(Flickr: unionsquareventures)

Back in August, Fast Company reported that Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes had sold his startup Jumo, a social network to connect people to nonprofits, to GOOD, the magazine publisher and digital media platform, for undisclosed terms.

Betabeat reported the terms were for $0 and a graceful exit.

Our story said Mr. Hughes's company was a flop, and that the sale was more of a face-saving effort than a true acquisition. "Rather than folding the grant-funded, well-meaning and inordinately high-profile startup and admitting what would surely be a very public failure, he arranged a deal with an old friend," we wrote at the time. Ben Goldhirsh, who went to boarding school with Mr. Hughes, is the CEO and owner of GOOD.

Betabeat has now obtained documents pertaining to the sale, which confirm every bit of our theory, except one. At the time, Mr. Hughes insisted the sale price was not $0, and he was right: The sale had not yet been approved by the state attorney general, a requirement because of its nonprofit status.

The sale was approved and the approval was filed in the Supreme Court of New York on December 30, 2011.

Jumo, a nonprofit corporation which raised more than $3.5 million in grant money from the Ford Foundation, the Omidyar Network and the Knight Foundation., among others, was not sold for $0. It was sold for $62,221, based on an appraisal of Jumo's value by Morrison, Brown, Argiz and Farra.

Time and the documents have shown that public statements made by Mr. Goldhirsh and Mr. Hughes were disingenuous. The "Jumo team will be fully integrated into the GOOD ecosystem" or that Mr. Hughes would be working on "Jumo’s next act... will appear under the GOOD imprimatur in some form this November or December" have both proved false. We could find only one employee who had been hired at GOOD after Jumo: Jen Chiou, Jumo's former outreach director. Ms. Chiou is now general manager at GOOD Worldwide, LLC; other Jumo employees went to Tumblr, Artsy, BlackBook Media and other places. Jumo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

(Additional fun fact: Jumo paid pretty well! Ms. Chiou made $95,000, the CTO made $150,000, and the engineers made between $107,500 and $135,000; Mr. Hughes, as executive director, took a $1 salary.)

Furthermore, while Mr. Hughes was supposedly slated to be a senior advisor to GOOD, we heard nothing about it after the announcement. The Facebook cofounder, whose second act included working on digital strategy for Barack Obama's presidential campaign, has gone on to join the Knight Foundation board, some kind of agency for the viral spread of progressive ideas with MoveOn veterans, and, most recently, take over as publisher and editor-in-chief of The New Republic.

Here is what GOOD did get from Jumo:

(a) 1-year exclusive license to use the Corporation's trademarks, copyrights, and brand likeness and the goodwill of the business associated therewith;
(b) a minimum of 10 registered users communications;
(c) a secure API endpoint for the retrieval of the Jumo profile and social graph information based on an email address (personal information to be transferred only if the user opts in to the transfer pursuant to the process described in paragraphs 11 and 12 below); and
(d) facilitation of Purchaser's recruitment of Seller employees.

Jumo also agreed to hand over five MacBook Pros, according to documents.

According to the document, which was filed in December, Jumo was also working to return approximately $488,944 in unused grant funds to The Ford Foundation, Knight Foundation, Omidyar Network, Pershing Square Foundation, and Rockefeller Foundation, in accordance with written grant agreements. No debt was transferred in the "sale," but GOOD didn't even get Jumo's domain name or its two patents.

The document filed with the New York Supreme Court:

Jumo - Leave to Sell Assets

Ben Weitzenkorn contributed reporting.

via flickr.com/docsearls

It looks like we can cut the question mark at the end of "Chris Hughes: Media Mogul?" The New York Times Media Decoder blog reports that the rumors were true, Mr. Hughes will indeed head up the 98-year-old neoliberal magazine, which has struggled with diminishing profits and dwindling circulation.

