The Atlantic CEO Nick Thompson on subscriptions, Google Zero, rage bait, and journalism's AI dilemma

Speaker 2: whole team

Speaker 1: on Congratulations on a

Speaker 5: great quarter.

Speaker 1: We'll talk to

Speaker 9: you soon.

Speaker 4: So much.

Speaker 1: Cheers. Rest of your day. Goodbye. Up next, have Nick Thompson, the CEO of The Atlantic. He's in the waiting room. We've been keeping him waiting too long, but we'll bring him in to the TBPN UltraDome.

Speaker 2: What's going on?

Speaker 1: Good to meet you, Nick. How are

Speaker 4: you doing? I'm doing doing great. How are you guys doing?

Speaker 1: Where's your go to travel destination? You a gross What American state do

Speaker 2: you romanticize? New Hampshire.

Speaker 1: New Hampshire.

Speaker 2: There you go. See we got 50 of them. Yeah. They're all underrated in their own ways.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Live free or die, guys.

Speaker 1: But when you're not in New Hampshire, where are you? What are you doing? What's your day to day like as the CEO of the Atlantic?

Speaker 4: Right now, I'm in New York City. We also have offices in Washington DC. My job is to figure out our strategy on the business side so that we can sell more subscriptions, hire more reporters, and do more journalism.

Speaker 1: Does the score take care of itself? Is is a lot of your job just protecting the role of the journalist, allowing them to go do great work? And if they do great work, everything else will take care of itself?

Speaker 4: Weirdly, yes. I mean, like, the way our business works Yeah. Is because we're subscription driven, because we're loyalty driven, if journalists do the kind of work and they break stories and they do investigative pieces and they get people to read the whole thing Yeah. It does lead to subscriptions. And if we get subscriptions, people stay on for a while and so the business works.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Are you a Google Zero mindset CEO?

Speaker 4: So Do want to explain interesting.

Speaker 1: For those yeah. For those who aren't familiar with Google Zero, this idea that if you are running an Internet publication, there was a moment where there were years where Google would just send you tons of traffic. It was amazing. It was free, but it was also maybe a Faustian bargain and it sort of went away and it's going away even more in the AI overview era. And so the Vanity Fair and Conde Nast in particular have sort of signaled that they now model their business on a world where Google is sending zero traffic.

Speaker 4: Yeah. I don't so we've been preparing this for a while. Yeah. What's interesting in our data is the number of subscriptions Mhmm. That we get from people coming from Google is up Oh. Year over year. Interesting. So we are getting less traffic from Google. Yeah. But the people we are losing are not the most loyal people. So some people come in from Google, and they don't even know what site they're on. They've come in just because they've hit a generic query, and you happen to have won that query. You had good SEO, or you got lucky. Right? Mhmm. I always want to win those queries, but those people don't subscribe. Yeah. The people who subscribe are coming in because they have a personal relationship with The Atlantic. They've saw somebody on TV. They've heard about a story. They're excited about something. Those people are still coming, and they're still subscribing. So the interesting question is, our Google traffic will continue to decline. Mhmm. Obviously, everybody's is. Right? Is it going to go to zero? I told Nilay, right, who came up with the Google zero phrase, that I don't care if we go to like, I don't want to go to Google zero. As long as you can stay at Google one, as long as you can still type in how to subscribe to the Atlantic and still get us, we'll have something. I kind of feel like, I don't know, we're going to Google 25 or something

Speaker 1: Sure.

Speaker 4: On traffic Yeah. But we're still going to have lots of subscriptions.

Speaker 1: That makes sense.

Speaker 2: Have you started rating Substack

Speaker 4: for talent?

Speaker 1: This is like Jordy's favorite hobby horse. He believes in he firmly believes in rebundling that there's been too much unbundling and that there's actually not only do brands like The Atlantic actually increase in value in the age of AI and the age of proliferation of the creator economy, but also there are just unique stories that you can't tell as an individual Substack writer where your audience is paying monthly and they want

Speaker 2: to Yeah. Be There's people that I subscribe to on Substack where I'm thinking, wish this person was telling four stories a year versus 50.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 4: Right. Right. Yeah. We've we've we've done that. We've brought people from Substack into the Atlantic. They end up writing less, but they write longer, and we think it's good. Right? There's a there's a kind of writer who does better on Substack. Right? Somebody who should just be like churning out stories, kind of better unedited, better going quickly, like really has a good personal relationship with their audience. And then there's a kind of writer who's better on The Atlantic, where it really helps to have the institutional support, to have the editing, to have the copy editing, to have the fact checking. They just do better work. And we want to pull in those people from Substack. Substack is a great place for us to find writers.

