From New York Magazine's Intelligencer, June 19:
Every Tuesday afternoon, many of The Atlantic’s newest, biggest stars gather for a meeting of what is called “the A-Team.” The Google Calendar invite goes out to 18 staffers, more than half of whom joined the magazine in the past six months and almost all of whom have been poached from the Washington Post, including Ashley Parker, Isaac Stanley Becker, Nick Miroff, Shane Harris, Missy Ryan, Jenna Johnson, and Michael Scherer. More veteran Atlantic heavyweights like Mark Leibovich, Tim Alberta, McKay Coppins, and Elaina Plott also are invited, as are the top brass, including editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg and his deputy, Adrienne LaFrance. The organizer of the meeting is Griff Witte, who joined The Atlantic from the Post in January as a managing editor to lead the politics and accountability team.
That’s what the A in A-Team technically stands for: accountability. But it’s not hard to see another connotation, as it also refers to a group of bigwig journalists who have been hired at enormous cost. Nor is it difficult to understand why others at the magazine, the B-teamers by implication, have been rolling their eyes at it.
The Atlantic has been on a hiring spree this year, announcing the addition of roughly 30 editorial staffers since January. Nine of them came from the Post, whose implosion under Jeff Bezos coincided swimmingly with The Atlantic’s drive to double down on political reporting during the second Trump administration. Posties were looking to jump ship, and The Atlantic, which last year became profitable and crossed the threshold of 1 million subscribers, had the money to get them. The magazine, which is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, has been offering salaries in the $200,000–to–$300,000 range, according to multiple people familiar with the hiring process. A conservative estimate suggests the magazine has added nearly $4 million in salaries to its annual budget, not to mention the expensive investment in new games it announced earlier this month.
“It’s always nice to see people throwing money at journalism, but Jesus Christ, they’re throwing a lot of money, and I’m not sure how it’s sustainable,” said an editor at a competing publication. “The salaries they’re offering are head and shoulders above what the market is for here, and they’ve hired some very good people, but I think it’s going to get crowded there very quickly.” And there are more A-Team additions to come: The Atlantic has just hired Toluse Olorunnipa, currently the Post’s White House bureau chief, and Nancy Youssef, who covers national security for The Wall Street Journal.
The creation of a new echelon of writers at The Atlantic is naturally a source of tension. A quirk of the magazine is that all writers have the same title — staff writer — which means there are huge pay disparities among colleagues of the same rank. “There are very clear hierarchies within that title within the publication, but they’re not delineated in any formal way, which makes it really frustrating to look around and be like, ‘I have the same title as this person but my job is totally different and there’s no clear path to progress toward having those circumstances,” said one former Atlantic staffer. “It’s part of why I think a lot of relatively young people have left in the past couple of years.” Nine women, many of them on the younger side, have left since the end of April 2024. Meanwhile, plenty of longtime staffers continue to labor away for far less money than their newer peers; the salary floor for edit staff was $69,000, according to the contract the union reached last year.
There is also a sense that Goldberg, a gregarious man-about-Washington who is known for his sharp elbows, can’t resist the allure of one-upping his rivals. “Jeff loves sexy hires. He loves to make another publication look foolish, to look like they got got,” a former Atlantic staffer said. “This happened a few times when I was there: Jeff would see a shiny object and suddenly there’d be someone new on your desk.” Or, in this case, a whole new team.
Still, it’s rare to see a media company not only turning a profit but putting that money back into its journalism. The Atlantic is betting on big-ticket reporting at a time when Google’s new AI tools are eating away at what’s left of search traffic and social-media platforms have pivoted away from news. As one Atlantic writer put it, “Who’s got it better? Only a handful of places exist and only a handful of places are literally saying, ‘Quality is all that matters.’ If anybody is unhappy, I’d think even they know well enough to be like, I’m just going to keep that to myself.”
Whatever The Atlantic is doing, it’s working. In March, the scoop of a lifetime landed in Goldberg’s lap when he was inadvertently added to a Signal chat group in which Trump’s national-security team was planning a military attack on Yemen. (“I feel lucky but not as lucky as Jeffrey Goldberg,” Graydon Carter said at a party this spring for his book launch. “Easiest scoop ever. Fuck!”) In the week after breaking the story, the magazine added about 100,000 new subscribers, and today it has more than 1.3 million subscribers at $80 a pop. The question for its newly expanded team is whether it’s going to mess with The Atlantic’s successful formula or enhance it, now and beyond the Trump era.
This isn’t the first time Goldberg, who declined a request for an interview, has tried to push the magazine in a newsier direction, and over the years he has made comments to colleagues about his ambition to compete with major papers like the Post. During the first Trump administration, The Atlantic hired a handful of reporters from digital media or newspaper backgrounds to cover politics and policy in a bid to expand its digital reach and be more relevant in the daily conversation. These writers included Rosie Gray (from BuzzFeed News), Edward-Isaac Dovere (Politico), Peter Nicholas (the Journal), and Natasha Bertrand (Business Insider). None of these people still work at The Atlantic....
....MUCH MORE
Over the years we've had some posts that may be of interest. One that comes to mind on the Atlantic is:
More On Truth Decay: Spies, Lies And Journalisming
And a couple on big money journalism:
"The story of Ernest Hemingway’s $187,000 magazine expenses claim"
which itself links to our earlier:
Why Aren’t Top Journalists Rich?"
