How The Atlantic won ‘tortoise and hare’ race versus digital news start-ups

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” of The Washington Post by hiring “very talented” journalists.

The Atlantic added 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 made losses of more than $100m last year, The Atlantic has been profitable since 2023.

The magazine brand was previously profitable from 2010 to 2017 but 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 2024 it had become profitable again.

Goldberg described 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.”

The Atlantic has almost 1.5 million paying subscribers (half are digital-only and half pay for digital and the monthly print magazine). This is up from about 1 million two years ago.

After Goldberg’s Signalgate scoop in March last year, in which he revealed he had been inadvertently added to a group chat on Signal with top national security officials about military strikes in Yemen, The Atlantic reached more new subscribers in the first three months of 2025 than it did in the entirety of 2024 which had itself been a landmark year for growth (up 14.7% year on year). This followed 14% growth in 2023 and 5.4% in 2022.

Goldberg is conscious that “things can knock us off this virtue cycle that we’re in”.

But he added: “It’s importantto prove a point, which is that if you make good journalism, people will pay for it. If it just seems cheap and fast and garbage-y, then people won’t.”

‘Having a strong Washington Post is good for journalism’

Goldberg said news organisations that have diminished in size in recent years have done so for reasons that are “largely self-inflicted” and he wished there was a “stronger media ecosystem”.

This includes, he said, The Washington Post which cut at least one-third of all staff, including more than 300 of about 800 journalists, in February. The Post also lost staff last year as it restructured its video desk, copy editing desks and opinion team.

Goldberg said: “We and our readers have benefited from the dysfunction of The Washington Post because I’ve hired a lot of very talented Washington Post reporters and editors over the past months, probably about going back to a year.

“The Post’s slide, to borrow from Hemingway, was gradual, and then all at once, the descent.

“I hate to use the word benefit from that, because I think that having a strong Washington Post is good for journalism, good for America, but we’ve gotten some very talented people because of their mismanagement, so that’s been good.”

Goldberg pointed to the culling of The Post’s books section, which was one of the hardest hit areas in the cuts along with sports and foreign correspondents.

He said: “Some people are trimming away their books coverage. I see that as an opportunity. If you want to leave the field to me, okay, we’ll do it. People read, people buy books. People want to talk about authors. It’s not that hard to understand.”

He quoted Warren Buffett, who said: “Investing is simple, but not easy.”

Goldberg continued: “Journalism is also simple, but not easy. Just to say, yes, okay, let’s make as many great stories as we can and convince the readers of those stories to enter into a relationship with us. That’s an easy formula. It’s actually hard to do. You need really talented people to do it.”

The Atlantic won ‘tortoise and hare’ race in world of digital news start-ups

Goldberg noted The Atlantic is behind very few publications in the US by subscriber count, pointing to The New York Times (12.8 million), The Wall Street Journal (4.7 million) and The Washington Post (around 2.5 million).

“We were, 25 to 30 years ago, a magazine for a particular audience but it didn’t have quite the presence that it has now,” Goldberg said. “Part of that is because of what we’re doing.

“Part of that is because, if you think of the magazines that led in circulation – Time, Newsweek, US News and World Report, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, Forbes, National Geographic and so on – they’ve all, for reasons that I believe are all largely self inflicted, diminished or are now simply ghost ships sailing aimlessly across the internet, shadows of themselves. So part of it is that we just stuck to our guns.”

Many of these brands have a much smaller print circulation today than previously but have built up a digital audience instead. US News and World Report closed in print in 2010.

[Read more: Newsweek editor on making brand ‘more reflective of the modern era’]

Goldberg continued: “When I became editor ten years ago, I was told over and over and over again that the threat to our existence came in the form of Buzzfeed, Vox, Vice, Salon, Slate Mic, Gawker, Huffpost, etc, and that we had to be more like them.

“It’s a little bit of a tortoise and the hare kind of story. We decided that the only way to get people to pay for your publication was to give them high quality journalism, not commodified journalism. We decided that, in practice, it’s the only thing we wanted to do anyway. It’s very nice when your personal proclivity aligns with the market’s desires.”

Goldberg praised The New Yorker and The Economist for being among “only a few titles left that are actually providing something that people are willing to pay for”.

Goldberg said giving journalism away for free online from the early days of the internet was a “terrible idea” and portrayed a “collective lack of self-confidence”. Although some argue for ideological reasons that information should be free, he pointed out “somebody has to pay for the gathering of real information”.

“Imagine you’ve trained the public to go to a supermarket and take whatever it wants for free, and then all of a sudden come in and say ‘well, now you have to pay for it’. People will be like ‘why do I have to pay for it?’ That was a struggle that had to be overcome, and a lot of publications couldn’t overcome that struggle. You’ve got to give people something that they want to pay for.”

The Atlantic’s “long-term existential challenge”, Goldberg said, is reaching young people in their 20s and 30s “who understand the value of what we do and are literate and want to pay for solid, vetted information, and also want to be entertained in a sophisticated way by interesting stories”.

But he added: “I would be bullshitting you if I said we’ve come up with answers. Obviously covering things that are of interest to people of different demographics is also important. I also think you can overvalue that and kind of pander to audiences.”

Goldberg said The Atlantic is “not in video as much as we should be” but that he is “platform agnostic” as long as they are putting out quality journalism: “Obviously, it’s harder to do quality journalism on Tiktok, 15 second little snippets. But you can be truthful, and you can say things that are important for the public to know, even on Tiktok or Instagram.”

Listen: The Atlantic Media’s chief growth officer Megha Garibaldi told the Press Gazette podcast how the next phase of growth for the title needs a focus on “quality traffic” as referral sources decline across news media.

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