Speaker 2: Yeah. That's what I figured.

Speaker 4: Makes And we do hire people who write there, we have lots of opinion contributors. We have one off writers who come in from Substack. And so our goal is to look at as much as possible and find as many good people, and then show them the wonders of The Atlantic. We don't have a, like, specific rebundling strategy. We did at one point. Right? We started a program where we took, like, six substack writers. We pulled them in the Atlantic, and we tried to create a program where you get the best of the traditional media. Right? You get the services we offer. You get the editing. You get the fact checking. You get the support. And then you get upside on your own subscriptions. So they're kind of half and half. The program didn't really work. So what we do now is we just, like, find great writers and make them part of our Atlantic core.

Speaker 1: Sure. Sure. What is the longest amount of time that a journalist at The Atlantic can work on a single piece? And do you want that to get longer?

Speaker 4: I think the record is probably like a year for Caitlin Dickerson. About

Speaker 1: right. Yeah.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Know I don't want it to get longer.

Speaker 1: Okay. I want You don't want someone being like, I'm going to come in and in five years I'm going to drop the, you know, Seymour Hirsch level bomb on the world.

Speaker 4: If I had a 100% guarantee. Right? Yeah. But what you don't want is you don't want someone to do that, and then two and a half years they haven't written anything. Mean

Speaker 2: Two or three.

Speaker 4: Look, in my mind, again, I'm I'm the CEO, I'm not the editor in chief, so don't make those choices, but I love people who are doing both. Right? Take someone who is filing feature stories, reporting like crazy and spending time. And then also, when something happens in their domain of expertise, they've got something to say. Yeah. Those people, those are dreams.

Speaker 1: Yeah. What is the is the right way to balance all the different opportunities that come from a star from star talent? Because a really great story can get adapted into a book, a movie. Sometimes if someone's starting a podcast within the Atlantic, they can their audience can just grow and then there's a discussion over should they stay, should they go. What is the modern way to think about nurturing your bench, your team, your talent and creating alignment at every possible stage of a star journalist's career?

Speaker 4: Yeah. So one of the most important things is you want them to get better. Right? Like, want to be like the Tampa Bay devil race. Right? You want to you want to be like the Dodgers. Right? So the Dodgers both sign expensive free agents who are awesome and do great work with the Dodgers or play great games, and they're really good at drafting and developing. And so you want to do both. You want the Atlantic to be able to find 25 year old reporters who are writing elsewhere or people who've just come out of college, and then you nurture them, and you teach them. You teach them what it takes to do a great great journalism. You also want to be able to hire the best people from the New York Times, right, or the Washington Post, and have them come here and do even better work, you know, with our editing support. So, you know, we've got some of each. We've got some of the acquire that great talent. Okay. Now to the rest of your question, if it's star talent, how do you nurture them with multimedia? Different journalists are good at different things, and different stories work in different ways. So there are stories that are really narrative and cinematic, and then we work really hard to option those to Hollywood. Right? There are stories that you can imagine, like, turning into spin off TikTok series or it's spin off podcast, and you try to do that. There's rarely one story that has all of those components, so it's kind of take the story and then figure out what the extras are. But here at The Atlantic, we usually start with the core story. We don't usually start from something else. We don't say, hey, somebody's got a really good idea for a movie, let's write a story and then try to sell it. It's much more, we have a really good idea for a story. Oh, that worked. Let's try to sell it as a movie. Other places you can try to reverse engineer, we don't do a lot of that.

Speaker 2: Interesting. Jordan, please. How important is print?

