Can the News Exist Without Big Tech? The Atlas Says Yes.

A monthly newspaper, distributed as a PDF, is trying to imagine a future for journalism beyond the reach of Silicon Valley.

When The Atlas, a digital newspaper, launched earlier this year, it billed itself as “the new samizdat.” The term recalls the dissident networks that distributed forbidden news and literature in the Soviet Union in the 1950s and ’60s, evading the censors. According to The Atlas, today’s samizdat—which roughly translates as “self-publishing”—must evade a different threat: big tech platforms, which wield their own form of imperious control over the flow of information. “For me, the parallel seemed very obvious,” Natalia Antelava, who grew up in the Soviet Union and cofounded The Atlas, says.