The Atlantic is now in a “virtue cycle” of making a product people will pay for and putting the profit back into the business, according to editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg.
Goldberg said the news magazine title has benefited from the “mismanagement” ofThe Washington Postby hiring “very talented” journalists.
The Atlanticadded 50 journalists to its newsroom in 2025 and now has an editorial team of more than 200 people. National security, politics, accountability, science and health, and tech have all been areas of expansion.
“I want to build the greatest collective of non-fiction writers in the English speaking world. I think I’m getting there,” Goldberg said.
The business model of The Atlantic, as he put it, is to “make the highest quality stories and convince the readers of those stories to pay you to read them”.
As The Washington Post madelosses of more than $100mlast year, The Atlantic has been profitable since 2023.
The magazine brand waspreviously profitable from 2010 to 2017but expanded quickly after a majority stake was acquired by Emerson Collective, which is run by billionaire philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs.
Chief executive Nicholas Thompson was hired in 2021 to turn the business around and The Atlantic announced in early 2024it had become profitable again.
Goldbergdescribed Powell Jobs as a “beneficent and strategic” owner who demands profitability. “We are a for-profit business and she does not want to subsidise it…
“And this is part of the strategic vision: when you make a profit, take the money, the profit, and put it back in the business to grow the business, hire more writers, hire more editors. And so, of course, the more writers you have, the more editors you have, the more stories you can make, the more opportunities you have to find new audiences. So we’re in a very virtuous circle right now. We’re in a really good cycle.”
Source: Press Gazette
