those not paying attention, here’s some insight: At the moment, The Atlantic represents America’s magazine exemplar. Just in the last three years, as recounted in a recent Wall Street Journal profile, the historic title has moved from shaky financial ground to profitable. During that same time, the magazine won multiple Pulitzer prizes and, this year, nearly swept the National Magazine Awards. And over the last decade, some of the most influential essays and reportage in American life appeared in The Atlantic’s 167-year-old pages.
Ask Jeffrey Goldberg, who took over as the magazine’s top editor in 2016 after years of reporting for the title, to account for their current success, and his answers come as simple as they are profound. In June, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief discussed the magazine and its boom with Common Good editor Aaron Cline Hanbury.
To what do you attribute your magazine’s recent successes?
The most important single factor in all of this is patient, visionary ownership that is committed to the mission of the company rather than the profitability of the company. Profitability is a byproduct of success, it’s not the reason to have success in public-serving media.
Another part of it is having faith that what you do matters, having pride in the thing you’re making, and having confidence that other people will want to pay you to read it. There’s no trick. You can’t fool readers. Just try to make the most ambitious, best, fair-minded, interesting — I can’t emphasize that enough — stories.
For readers who don’t follow media trends, the era of traffic-based, internet-driven media is shifting, if not ending. Still, for you to talk about ‘profitability as a byproduct’ and high quality work stands out from stuff you could say like ‘clickable’ or ‘shareable.’
By the way, we fail all the time at making high quality. But the commitment to quality gives you a fighting chance of convincing readers to pay you for what you’re making. When I became editor about eight years ago, I was told by experts, by the whole culture around journalism, that The Atlantic was going to have its lunch eaten by Buzzfeed, bots, Gawker, HuffPo, and on and on. There are graveyards filled with web-only products whose existence was predicated on wealthy ownership, programmatic ad revenue, and virality. We went a different route, and we picked the right route.
How do you measure whether or not you’re doing interesting work?
I have eyeballs, I have a brain, and I have a limited attention span. I like stories that move. I like stories that surprise. I like stories that have compelling characters. I like stories that provoke curiosity.
Ultimately, it all comes down to taste, to the editor’s taste.
Look, this is why I don’t believe that there’s an AI program that could do what an editor does. Editing is curation. Let’s use a museum: Your job is to fill the Museum of Modern Art. Do you trust AI to tell you what would be best? Or do you trust somebody who’s been in the curation business for 40 years to figure out how to present art in the most compelling way? Maybe I’m wrong and eventually the machine will be smarter. But I’m not feeling it right now.
What is the purpose of The Atlantic?
To entertain and enlighten our readers — because if we’re not doing a good job of that, we shouldn’t exist. The point of The Atlantic, going back to its founding in 1857, is to use journalistic techniques and tools to help bring about a more perfect union. It’s a magazine that’s supposed to explain America to itself. It’s a magazine that, because it understands that there’s no single American idea, has to be open to different interpretations of what the American idea is.
Today, more than ever, I think its purpose is to hold the line on matters of truth, which is to say that there is a reality. We’ll only survive as a country, and as a species, if we have a shared reality. Especially with the way politics has gone off the rails, the acute technological challenges we’re all facing, I want to be a place where people can come to us and leave having a slightly better understanding of the threats, challenges, and promises of AI, or a better understanding of how Donald Trump fits into the history of the Republican Party, or how scientific experimentation works in the context of a pandemic. It’s a fight to hold on to complicated reality.
The magazine’s 167-year old moniker, “Of No Party or Clique.” What does that mean?
Originally, it meant that The Atlantic was not going to, in a hyper-partisan age of the 1850s, align with any of the parties that existed at the time. It was an abolitionist magazine, obviously it was pro-Lincoln when it counted. The only thing it means to me today is the difference between, “Of No Party or Clique” on the one hand, and “the resistance” idea on the other. I get this criticism fairly constantly: “Well, your magazine is very critical of Trump, and you obviously have written about how Trump is a danger to democracy. So, why are you running stories about how old Joe Biden is?” The answer is that I’m running stories about how old Joe Biden is because he’s old. That’s a relevant fact in the election. We have to publish things that are true. If you’re offended by it, then you’re just on a team.
It’ll surprise some that a stable part of your magazine is the print edition, the paper and ink that comes in the mail.
It’s the soul of the enterprise. It’s obviously the original. It’s the repository of all of our values, and it’s a viable commercial product. It turns out that lots of people still want to read a print magazine. Put aside that it’s aesthetically pleasing, I think it’s a wonderful delivery system for information. You roll it up and put it in your pocket. You don’t have to wait for it to load. You don’t have to charge it. It doesn’t beep at you and flash at you all the time. It’s just there, patiently waiting to capture your attention with excellent stories.
Back to the ‘graveyard of web-only products.’ What’s the relationship between sustaining print and sustaining presence?
Print magazines have physical ballast. People who understand the culture, understand that this is the way you deliver complicated information. It’s why books are still read. We don’t want just to live in the air. Without print, you risk floating away. It tethers you to physical reality.