Note: I originally wrote this for the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer
Before COVID-19 put the final nail in a number of media coffins, one of the escape routes that many journalists dreamed about was for their organization to be bought by a billionaire. After all, the Washington Post seemed to lead an almost charmed life from the moment it was acquired in 2013 by Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive (currently the richest man in the world with a net worth of about $150 billion). While others were cutting back because of an ongoing decline in ad revenue, the Post continued hiring, because Bezos said that the paper was in “investment mode,” and didn’t really need to turn a profit immediately. But even billionaires often reach a point where the business part of what they are doing takes precedence — after all, that kind of thinking is why many of them became billionaires, and you didn’t. And what just happened at the Atlantic magazine is one of the latest examples.
David Bradley, the magazine’s chairman and former controlling shareholder — who sold the Atlantic to Laurene Powell Jobs in 2017 for an undisclosed sum — announced that the company is cutting 68 jobs, or about 17 percent of its staff, and instituting a pay freeze for those who remain (executives are also taking pay cuts). Of the editorial positions that are being removed, about half are on the video team, and the other half appear to be staff who worked for the Atlantic‘s event business, which — like many other media companies — it has been building up for some time as an alternative to advertising revenue. The coronavirus, as Bradley pointed out in his memo, has effectively nuked that business, and no one is quite sure if or when it will ever return. “We would have paused over furloughs instead of severance if we believed the positions were coming back,” Bradley said in his memo to staff.
All of these business realities are just that — reality. Anyone who has been following the media business knows that it was in poor financial shape even before COVID-19. But the Atlantic stands out in part because it has been firing on all cylinders, both in journalistic terms and in business terms. The magazine launched a paywall, and Bradley said that it has been very successful, bringing in 90,000 new subscribers in just the past month, for a total of 450,000. One of the reasons for that growth is likely the excellent journalism that the Atlantic has have been turning out, not just on the coronavirus — where Ed Yong has become a must-read for his in-depth, analytical takes — but on other topics as well. So this leads to the obvious question: if you are doing literally everything right, subscribers are growing, and you are owned by a billionaire (Powell Jobs is worth about $26 billion at last count), and yet you still lose almost 20 percent of your staff, what chance does anyone else have?
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