YouSaid · the spoken record

Nicholas Thompson

lines on the record: 41
first: 2026-01-15
most recent: 2026-01-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“So, the way I've tried to do it, and I've just gone through annual reviews, so it's part of this I like to sort of ask a question of like, what is the biggest thing that you think you could accomplish at the Atlantic? What is the thing that you haven't done yet that you want to do? What is the thing that we're struggling to get to that you think we can do? And I try to like help them. I don't say, hey, I think you should do this, right? Like, I remember I started working with these new coaches at the beginning of that training cycle. And they're like, what is the fastest you think you could go? And I was like, well, you know, I think if I could run a 243 again, and they were like, okay, they had a call afterwards like this guy.”
2026-01-15 · Masters of Scale · How to save a magazine, with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can learn and running pretty well. Part of the hypothesis of the book is that because running is so simple, it's just you. There are no teammates, right? There's no like judge. There's no subjective. It is all objective. You run the marathon. And from the time you cross the starting line to the finish line, there's amount of time and you either went faster, you went slow, and you either went faster, you went slower. And it's on you. And if you went slower because of something you did, right? If you went faster, it's because of something you did. And so you can learn these lessons really well because it's so direct. And so, you know, maybe the lesson I've learned from my training is more about pain and about pacing and about effort and about how you structure like an intense regime more than it's about the singular realization about the way pain works, the way memory works that triggered the book.”
2026-01-15 · Masters of Scale · How to save a magazine, with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can go out and I can run eight miles a day, a couple 20 mile runs, and I'll go run that. If I want to run it in two and a half hours, 2 35 or whatever, my best possible thing I could do it in, it's three months from now, you know, they're about 30 days between now and then where I'm going to have to like just withering pain, where at the end of it, I'm like leaning over on my hands on my knees. Heart rate is at its max. And I'm like very uncomfortable. And that's actually a good lesson for work, right? Sometimes you have to go at an uncomfortable pace and sometimes you have to like just charge into the thing you don't want to do and you have to like, if you're trying to find the route around, it doesn't actually work, right? And that's like a lesson that”
2026-01-15 · Masters of Scale · How to save a magazine, with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the observation that then led to the book was not Nick ran faster because he trained harder, right? That's not a very interesting book. What was interesting is I had this realization happen one day I was running across the Brooklyn Bridge and I sat down and I realized, wait, you know, the reason why I had been stuck at 243 was that I had like a mental block about going faster than I had been before I got sick. That was really interesting. That led me to the realization that what makes you faster, makes you slow is often buried much deeper than you think and it can be tied up in your expectations. It can be tied up in the way pain works. Now that leads to this interesting question. The second part of your question, so what does that thing you learned, how does it affect your business? And there's not quite a parallel. There are lessons, right? Like one of the things about running, right? And one of the things I learned while training hard is you have to get better. You know what you have to do when you run to get better? Make yourself really hurt, right? Like really. And you have to go at a pace that you don't think you can go at, right? And you can go and run a marathon having a nice time every day. If I want to go run the Boston Marathon in three and a half hours.”
2026-01-15 · Masters of Scale · How to save a magazine, with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there was a crazy thing I learned about myself that was really the impetus for writing this book. I had spent my 20s trying to break a three-hour marathon. I hadn't. I did when I was 29 years old. And then when I was 30, I ran a 243. And for people who aren't marathoners, like, that's quite a difference, right? Like it doesn't sound like that big a difference, but it's a huge difference. And then right after I broke that 243, I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. I go through really hard treatment. Two years later, I come back and I run another marathon. You know what I run? 243, right? Amazing. And then the next 12 years, you know what I run basically every marathon? 243, right? And people make fun of me and they call me Mr. 243. And when I was in that period, I was like, well, this is as fast as I can go. And right, like, then this crazy thing happens when I'm 43 years old and 44 years old. And it's not coincidentally right after my father died. Suddenly I run a 238. Whoa. That's nuts. Then I run 229, right? And then I set the American record in the 50K.”
2026-01-15 · Masters of Scale · How to save a magazine, with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And like it was a cool experience for my child, right? And I bring them to everything I can. If they're free and I'm going somewhere, like they're coming with me. And I think they learn a ton.”