Although the terms of the deal were not revealed, Mr. Hughes will become the magazine's editor-in-chief and publisher. And they've wasted no time updating the publication's Wikipedia page. After spearheading President Obama's digital campaign in 2008, Mr. Hughes went on to found Jumo, a social network for nonprofits and activists which was "acquired" by GOOD for $0.

What's the former Facebooker's plan to rescue old media? According to Media Decoder, Mr. Hughes will focus on "distributing the magazine’s long-form journalism through tablet computers like the iPad."But that doesn't mean he's privileging technological innovation over good ole fashioned gumshoe reporting. As Mr. Hughes writes in his letter to The New Republic's readers:

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.

Between Mr. Hughes' new gig and Yishan Wang's appointment as CEO of Reddit, we think its safe to say the Facebook Mafia is starting to feel the call of duty.

Mr. Hughes. (wikipedia.org)

Another member of the Facebook mafia struggles to find an equally fulfilling pursuit. Chris Hughes, one of Mark Zuckerberg's college roommates, a co-founder of Facebook and its first head of publicity (in the movie, he's one of the guys on the couch), went from startup founder to politics all star; working on Barack Obama's digital campaign and then launching Jumo, a socially-minded startup that shut down in August. Now the 28-year-old millionaire (reportedly $700 million) is moving into the media scene. 

The Soho resident joined the Knight Foundation's board in October and is backing a "viral media startup" with the former executive director of MoveOn.org for those with progressive politics (Reddit?).

Now, reports the Huffington Post, he's considering buying the lefty news magazine The New Republic, which has experienced the usual falling circulation and dwindling profits, and has reportedly been exploring a sale. HuffPo's media reporter, Michael Calderone, also reported that several prospective buyers had already passed; although TNR's owner denies it all.

About to go viral

As Liz Gannes noticed yesterday, Chris Hughes has got himself a new project. The former Facebooker turned political wunderkind stumbled with his last project Jumo, a social network for do-gooders that was acquired by GOOD. Now he's working on something code named Cloud Tiger Media, which plans to create a viral engine for spreading progressive ideas. 

The site describes the project thusly: "Veterans of The Onion, MoveOn, and Facebook are joining together to launch a viral media startup that will spread important, compelling ideas to hundreds of millions of people online and make being a progressive fun again. Our first round of funding is complete –- now we need a few fantastic partners to help hit the ground running."

Hughes was instrumental in the online organizing for Barack Obama's 2008 campaign. He's working on this new project with Eli Paiser, the former executive director of MoveOn.org.

They are hiring for four positions, three of which are technical, but for all you aspiring Jonah Perreti's out there, there is a gig as viral editor that might be your big break.

Here's our favorite part, the qualifications. "Send a cover letter, a resume, and the link to your Tumblr or personal blog to editorjob@elipariser.com. If you don’t have either, create a Tumblr and post 10-20 interesting things to it so we get a sense of your taste."

Any job where you can throw together a Tumblr as your entire resume sounds like the kind of bleeding edge project we want to be involved in. From Mr. Hughes post about the new company, there seem to be two other important qualifications: you must love Facebook and hate Fox News.

Good Magazine.

Good help—pun unintended—is apparently really that hard to find.

It's pretty typical for companies to offer internal recruiting bonuses to anybody who can bring home a viable applicant that pans out. It wasn't until recently that media companies started offering up these kinds of bonuses (or at least at decent sizes) when they all started looking for engineers (one company this writer worked for offered up a $1,000 bonus for an iOS programmer to the entire company including editorial employees, which is more than any potential editorial bonus was worth).

But a media company taking the bounty to the public—and to Twitter—isn't something we've seen before...until now:

This probably isn't the first time this has ever happened, but it's one of the first instances we've seen of and/or heard of it from such a public, viable brand. For what it's worth, Good Magazine "partnered" with social networking service Jumo back in August; it was founded in 2006 by a then 26 year-old Ben Goldhirsh (entrepreneur Bernie Goldhirsh's son) and among their recruits including one Al Gore III, the son of America's Would-Be President. Despite criticism of their profit models, Good has not only managed to persist, but thrive due in no small part to angel funding and pivoting from being merely a media operation to an "integrated media platform" focused on social causes. They also produce a pretty quality product; between that and their deep pockets, this seems like a smart, crowdsourced version of spending money to make money. Upshot: Don't be surprised if larger, more prominent media brands follow suit in search of tech talent.

