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?"