2026-01-15 · Masters of Scale · How to save a magazine, with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My dad did a bunch of things that I don't do, right? Like, A, he was absent. I spent more time playing sports with my kids yesterday than my dad did my whole childhood, right? So I am way more attentive and focused on them. I also don't push them as much as he pushed me. Like he made it very clear to me that you should absolutely do the best at every single thing you do and you have that capability. And if you don't do it, it's due to lack of effort. And that's an interesting lesson to get because it's both good. It's good to get that support. You can also crash out if a parent believes that, right? And you can have a hard time with that. It ended up being a good way to parent me for whatever reason. You know, there is one thing that he did teach me that I 100% follow, which is if I was with him and he was meeting anybody, he had a meeting lunch with a senator. Bring me. And I did that with my kids, right? Like my little guy got to interview Joe Biden one day when I was interviewing him for CBS and the lights went out and couldn't do it. And he was like, hey, kid, come interview me.”
2026-01-15 · Masters of Scale · How to save a magazine, with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like me, right? He's great talking to people. He's always interested. He's always curious. He's unafraid of travel. He's unafraid of difficult situations. He's happy to sleep on the floor if there's something interesting he'll get the next day. It's kind of interesting that I sort of wish, not that I had followed his footsteps, but that he had somehow figured it out and done the same thing that I did.”
2026-01-15 · Masters of Scale · How to save a magazine, with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the greatest set of documents that I got was his reviews as a road scholar at Oxford. But there are these pretty vicious analyses by the Dots. So when my dad was at Stanford, everybody loves him, right? I read his recommendation letters and they're like, this is the best kid we've had since Hoover, never seen a kid like this. The Dawn sees something, right? And they write, you know, this kid doesn't have the attention span to be a great academic. Like he can't stay still. You know what he should be? He should be a journalist. And it's kind of interesting that In some ways, I have the same trait. I like to do lots of things. I like to move around. I like new challenges. I like learning this. I like learning that. And I kind of think that my dad should have been a journalist.”
2026-01-15 · Masters of Scale · How to save a magazine, with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“guy. It was hard to live through and then it was hard to process as a writer. And so your question is like what I learned while writing the book. I think my view of him matured while I was writing the book I think forgives not quite the right word, but to be more appreciative of the love he gave while also being entirely aware of the chaos he caused. And I have this insight that it's sort of been bubbling for a while, that my father was both The person I was most like Person, I in some ways had spent my adult life trying to please and to live up to the expectations he set, and the person I was most desperate not to become. And people, a lot of men, a lot of women, they run towards their father, they run away from their father. And I like was doing both”
2026-01-15 · Masters of Scale · How to save a magazine, with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Big question. My father, remarkable guy, grows up in tricky circumstances in Oklahoma. And then it's like the world's fastest rise up the American meritocracy, right? And of her scholarship, Stanford scholarship, road scholarship, Stanford marries into Paul Nitz's family. My mother comes from this prominent D.C. family. And like Scott Thompson's on top of the world. And then doesn't work, right? Like everyone's, this guy's going to be present. He's going to be Secretary of State. He's going to be president of the university. Life's hard, right? You can be a really promising kid and a really promising student. And you can have what it takes to succeed at Stanford and not what it takes to succeed in Washington. And he starts to drink too much, gets a little depressed, you know. It's not really working. And then he comes to this realization that he's gay after I'm born. By the end of his life, he's running something kind of like a brothel in Bali as this ridiculous sex addiction. He's bankrupt. So, you know, watching his rise and then the downward trajectory of his later years, during which he's also a loving father and an interesting.”
2026-01-15 · Masters of Scale · How to save a magazine, with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe she's the best sports reporter in America. She's awesome. So you hired those people. He also makes some bats on some 25 year olds who hire as fact checkers and maybe you assign freelance stories to. And the hope would be you do both, right? You can build up the young people and you can hire the proper stars. Derek is an interesting case because Derek came up through the Atlantic and the Atlantic helped make Derek. And so maybe like the really smart 25-year-old is like, you know what? I can't make it on Substack now, but if I go to the Atlanta for 10 years, I can't on Substack. And we get 10 years of great work, right? I can guarantee you that David Bradley is delighted. He hired Derek Thompson as an editorial fellow.”