Speaker 4: You know, it's kind of it's kind of more important. This is like, a, it's like half our subscribers. Right? So we have, you know, just, I don't know, between 1.5, 1,600,000 subscribers. About half of them, a little less, get print. Mhmm. That's great. It gives them a monthly reminder. We care a ton about retention. Obviously, in our subscription business, you really want to keep your retention rate high. Print is a good reminder. Gives an emotional connection. The deeper the emotional connection, more likely they are to retain. But also, what I like about print that there's no algorithm in the middle. Right? We just mail it to you, and the US Postal Service delivers it. So nobody else can control it. Like, US Postal Service is not going to get mad at us. Google could get mad at us and cut us off. Twitter could get mad at us, change the algorithm and cut us off. Sure. Right? With every algorithmic intermediary, you've got some risk.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 4: And the other nice thing about print is even if the web goes to total slot. Right? Let's imagine a web that no one goes to anymore because it's all just like AI search engines and stuff.

Speaker 2: We're 99% of the way there.

Speaker 4: We're like we're like yeah. So so you don't even have to imagine it. Yeah. In that world, it's great to get a print Atlantic. So for that reason Yeah. We increased the number of print issues. We went from 10 a year to 12. Yeah. And if I had my druthers, maybe we'd do even more. But if the editors are watching this, they're not going to be happy that I said that.

Speaker 1: Yeah. How do you think about Yeah.

Speaker 2: I asked just because there was my dad has read The Atlantic as long as I've been alive or even Yeah. Able to be conscious enough to see, okay, he's reading The Atlantic. And I doubt that he reads on the website at all even though he's been, you know, loyal across decades now. Yeah.

Speaker 1: On on the completely opposite side of the spectrum, can you tell me the history of the pivot to video that I've always heard media organizations have gone through many times at various stages? It's been something that's been discussed over, oh, this media company is pivoting to video. It's more important. How have you processed the various eras of pivots to video? What that meant historically? What worked? What didn't? And then your current thinking on video and just modern media as a as a, you know, an addition to obviously print.

Speaker 4: I think that phrase comes like specifically from, I mean, like 2014 or so

Speaker 1: sounds when right.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah. It's like when Facebook was building Facebook Watch. So so

Speaker 1: Throwback.

Speaker 4: Yeah. My stages. So back then, was at The New Yorker.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 4: And there was pressure to, you know, pivot to video, build a big video operation, and we didn't do it. Yeah. Right? We we actually the the cool thing we built in video is we built we built like a documentary shorts where we would buy documentary shorts that had gone up through the film fest. We thought there was like basically a market opportunity in buying shorts that align with the New Yorkers values that you could pick up for far less than they would cost. Because the problem with video is that nobody wants to watch short video on a media website. They want watch it on social platforms.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 4: It's hard to make money on social platforms. Yep. Kind of video that aligns with the editorial at The New Yorker is like long complicated video, which is just way too expensive to make for the advertising revenue you can get, and it's not clear that you can build a subscription product. So the economics don't really the economics are hard.

Speaker 1: Yeah. It's hard for the New Yorker just to become HBO and get tons of people on $30 a month private streaming plans, like, for that.

Speaker 4: Yeah. And and then you can't monetize the advertising. Like, New Yorker, it's very hard to build a model where you can make up cost in advertising revenue, if you are the New York. So, I was there, and we sort of avoided the pivot to video. Mhmm. We did this documentary short thing, which was awesome. Yeah. One on Academy Award, it was cool. Yep. Great. I then went to Wired, and we found a way to actually make money on advertising, which is repeatable YouTube formats. Right? So you do the wired auto complete thing. Yep. You do

Speaker 1: That's so good.

Speaker 4: Almost impossible. And there's like, there's margin opportunity there. You can if you can get a series that aligns with your values that the economics work on and that you can do over and over, you can actually make money. So that was great and worked for Wired. I came to The Atlantic, and they had actually kind of shut down their video operations. I started in The Atlantic in 2021 and Yeah. It was something that had been, you know, dramatically reduced in 2020 and 2021 before I started. Mhmm. So now our video strategy is, you know, we're pushing on it more now. Right? There is a market opportunity to what's happening with sixty Minutes. We are obviously watching what the New York Times is doing. Clearly, it's really important for demographics. So we're doing a lot more short form video. Right? We are starting to do vodcasts. We're going in steadily, but cautiously recognizing that the economics are hard. I would like us at some point to make a big bet, but I need to figure out an economic model

Speaker 1: Yep.