Mr. Hughes via Crunchbase

The Knight Foundation, which sponsors innovative projects in journalism, just named the "first ever digital appointments" to its board, reports Businessweek.

They include Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, Joichi Ito from MIT's Media Lab (an early investor in Twitter, Flickr and Technorati), as well as John Palfrey, who runs Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society and works as an adviser at Highland Capital Partners.

Mr. Hughes told Businessweek, "We need to be approaching these questions and these problems with an attitude more akin to venture capital, than with the attitude of a foundation." That attitude dovetails with the Knight Foundation's own pivot. The agency is switching it's strategy, "from charity to 'social investing' as news and information delivery becomes digital."

Mr. Hughes co-founded both Facebook and Jumo, a social network for activism. According to Crunchbase, Mr. Hughes venture capital experience comes from an entrepreneur-in-residence program at General Catalyst Partners. He has no angel investments listed.

In August, Mr. Hughes arranged for an 'acquisition' of his startup Jumo by friends at GOOD. Although the price was undisclosed, Betabeat reported at the time that no money changed hands.

Knight Foundation president Alberto Ibarguen told Businessweek:

“Traditionally in the nonprofit sector, because an idea is founded on fate so much of the time, or founded on hope, the typical thing would be for someone to continue and continue until they ran out of money,” Ibarguen said. “An entrepreneur would find a creative way to make it work.”

Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes has struggled with his ambitious solo start-up, the social network for activism Jumo, ever since its bumpy launch. Waning traffic and disinterested users were making it obvious that the site was not going to catch on, despite multiple redesigns; a tough pill to swallow for the wunderkind whose second act after Facebook, online strategy at the Obama presidential campaign, was another huge success story.

But Mr. Hughes found a solution: rather than folding the grant-funded, well-meaning and inordinately high-profile start-up and admitting what would surely be a very public failure, he arranged a deal with an old friend. GOOD, the publisher-turned-digital-media-platform with a focus on good design and social causes, announced today that it has acquired Jumo for undisclosed terms. But the "acquisition" is not quite the earth-shaker it was made out to be. Betabeat has learned the terms amounted to $0, a loose "advisory" role for Mr. Hughes at GOOD, and the opportunity for Jumo's 16 employees to interview for the start-up's new owner.

Mr. Hughes and GOOD co-founder Ben Goldhirsh are old buddies who went to boarding school together at Phillips Academy in Massachusetts. After the Obama campaign, GOOD tried to recruit Mr. Hughes to build out GOOD's online community--but declined so he could try his hand at his own start-up.

The Goldhirsh Foundation became one of Jumo's early investors and the pair stayed close during their entrepreneurial journeys. When it became clear that even Mr. Hughes's resume and extensive network could not save Jumo, Mr. Goldhirsh offered a way for the CEO to save face while imparting web 2.0 cred to GOOD, which produces a website, videos, live events, and print magazine, but wants to beef up its technology, interactive apps, online community and other digital offerings.

Since GOOD is acquiring no technology--Jumo is open-sourcing its code--and hasn't committed to acquiring any engineering talent, the partnership is more of a symbolic marriage than a business deal (contrary to the report today that the companies are "merging forces" in Fast Company, the source of an earlier profile of Mr. Hughes called "The Kid Who Made Obama President").

Jumo is a nonprofit 501c(3) dedicated to building loyal online communities for causes and charitable organizations. But the site's traffic peaked when it launched, and the reaction from the nonprofit sector was tepid, although 15,000 nonprofits signed up. The site's design was confusing, some elements such as a Kickstarter-esque component for campaigns fell flat, and the core idea itself was questionable: why ask users to build a separate profile on a new network, and how do you get them to go from clicking "like" to meaningfully supporting a cause with action?

"As our teams combine, you will see the emergence of a single, vibrant online network on GOOD.is," Mr. Hughes wrote in a vague post on the Jumo blog today. "I will be teaming up with GOOD’s CEO, Ben Goldhirsh, to help grow GOOD and Jumo through an important stage of development."

Sources report that employees within Jumo reacted to the story in Fast Company which broke the news of the acquisition and discussed the future integration. Mr. Hughes is a former Fast Company cover boy. And Inc. Magazine, Fast Company's sister publication, was founded by Mr. Goldhirsh's father, Bernie Goldhirsh.

Betabeat reached out to Chris Hughes, Jumo and Good Media for this piece. Jumo general manager Kristen Titus responded: " We are not disclosing the terms of the agreement, but GOOD is purchasing Jumo assets for an undisclosed sum. Chris Hughes is joining GOOD’s team, along with other Jumo employees, as a Senior Advisor."

Jumo had raised $3.5 million dollars through a grant from the Omidyar Network and Knight Foundation, according to Crunchbase.

Video of Chris Hughes talking about Jumo on Colbert - h/t Working in Boxer Shorts

"Congratulations! You have just become a top advocate for Charter Schools on Jumo. Boost your advocate status by posting, commenting on, and caring about stories on Jumo: http://www.jumo.com/charterschools."

Mr. Taylor had been a member of Jumo for two days, having joined on March 29 to find specific ways to make fun of it.

When Jumo was getting ready for launch, a guy could practically feel the drool puddles from a small army of social-media buzz junkies gathering around his Chuck Taylors. Chris Hughes, the adorable blonde "Facebook co-founder" (Yeah, remember the guy whose job it was to reach out to Yale and Columbia in The Social Network? Great founding.) who used Twitter to help Barack Obama become president was behind the project.

As it turns out, the website that helps people engage in perpetual real-time narcissism makes a pretty bogus inspiration for a site designed to get people thinking about anything but themselves. But Jumo manages to be a dud even if you ignore the totally flawed premise. It’s suspicious, confusing, ugly and boring.

To get started on Jumo, you better get in the spirit of giving right away, because the website demands that users hand over a bunch of Facebook data right off the bat. Jumo wants to know your basic Facebook information and access your data whenever it wants. And it wants to post to your wall.

After that, Jumo makes fake activism easier than ever before. Pick a couple nebulous causes you’re vaguely interested in (are you into “Environment and Animals” or “Human Rights”? -- you can pick both!). Soon you’ll be confronted with a Facebook Wall-style page that displays articles and other material that sort of fall within the set of interests you chose. Right now I’m looking at two posts about refugees, something about sea turtles and a promo for a documentary about landfills. Next to each item is a little green button that’s resembles Facebook’s “Like” button except it says “Care.” Caring was never so easy. Thanks to Jumo, I can care about 50 tragedies by the time I’m done eating my Kashi Heart to Heart Warm Cinnamon Oat. It’s soothing to watch that little green button turn from green to white. “Care” becomes “Cared.” There are a million Ivory Coast refugees.  More in Somalia. Public schools in Detroit are failing. Click, click, click. Care, care, care.

Just like voting for a president, “Caring” is easy. Too bad Amnesty International doesn’t free political prisoners on the strength of clicks. Anyone who cares about doing more than making empty gestures for Amnesty is going to have to actually write a letter. (You can send money through Jumo, but it doesn’t use PayPal, so get ready to give your credit card number to yet another website.)

Part of the confusion owes to an uncomfortable fact: Jumo is as ugly as a shaved rabbit. Honestly, I’ve seen Geocities pages that looked better. Part of being a serious charity website is looking like you’re serious. And the Reebok Pumps color scheme isn’t helping here. I haven’t seen this much royal blue and lime green since I thumbed through a Pac Sun catalog. When people give money to Jumo they probably expect to get a pair of board shorts in the mail.

Look, Jumo isn’t bad for charities. It’s way too useless to do any harm. Jumo’s users are the kinds of people who if you asked them if they cared about a certain humanitarian disaster they would say “Oh yeah that’s awful,” and if you asked them what they did about it they might say “I voted for Obama.” Or, if they were really engaged, maybe they paid some money to get a little Japanese flag onto their Tumblr avatars after the earthquake. Fixing problems isn’t fun. Activism is boring and hard and frustrating. And that’s not going to change just because someone made an ugly, buggy version of Facebook and said it’s for a good cause.

Grow up, you babies.

Panicked, he turned to Twitter.

So you got into the elevator, pressed the button and it started moving. So then did it... grind to a stop?

Not really, no. It's a really quiet elevator and bigger than the usual elevator. I was in there by myself and it just kind of stopped and I couldn't tell, like I could tell it was in between floors and everything, but it just halted. I tried hitting the call button and nothing happened, so I just gave my boss a call and let her know that I was stuck in the elevator.

"STILL STUCK IN THIS FUCKING ELEVATOR." --2:30 p.m.

What inspired you to tweet?

I was like, I have internet access and I need something to occupy myself with. I think I took a picture of myself to post to Tumblr. [Also, a video. --ed.] Also I had 3G service so I checked into Foursquare and added "A fucking elevator" as a location.

"I BETTER NOT HAVE TO STAY LATE AT WORK TODAY. BTW, STILL FUCKING STUCK IN THIS FUCKING ELEVATOR." --2:32 p.m.

And what was the reaction from the Twittersphere?

I got a couple of responses. My co-worker Matt told me he didn't even know that I was actually in the elevator until he saw my tweet. He told me he took his headphones off and said, "Oh my god, Tyler's stuck in the elevator" and everyone was like, "Yeah, we know."

The majority of the time I use Twitter is if I'm at a bar or at a movie theater, waiting for my friends to show up, and I need to look like I have something to do because I'm out in public and I don't want to look like I'm just waiting for someone. So I guess it was kind of the same thing except I happened to be in an elevator, stuck by myself, and no one was watching me.

"WHY HAVEN'T THE @GROUPME GUYS SAVED ME YET? STILL STUCK IN THE ELEVATOR." --2:35 p.m.

"I'LL KEEP TWEETING SO YOU KNOW THAT I HAVEN'T CUT OFF MY HANDS FOR FOOD." --2:39 p.m.

"TELL EVERY DUDE I HAVE EVER DATED THAT I WAS TWEETING ABOUT THEM BEFORE I DIED IN THIS ELEVATOR." --2:56 p.m.

Did you get any new followers out of this ordeal?

Yeah! The Awl posted a screenshot of my first few tweets with a link to my Twitter account. I've gotten at least 100 since this morning when no one was paying attention to me.

"IT'S MOVING" --2:56 p.m.

So what else happened while you were in the elevator?

A couple of the GroupMe guys, I believe Steve Martocci was one of them, and someone else said they were coming try to pry it open with a hammer. They banged on the door-I could hear them and they told me they were trying, but they couldn't do anything because it was stuck between floors.

I just kind of sat there. I stood for a while, and I was kind of shaking and nervous because I'd never been stuck in an elevator before. After about ten minutes I just sat down because I was like, I have no idea how long this will take so I might as well get comfortable.

"I'M ALIVE AND OUT OF THE ELEVATOR." --2:58 p.m.

How do you feel about the elevator right now?

Um, I'm not a really big fan of it. I definitely don't think I want to be on it alone anytime soon. I don't think I would stop taking elevators altogether. I'm not claustrophobic and it didn't drop or anything, so I'll probably go back to taking the elevator one day. Probably sooner rather than later.

"My mother is really upset that I said 'fuck' on Twitter." --5:42 p.m.

LATE UPDATE: GroupMe developer Pat "Boy Wonder!" Nakajima tweets in to report he was the second attempted rescuer; it was his hammer.

Disclosure.