2026-01-15 · Masters of Scale · How to save a magazine, with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, then I have a better chance to keep them. Jeff Goldberg's job is to make sure that they've got the best editors making their stories better, right? And that we, and then Jeff and I collaborate and making sure that we're putting it out in the world to get as many readers and have as much influence and they're on the right stages. What I want us to be able to do is I want us to be a combination of the Yankees and the Devil Race, right? I want us to be able to go out and find stars, right? And we just hired Sally Jenkins. Everybody knows Sally Jenkins.”
2026-01-15 · Masters of Scale · How to save a magazine, with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we have to figure out what the value that we can give somebody that makes it worth it to stay, right? So we can give you copy editing, we can give you fact checking, we give you editing, we give you social promotion, we give you the SEO value being on the Atlantic, we give you the reach of the Atlantic, we give you the network of the Atlantic, right? And so we have to optimize all of those things. We also have to like figure out how we can let you do some of it, right? And so maybe you have this itch and maybe you want to go and do some independent stuff, not because you think you can make more money. You want to have a YouTube show, right? So, okay, well, you know what? David Fromm has a YouTube show. You know, we got to like give people those opportunities and make it so that they can feel as fulfilled as they would being independent on subsequent. You know what I want? I want every Atlantic journalist to wake up in the morning and say, you know what? I think we're in good hands because Nick's running this organization. And Nick and his team are out there and they're looking out for us, right? And one of the ways we're going to lose people is the minute that doesn't happen. If I do a good job.”
2026-01-15 · Masters of Scale · How to save a magazine, with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's an incredibly hard issue, right? And we've lost people, right? Derek Thompson came up through the Atlantic and now is on Substack. So we have a challenge. So we have to make it so that the next Derek looks at the options, right? And you make a lot of money on Substack, right? And you can make more money there than you can at the Atlantic, right? Where we have bans on what people can be paid”
2026-01-15 · Masters of Scale · How to save a magazine, with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We do stand for truth. We stand for honesty. We stand for reality. We care about democracy. The things we care about, the core values that we have, but our job is very much not to be perceived or to be on, like parts inside. So we have Adam Surrey writing this. Like, we have David Front, you know who don't agree all the time? Adam Surr and David Fromm. But we publish both of them. And then for me personally, I feel like a little back to what I said a minute ago, there's a subset of issues where I should speak publicly, right? And if there's like a law coming in about copyright, I will happily talk about that. But I'm not going to talk about a law about ICE. And so we have that as the rule and the expectation.”
2026-01-15 · Masters of Scale · How to save a magazine, with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you have an idea and you don't feel like you can state it, well, then we're doing something wrong and sense of belonging. This is a place where they belong and this is a place where the ideas can be heard, whether they are utterly traumatized by ICE or whether they think that guy who shot Renee Good was doing the right thing because his life was under threat. You want to make sure these people feel welcome at the Atlantic. And that's a challenging management problem. Our founding statement says of no party or click, right? We are not supposed to like take stance, even as journalists.”
2026-01-15 · Masters of Scale · How to save a magazine, with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So that's a great and hard question. So I'll say a couple things. So, one, the way the Atlantic is structured is that Goldberg runs the editorial team. I run the business team. We both report to the board. And what that means is that we have our own series of influence, church and state. I don't know what they're going to publish today. And that's good. It also means that on issues like this, I'm very careful. My view is that as the leader of a media organization, I'm going to make a public statement on issue. There's like a pretty limited range. I should make public statements about AI and scraping, copyright, freedom of speech, freedom of the press. But I shouldn't be making statements about ICE. If it's anybody's role in the organization, it's Jeff's, right? It's certainly not mine. But that doesn't really answer your question. That's just about like public statements. Maybe I'll answer it this way. So we have a set of sort of founding principles at the Atlantic, right? You know, spirit of generosity. Treat people well. But same time, force of ideas. You respect ideas. You argue it out, right?”
2026-01-15 · Masters of Scale · How to save a magazine, with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't. And I couldn't do it. It would be the wrong choice. If A, I wasn't good at it, right? It's not that I'm like naturally particularly smart or whatever. It's just that I was on TV, right? You go on CBS for years and you have two minutes to explain something, you get better at explaining stuff in two minutes, right? So I had all this training that makes it easier for me to do this, right? And I was an actor when I was in high school and college. And I was a street musician too, right? Like talk about a thing where you have like two minutes to impress someone. Street music is pretty good. You're always on and then the subway comes and like you have to stop. And so it depends on the personality. And then two, there's an opportunity cost. Time is your most precious resource. There are definitely some people where it's worthwhile and there's somewhere it's not.”