Speaker 4: That I can be confident in before we do that. And, like, if you look at the times, it's great. It's building great brand loyalty. It's building out their their presence on, you know, vertical video social platforms. You look at their last earnings call, the economics aren't obviously working yet. It's a real bet on the future because they're doing so well right now. You know? So we'll probably do something similar at some point.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Wild card idea I want you to sort of like debunk or wrestle with for me. I have seen a boom in long form YouTube videos sort of in like the book talk adjacent space where basically someone who's just in their living room or in a very natural space, it's not overly designed, they will spend an hour reading through an article in The Atlantic sometimes, sometimes in The New Yorker, sometimes in a variety of long And they will contextualize it and sometimes critique the writing and the actual journalism, but also talk about the subject matter that's in the piece. And they sort of take the viewer and the listener on this tour of the piece that is the original reporting. They're not journalists. They're more commentary. And I imagine that that in some ways is good because it might drive subscriptions and in other ways it might be bad because people might say, oh, this is a perfect substitute. I don't need to go read the actual piece. But I'm wondering if there's more to be done there to sort of have some of those people just be affiliates and because I'll listen to them and they'll have an ad for something that's clearly not very expensive. And so I'm wondering if there's just a world where, hey, you're going to be talking about this thing. How about we send you the physical copy and you recommend at multiple stages while you're talking about this that you go subscribe and then everything mass out, you get the content that you're already talking about and the Atlantic gets the subscriptions?

Speaker 4: That's a super interesting business model. So we do a little bit of that, right? So if we if there's an influencer and we know about them and they tend to read launch stories, we're like happy to send them a free subscription. We're happy to invite them Yeah. To our We haven't built out an affiliate model with them where we incentivize them to talk about us. Like, we are, you know, we're very cautious about anything that could look like we're paying influencers. We're very careful about that. We have a lot of very specific rules about mixing business and edit, so we haven't We've been cautious about that.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 4: But I would imagine that if this thing we have seen examples of this. If it really takes off, there may be a business player. It's a very smart idea and very creative.

Speaker 1: Yeah. It just seemed interesting because you're like, if you do the thing where one of your journalists is recording from their car, it looks like, oh, that's not the Atlantic brand. Like that. So you sort of have to do like big production if you're going to do something. But if you have this arm's length relationship, they can so they can be creative and they're independent but you still see some flow back. I don't know. It'd interesting to see where it goes.

Speaker 4: Well, so I only disagree with one part of that Please. Which is the Atlantic brand doesn't have to be how they produce. Like, I do a daily video Yeah. Every day on LinkedIn where I'm often in my running shorts. Okay.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 4: Not because I want to be in my running shorts, it's just the deal is I'm going to do a video every day and I'm just going to do it when the idea comes to me about whatever AI paper I've read or policy.

Speaker 2: And so that works for you because you have this sort of effortless, cool, sophisticated, educated look. Yeah. So you can be in

Speaker 4: I actually I have the effortless look. I don't have any of the other adjectives you just used, but I appreciate it. It works just because you as you guys know, like, the same thing that works for you, like, people people trust news and information from people they kind of like and who feel like they aren't trying too hard, and who are just telling it to them straight. And so I think that I would be delighted to have like David Fromm, like just sitting there in his living room talking for five minutes about a story. I I I wouldn't need that to be how they produced at all.

Speaker 1: Yeah. No. That makes a lot of sense. Jordan? Alright.

Speaker 2: How how black pilled are you on the current media landscape overall? Like when you're at New Yorker, did you ever imagine that gambling companies would have newswire accounts that they would use just to harvest eyeballs? Because even yeah. I try to mute I try to mute a lot of stuff on X. It's extremely effective. But there's, like, so many of these newswire accounts that are run by various companies that are not in the news business, and they have this, like, implicit incentive to kind of, like, frame things in the most provocative way to get the most clicks. And at this point, like, lot of people just take it as facts because it's templated out, like it's Mhmm. A, you know, newswire breaking, and then people just trust whatever's after it, even if it's an account they've never seen before. But I'm curious if you ever thought I would get this bad.

