The Atlantic

The Atlantic is owned by Atlantic Media Group, a privately held company headed by David Bradley. Other brands in the company’s portfolio include Citylab, The Wire, Government Executive, Defense One, National Journal, Quartz and Atlantic Media Strategies. The Atlantic’s website has 16.6 million unique visitors a month. In 2010, the magazine turned a profit for the first time in a decade, earning a net profit of $1.8 million. In 2011, the Atlantic made $18.6 million from advertising, which made up slightly more than half the magazine’s revenue, with most of the ads being digital.

Currently based in DC, the Atlantic was founded in 1857 in Boston, Massachusetts as a monthly "journal of literature, politics, science, and the arts." Besides featuring poems and texts by leading writers, it also shared their opinion on major contemporary nationwide issues, becoming a "platform for voices." The Atlantic remained a monthly magazine for 144 years, until changing its regularity in 2001 to 10 issues a year. It first dropped the word "monthly" from its cover in 2004 and changed its name in 2007. Available without subscription since 2008, The Atlantic offers reportage on international affairs, politics, economics, technology, health and culture. In October 2015, the magazine surpassed 25 million views online, setting an "all-time audience record." The Atlantic’s revenue also showed "unprecedented" growth for the second year in 2015 due to digital advertising.

The owner and CEO of Atlantic Media (formerly the National Journal Group), Bradley made his fortune by founding two for-profit corporate consulting firms that have since gone public ‒ The Advisory Board Company and the Corporate Executive Board Company (currently CEB Inc.). He founded the first aged 26, after having previously been an intern in the Nixon White House, though he claims to be centrist and non-partisan now. He contributed to Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Mitt Romney in the 2007 presidential race. Bradley purchased the National Journal Group in 1997, followed by The Atlantic in 1999 for $10 million. He currently sits on the boards of the Council on Foreign Relations, the New America Foundation, KIPP DC public charter schools, Bridges of Understanding, and the Child Protection Network. Bradley sparked controversy by moving the Atlantic from its Boston home ‒ where it was founded in 1857 by literary luminaries like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Francis H. Underwood ‒ to the nation’s capital in April 2005.

After more than three years without an official editor-in-chief (following the 2002 death of then-Editor Michael Kelly, who was in Iraq on assignment at the time), the Atlantic announced that Bennet would be stepping into the role in 2006. In March 2014, after eight years at the magazine, Bennet and Bob Cohn were named co-presidents of the Atlantic, with Bennet also continuing on as editor-in-chief. Previously, he was a reporter for the New York Times, serving as Jerusalem bureau chief at the end of his 15-year tenure at the paper. He also wrote for the New Republic and the Washington Monthly. Under his stewardship, the magazine earned four National Magazine Awards (out of 17 nominations), and Bennet was named editor of the year by Adweek (2012) and Ad Age (2009). Bennet’s older brother is Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colorado). Their father, Douglas Bennet, served in both the Carter and Clinton administrations, and was the president and CEO of National Public Radio for a decade.

Before joining the Atlantic in March 2014 as a senior editor, the Canadian-American Frum worked as a speechwriter for George W. Bush, serving as a war hawk who crafted the administration’s "War on Terror" message. He also worked on former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign, and for the neoconservative think-tank American Enterprise Institute. He has been a contributor to CNN, the Week, the Daily Beast, the Weekly Standard, National Review, and the Wall Street Journal.

Fresh out of college in 1992, Stossel helped launch The Atlantic Online. From there, he left for The American Prospect, working his way up from associate editor to executive editor and culture editor. In 2002, he returned to the Atlantic, where he oversaw its 2005 move from Boston to DC’s Watergate Building. Stossel has been very open about his battles with anxiety since writing a memoir on his mental health struggles in January 2014. His sister Sage, a contributing editor and political cartoonist at the Atlantic, has also battled depression and anxiety. Their uncle, John Stossel, is the host of a weekly Fox Business Network show which has a libertarian viewpoint, and was previously a co-anchor for ABC’s ’20/20.’

Fallows has worked for the Atlantic for 30 years, and is a national correspondent based out of Washington, DC. He won a National Magazine Award for public interest writing in 2003, and has been a finalist four other times. After serving as the Atlantic’s Washington editor since 1979, Fallows briefly left the magazine in 1996, serving as the editor of US News & World Report for two years, and then as a program designer at Microsoft for six months. He was former Editor-in-Chief Michael Kelly’s first hire in 1999, after David G. Bradley purchased the magazine. At that time, outgoing editor-in-chief William Whitworth told Kelly, "Fallows is the best reporter we ever had and we should get him back," and Kelly agreed, according to Scott Sherman, writing for Columbia Journalism Review. Fallows, who used to write speeches for Jimmy Carter, identifies himself as a Democrat.

Bradley courted Goldberg to join The Atlantic for over two years while he was the Washington correspondent for the New Yorker. The millionaire also sent ponies to Goldberg’s home to entertain the journalist’s children. Goldberg joined the magazine as a national correspondent in July 2007. He was previously the New Yorker’s Middle East correspondent. Goldberg also wrote for the New York Times Magazine and New York magazine, and was a columnist for the Jerusalem Post. He won the 2003 National Magazine Award for reporting, for his coverage of Islamic terrorism. Columbia Journalism Review editor Michael Massing once called Goldberg "the most influential journalist/blogger on matters related to Israel."

The Atlantic landed in hot water in January 2013 when a Church of Scientology native advertising campaign ‒ which Bloomberg Business describes as a paid-for post designed to look as similar as possible to those written by editorial staff — prompted an outcry from journalists and readers over the misleading piece, including how comments were moderated and the controversial sponsor itself. The magazine pulled the ad and issued new guidelines, admitting that the Atlantic "violated the spirit of native advertising by giving a platform to a controversial institution that didn’t jibe with its intellectual tradition," Adweek reported.

In 2008, journalists and Atlantic readers decried the magazine’s decision to use disgraced pop star Britney Spears on its cover, making her "the subject of the highbrow academic treatment," according to the Huffington Post. The cover story ‒ on Britney, her entourage and the paparazzi ‒ was part of its shift towards a broader emphasis on cultural criticism, not just policy and politics. The issue tanked at the newsstands, but the controversy over the magazine’s supposed "selling out" was indicative of its melding of old-world print and new-world digital journalism, in which the Atlantic strives for "a marriage of long-form, analytical print — its traditional bread and butter — and fast-paced, controversial digital conversations," according to Folio.

Of course, if you remember, Britney once graced the actual print cover of @TheAtlantic in 2008. http://t.co/JtXPaqELuj

— Nolan Feeney (@NolanFeeney) December 2, 2013

In the midst of Israel’s incursion into the Hamas-run Gaza Strip in July 2014, senior editor David Frum sent out a series of tweets accusing the New York Times, among other news outlets, of running a "faked photo" of Palestinian casualties. The photos were real, and Frum retracted his claim and apologized to the photographer (as well as to photojournalists from Reuters and the Associated Press), Atlantic readers, and his Twitter followers for his misjudgment and erroneous tweets. Despite his remorse, critics were not placated because he tacked on a brief history of "faked or misattributed photographs as tools of propaganda" by Hamas. "If nothing else, Frum showed how utterly inclined he is to believe and recirculate a claim of Palestinian photo fakery," Erik Wemple wrote in a Washington Post blog about the editor’s apology. "Journalists guard against their biases by checking their reporting before publishing it."