2026-01-15 · Masters of Scale · How to save a magazine, with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I stopped for like two weeks. When I took the job. And then I remember the first one I posted, one of the first comments was like, dude, you're CEO of the Atlantic, why are you still doing this? And then I remember thinking, well, you know what? It's actually a really good learning mechanism. And so it's a way to force myself. You become CEO. You can spend all your time doing things that are helpful to your job, but you're not learning about the world in a way. That's what's best about being a journalist. So it's like a learning forcing mechanism. And then I actually realized it's good for a business. Because you know who's watching these videos? CMOs and they're really important people to reach. And so you go into a meeting with a CMO and you're like, hey, you know, I think you should advertise in the Atlantic. I go, tell me more about it. By the way, I liked your videos, right? And it turns out to be like a really good marketing channel for the Atlantic. Now, I still do it as a journalist. I'm not talking about our advertisers. I'm not talking about our partners. And sometimes I'm upsetting them. I'm just saying what's on my mind. And as soon as I stop doing that, then the things are worthless, right? As soon as it's canned, rehearsed, as soon as it goes through a comms channel, then it's dead. The whole point is like, this is now.”
2026-01-15 · Masters of Scale · How to save a magazine, with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Listeners, Bob here, if you listen to rapid response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show because every Friday we release a second rapid response exclusively in the rapid response feed. The guess and topics are just as compelling and timely from Ford CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from the Devilware's Prada. It takes about ten seconds to find just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there.”
2026-01-15 · Masters of Scale · How to save a magazine, with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's one point of leverage. Second point of leverage would be legislation. It's not going to happen in the United States, but it might happen in Europe. It could happen in Australia, right? And then once there's legislation, then things change. Another point of leverage would be lawsuits. Anthropic just had to pay out billions of dollars to authors. What if we start winning, right? And like the case law has been a little mixed so far, but you can imagine we start winning lawsuits. Well, then that changes it. And then another lever is public pressure. My view is that Once one of these AI companies comes out and actually does the right thing for the publishing industry and the right thing for content creators and the right thing for Hollywood and the right thing for authors, once somebody does that, like maybe they'll get the reputation as like the ethical AI shop. And then things will be much better, right? And that will actually be good for their brand. And you can imagine a discussion like, huh, wouldn't it be good to have the reputation as the ethical AI search engine as opposed to the unethical one?”
2026-01-15 · Masters of Scale · How to save a magazine, with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so initially, we were like, gosh, they're scraping us? And then we're like, okay, well, we'll put a robots.txt file up and we'll say, hey, please don't scrape. And that's like a no trespassing sign, right? You know what? You know how much they care? Zero, right? So then it was like, okay, then Cloudflare comes in. And they're actually good at blocking bots. So now we have a nice dashboard. And we can say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And so we block them. So that gives us a little bit of leverage. So now what are the other points of leverage? Well, you could move up the stack. And if people somewhere else in the stack of information supply, right? You can imagine ISP, right?”
2026-01-15 · Masters of Scale · How to save a magazine, with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Okay, amazing question. So part of the problem, part of the reason we have less leverage than we did in the last round is that they all think that their ultimate end value is going to be infinity. So now the question is how do you get leverage and how do you get them to pay attention? And there are a couple of ways you can do that. So one, and I wish the media industry had done this sooner, is block them from scraping you.”
2026-01-15 · Masters of Scale · How to save a magazine, with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What we've seen in the relationship between the media companies and the tech industry and the tech platforms, and I view these guys as like the new tech platforms, right? And they will probably have a similar role to what Facebook and Google had. None of these partners can be trusted. Is any of those things, right? And what I hope happens in the next year is that one of those big companies says, oh, you know, right? We're going to figure this out so that we can build a model for the future internet that works as well as the old model did.”