Speaker 4: I kind of did. I mean, suppose I Maybe I have the I'm the exact opposite. Like, when I was at the New Yorker ten years ago, I mean, back then you have all these sort of aggregators taking your headlines. Then you have these fake accounts taking your headlines. It just seemed like it's getting worse. Now we have AI that can perfectly simulate humans, can perfectly simulate publications. I'm kind of surprised it's not even worse. And I think the nice thing

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 4: Is that like people still trust the high quality respected brands whether it's you guys or whether it's us. Yeah. And if you can build a real audience and build trust, people stay with you. So thank goodness

Speaker 2: for Someone someone called us recently like, I think it was the editor of what's the Fast Company, I think was saying Uh-huh. That they they listened to the cut down version of our show, the thirty minute highlight reel, and they called it like drinking Mountain Dew with breakfast. But another another question for you. How do you like, what is your kind of view around this concept of rage bait, which feels like it was born out of almost, you know, it was born out of the Internet but at the same time nothing's new and media companies have have used this strategy over time. We talk to startups or we end up covering startups that are basically utilizing rage bait to get attention for their businesses in a way that a YouTuber might have done so like 10 ago. And again, these these founders are often You know, they grew up watching YouTube or Jake Paul or the Paul brothers, and so now they're like, I'm just gonna do something that makes a lot of people angry and upset, and I'll get eyeballs through that. Media companies have done this forever, but it it's it feels like it comes very much at a at a cost. What's your view on it?

Speaker 4: Yeah. Rage bait is good for the short run. It's not good in the long run. It's a really bad long run economic strategy. It's a good way if you want to juice your numbers in the short run. I'm kind of intrigued about whether, you know, as the sort of media ecosystem shifts out of social media into more AI and AI mediated group chats, whether like, the weird so social media drives people to extremes. It encourages rage baits. Didn't have to be that way, but it's way the algorithms were built. It's the way we used them. Right? AI kind of does the opposite. Like, the more time you spend on AI, the sort of the more moderate, the more towards the center, the more towards everyone else you get. Advantages to both, but I kind of wonder whether as the media ecosystem has, like, more AI and is less dominant by social media, whether the incentives for rage bait go down and whether that actually leads to a healthier media ecosystem because, you know, I hate rage bait. I've never worked at a place that has prioritized it. Every time I click on it, I get upset. So I'm I'm kind of hopeful that maybe AI makes this better.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Does journalism need a Hippocratic oath right now? The line is blurring with influencers and I know that basically every serious journalistic outfit has rules and disclosures for certain things like sponsorships and the editorial lines and whether or not the anchors can trade public stocks or own private stocks. And there's all these different things but it feels not unified in a sense of just like, yeah, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, like they all signed the same thing. I know what I'm getting there. And then a bunch of influencers, they haven't signed that, so I assume it's all some it's all different.

Speaker 4: Yeah. I mean, came up most recently with prediction markets where we were like, you know what? We just need to say to all of our journalists you can't bet on any prediction markets. Because sometimes prediction markets affect the news and you could end up writing it. So just like, stay out of them. Yes. Right? Just like we were like, stay out of it, don't buy stocks in the company

Speaker 2: You had like half the staff quit.

Speaker 6: For real?

Speaker 2: You're like, wow, you guys are a bunch of degenerates.

Speaker 1: No.

Speaker 4: Yeah. I I you know, look, there are standards that we share with the other with like The New Yorker and The New York Times, and sometimes we'll, you know, talk about sharing standards. Yeah. There's no like uniform set of standards for journalism. Even if there were, I don't think creators would sign off on it. Even if some creators did, like, what do you get? I mean I don't know.

Speaker 1: I think it's okay if the creators don't sign off on it.

