportunities that come with networking throughout the day from breakfast to closing cocktails, I strongly suggest you register now.

If you’re interested in sponsoring paidContent 2012, please contact eventsales@gigaom.com.

It’s a sign that Gannett is serious about moving ahead in digital while making the most of its print roots. Kramer will report to CEO Gracia Martore and will be responsible for every facet of Gannett’s troubled flagship publication. In addition to the print edition and its reach across platforms, that includes USA TODAY Sports Media Group, the Travel Media Group, Reviewed.com and USA WEEKEND. He may have a lot to learn about Gannett and USA Today but he’s already got the most-needed skill set: a pragmatic understanding of how things work in a cross-platform, digital-first world when print revenues still matter. (Release.)

Kramer comes from the old school with a distinguished career at the Washington Post and San Francisco Examiner but has been a new media entrepreneur since he founded DataSport, featuring a hand-held sports info device, in 1991. In addition to founding MarketWatch and selling it to Dow Jones, he is a former chairman of The Online Publishers Association.

Kramer (no relation to me) has been teaching at the university level and serving on a number of boards, including Discovery, since leaving CBS in 2007. He was on the board of paidContent’s parent company ContentNext prior to its 2008 sale to Guardian News & Media.

He also wrote C-SCAPE: Conquer the Factors Changing Business Today and has been blogging a bit at the book’s site. His most recent post explored how his news consumption has changed since the iPad. What did he have to say about USA Today?

The good and the bad news about the USA Today app is that it is a close cousin to the look of the paper. While it captures some of the design feature of the paper, some have become tired. The site loses a sense of urgency and news judgement by stacking stories with essentially the same look and feel as each other. The larger layouts in the print version of the paper are often the most attractive devices in the newspaper, and they are not translated to this platform. Photos dominate the visuals, and the reader gets little interactive or even passive, graphic presentation that approaches what is so great about the print paper. The page looks the same every day. USAToday’s IPhone app is slicker and faster to use.

USA Today overhaul coming up

Gannett is already committed to a cross-platform remake for USA Today. In the Q1 earnings call last month, Martore said a relaunch is already in the works for apps, mobile and print in conjunction with the paper’s 30th anniversary this September. From the transcript:

So we see those areas; they’re small now. And even if you look at overall numbers that are being reported, tablet and mobile are still a very small piece of overall Digital revenues. But we see those categories as growing disproportionately to the rest of Digital revenues. And that’s why we are making the investments and
doing the things that we are doing in both of those areas that we think are going to be very important growth areas for us over the next several years.

Digital revenue was up 25 percent at USA Today in Q1; in a bright spot, subscriptions to e-editions outweighed print circ losses. Overall, the unit accounts for less than 10 percent of Gannett’s revenues. During the call, the most important goal highlighted was finding “a top-notch publisher to advance the promising initiatives already underway, and grow the business by spearheading USA Today’s continuing evolution into a leading multi-platform media brand.”

That search formally began April 10, when Gannett vet David Hunke, who held the role since 2009, was bumped up to chairman. Kramer is the first USA Today publisher from outside Gannett since its founding. Hunke succeeded Craig Moon.

At that same earnings call, Gannett reported a 25 percent drop in revenue.

Gannett also had a change in the C suite Monday, with the resignation of CFO Paul Saleh. Treasurer Michael Hart will be “interim principal financial officer” during the search.

Update: I’ve confirmed with Kramer that he will have to leave the boards of Discovery Communications, AMI, Freedom Communications and Appinions. He will stay on the Black Arrow and HBS Publishing boards, as well as the Syracuse Board of Trustees.

Larry Kramer will interview DigitalFirst’s John Paton and Vox Media’s Jim Bankoff at ourpaidContent 2012 conference in NYC on May 23. Register here.

Photo courtesy of Katy Raddatz.

The 15-minute video, after the jump: