Chris Hughes, the owner of The New Republic, said on Friday that he had sold the magazine to Win McCormack, a publisher and editor based in New York and Portland, Ore., who founded the literary quarterly Tin House.

Mr. McCormack will appoint Hamilton Fish, the publisher of The Washington Spectator and a former publisher of The Nation, to be publisher and editorial director, The New Republic said.

Mr. Hughes, a Facebook founder whose tenure at the magazine was marked by turmoil, including the resignations of multiple employees protesting his decision to replace its top editor, signaled an intention to sell last month. Mr. McCormack’s and Mr. Fish’s backgrounds in journalism and progressive politics, he said, “make them uniquely qualified to lead such a historic institution. I look forward to watching their progress over the years to come.”

The Washington Spectator is a nonprofit liberal publication that, its website says, reports “on the excesses of the public and private sectors that distort our politics and undermine democracy.’’

Mr. McCormack, an active Democratic fund-raiser, is the author of a book that details the sexual indiscretions of Republican politicians who espouse family values. Mr. Fish, who also produces documentary films, comes from a long line of Republican lawmakers. In 1988, he sought the Democratic nomination for the same Westchester County congressional seat his forbears had held, but was defeated.

The magazine did not make Mr. McCormack, Mr. Fish or Mr. Hughes available for interviews, or disclose the terms of the sale. But Mr. McCormack said in a statement that he intended to stay true to The New Republic’s traditions and preserve “the journal as an important voice in a new debate over how the basic principles of liberalism can be reworked to meet the equally demanding challenges of our era.”

The sale caps a troubled four years at the helm for Mr. Hughes. When he bought the magazine many hoped that the combination of his Silicon Valley experience and the storied history of the publication — which has published George Orwell, Virginia Woolf and Philip Roth, and has a reputation for producing talented editors and writers — would prove formidable.

Instead, a new chief executive he installed clashed with the magazine’s editor, Franklin Foer. When word got out in late 2014 that Mr. Hughes had decided to name a new top editor, Mr. Foer resigned and was followed by a dozen staff employees and dozens of contributing editors, forcing The New Republic to cancel an issue.

In a letter last month announcing his intention to sell, Mr. Hughes said that he had spent more than $20 million on the magazine, but had “underestimated the difficulty of transitioning an old and traditional institution into a digital media company in today’s quickly evolving climate.”

Shortly after Mr. Hughes released that letter, the magazine’s current top editor, Gabriel Snyder, posted a message on Twitter saying that the magazine’s staff was “focused on what we do every day: trying to make great journalism.”

One of Google’s driverless cars has been involved in an accident for the first time in a situation where human drivers rely on the normal social etiquette of the road to avoid scrapes, according to an accident report filed in California.

The incident highlights the challenges of programming machines to deal with the sort of social situations that humans encounter every day on the roads, but which are beyond robots to resolve, experts said.

It also threatens to cast an unflattering light on the technology at a time when Google is fighting a proposed California rule requiring autonomous vehicles to have human drivers on hand to override their controls in emergencies.

However, the company suggested that the accident would have occurred even if a human had been at the wheel, while adding that it had already adjusted its algorithms to take account of the lessons from the scrape.

“There are all sorts of social clues that people abide by that are hard to program into a car,” said Jerry Kaplan, a serial technology entrepreneur and author of a recent book on robotics. “There was nothing terrible about this, no one got hurt or killed. But it will be a long time before the cars can be driven in heavily used streets and abide by the same social conventions people use.”

In a filing with the California Department of Motor Vehicles, Google said its car had been trying to pull out into slow-moving traffic on Valentine’s Day when a bus driver did not slow to leave room, causing a minor collision.

In a blog post on Monday, it blamed the accident on a “tricky set of circumstances” caused partly by an adjustment it had made to the car’s algorithms weeks earlier to help it drive more like a human.

“This is a classic example of the negotiation that’s a normal part of driving — we’re all trying to predict each other’s movements,” the company said. “We clearly bear some responsibility.” However, it also said that a Google employee in the car had also believed there was room to pull out.

The car had pulled close to the side of the road to make a turn, leaving room for other vehicles that were carrying on straight ahead to pass in the same lane — a manoeuvre Google said it had programmed into the car to make it a more considerate driver.

After finding its path was blocked by sandbags that had been placed round a drain, the car was forced to move back out into the line of traffic, causing the accident.

Google said it had already programmed lessons from the accident into its software, along with its findings from running simulations of thousands of similar situations.