Speaker 4: I I I what I what I think

Speaker 1: is interesting is just right now there's very much like this blurry line from like traditional media to like, you know, complete a non random poster. Yeah. And it's this blurry continuum instead of sort of shoring up the castle wall of traditional media with sort of a unified message that does come from the old guard around what the standards are so you know that, yeah, everyone sort of came together and created a consistent thesis around prediction market strategy. Everyone agreed to it. And then if you hear about it on The New York Times, you and then you hear about it at The Atlantic, you know that they're following the same rules as opposed to you have to go and educate your audience about prediction markets. I just heard about that for the first time, and then I have to hear, Oh, well, how does The Washington Post think about that? Do they follow the same thing? I've got to go dig into that instead of just like, Oh, when I hear about one organization laying out a rule, and then they can easily mention that it applies to all of these others that have signed the same thing.

Speaker 4: Yeah. You would need something like the News Media Alliance to have everybody commit that they're going to follow certain principles. I mean, all do follow certain principles that are like set by the FTC about

Speaker 1: the Sure.

Speaker 4: Of advertising. Right?

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 4: Yeah. And we are portions of journalistic. But I I mean, the most interesting one, the one that is like most at stake is like, will you use AI to write?

Speaker 2: Sure.

Speaker 4: Right? Like that's the biggest question, and we have a very firm policy that we won't. You know, as New York Times, as do other places. Yeah. That's the one where you could really get an interesting consortium and see who's in and who's out.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. No. I I mean use

Speaker 2: AI to check to see if people are using AI to write? Oh. Because it feels like you need some pretty strong internal controls because I imagine that's like a top priority for you and the team to not at any point ever have this like firestorm around. Because especially with print, is, you know, you end up printing something and it slips past, and it's like, you know, The Atlantic isn't just a magazine. It's a cultural And then people I

Speaker 4: mean, the worst case scenario would be there are publications that have had like fake AI generated people submit and have stories accepted as freelance pieces. Right? So, you know, like that's not great. Yeah. We take a lot of care to make sure that Yeah. People are real and they're not using AI to write. Now, can use AI to like edit, to think, and if you don't, you're crazy, right? But to research mean, it's amazing. It's an incredible tool for all of that, but don't ever use it to write.

Speaker 2: Out of curiosity, based around how people in The Atlantic, subscriber base or community, how their views on AI have evolved over the last few years, do you have Do you feel like their sentiment towards AI will ever get better or do you actually think it will just get worse? Because we're at this weird point right now where AI is clearly undeniably a useful tool. Like it's really hard to argue that it's not useful. But people's feelings, you know, average, not our listener base, of course, but the average person is still skeptical and very emotional about it, and I think for good reason. But I'm curious if you see that changing.

Speaker 4: I feel like it's gone in a little bit of like a maybe a sine curve or a sine curve that's on a downward slope right now. Right? Where at first excitement, then lots of skepticism. Oh my god. It hallucinates anger. It's gonna like replace all the jobs. And then there was a period where I felt like the average person was feeling a little better about it. Like, they were understanding it and they were using it so they saw it wasn't so bad. And now there's this huge backlash against data centers and against the apocalypse and against I mean, tech companies marketed themselves as possibly destroying humankind, which probably wasn't the best marketing strategy ever. And for all kinds of reasons, there's this backlash. I think it'll probably s curve again. I mean, my view is that it's amazing. I use it all the time. Yeah. It's like, I've got I've got nine agents running in the background of our conversation right now doing

Speaker 3: Right? All kinds of crazy

Speaker 4: You know? It's fantastic. For example. But yeah, there's there's backlash.

Speaker 1: Well, let's do this again soon. Let's go way deeper into AI and and all the hot topics that you're thinking about and talking about because

Speaker 2: Are there any people in tech that you want to that you would love to come write opinion pieces in the Atlantic? Maybe you can maybe you can just have your agents take this away. Agents, I know you're listening. Yeah. Look at our guest list. Yeah. Let's see. I want

Speaker 4: big thing to write a big piece about spatial intelligence. That would be that's that's an assignment I want today. I don't

Speaker 1: know why she's on the show. Well

Speaker 4: Oh, she's amazing. She's great.

Speaker 1: Yeah. That'd be great. I would love to read that. Very very exciting technology. Feels definitely like the next major wave that's coming any day now. Alright. But thank you so much for coming. Yeah. Great to

Speaker 2: meet you, Nick.

Speaker 4: Oh, it's so much fun.

Speaker 8: It's great.