2026-01-15 · Masters of Scale · How to save a magazine, with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sue, go get them, right? And we are partied another lawsuit, and who knows, we've reserved all rights. There has to be a fair exchange of value, right? And if there isn't a fair exchange of value, well, then we'll. Use whatever methods of pressure we can, whether it's lawsuits or whatever. And so that's how I've approached it.”
2026-01-15 · Masters of Scale · How to save a magazine, with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Aggressive. I never doubted that it was the right thing. 100% confident and remained so. So the reason we did the deal is that the AI companies came, they scraped all their data, clearly in violation of our terms of service, probably in violation of copyright law. Of course, you're going to sort that out, certainly in violation of kind of every sort of ethical standard. And then they built competing products against us, right? So they did this, right? And we weren't savvy enough to catch them and stop them in the beginning. So then the question is, all right, what should you do about that? I think that's not useful is just kind of like stamp your feet and be frustrated. And unfortunately for many of my peers, the strategy has been stamp your feet and be frustrated. And so I basically said, look, we would like to be compensated. So we're either going to sue and pursue this legally or we're going to make deals. And with OpenAI, we said, hey, here we are. Let's talk. And they said, great, let's make a deal. And you'll become a partner as we build this new part of the internet. And to me, that's a much better deal than not doing that. Now, I can see the argument, the New York Times argument, let's”
2026-01-15 · Masters of Scale · How to save a magazine, with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This was interesting because I had the most hate, the most anger internally, right? We ran a story. I signed this deal and then our journalism side, which is separate from the business side, runs a story called The Deal with the Devil, right? And we run all these stories that are kind of attacking our deal. And there's a lot of commentary, and I do this all hands, which is quite.”
2026-01-15 · Masters of Scale · How to save a magazine, with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have to be profitable and you'll do everything to be profitable. And if you're not going to be profitable, then you make hard choices and all that. If you are going to be profitable and you're going to make $2 million, well, then you can take $1.9 and put it back into the most valuable things in the organization, ideally to grow and have more influence and hire more great journals. You're going to make $4 million, maybe put 3.9 back in. And so that's the way we're running it.”
2026-01-15 · Masters of Scale · How to save a magazine, with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, to be where you are now. And now we're at one point four six, right? And we're making, I can't say exactly how much we're making, but we're making good money. I mean, we take the money we make and we hire new people. So we don't, the goal of the Atlantic is really interesting. We're owned by Lorene Powell Jobs, who obviously doesn't need revenue from the Atlantic as her principal source of income. But she doesn't like being taken advantage of, right? And she liked the things she owns to make money and be sufficient and be serious and not to treat her like she's an ATM. And so the way I think of it, not everybody in the organization agrees, is”
2026-01-15 · Masters of Scale · How to save a magazine, with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The test started working, and like maybe it just took enough time to gestate, maybe it was some changes in personnel. But when I was there a year and a half, that's when you could start to see when you look at kind of the leading indicators. Oh, wait, actually, like the numbers everybody else sees are bad, but the numbers I see are good. And then by the winter of 2024, it was like, oh, wow, now everybody can see the numbers are good. And then by the end of the year, we were like profitable and it reached a million subscribers. So everybody gets paid. And everybody was incredibly excited about that. But there's like, there's a period, I guess it's about 18 months from when I start to when the indicators look good. And it was probably about a year, that sort of the year to 18 month period where I was like, God, huh?”
2026-01-15 · Masters of Scale · How to save a magazine, with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, totally. I was terrified. So, what happened? I was just worried. I was like, well, maybe I'm not good at this, right? Like, I came in with all this confidence. We could run the New Yorker playbook, the Wired Playbook. But what I knew is I knew the team I was building was amazing. The team was getting better and better, right? And like morale wasn't dropping. Like it wasn't like people were starting to fight it. When an organization goes up, it's kind of like everybody's happy, right? Like you have to remanage it and you have to figure out like reporting lines and flows of information when organization's going down you can have a great team and like everybody's mad, right? And we weren't we didn't have that. And I also had said it was like my first all hands. I said to the staff, I said, we want to get to a million subscribers. Really hard goal. And we want to get to profitability. Really hard goal, right? And when we get there, everybody gets a 10,000 or 10% bonus. So I started in 2021 and 2022 was like ominous. And then 2023 starts to pick up. I think it's the summer of 2023.”
2026-01-15 · Masters of Scale · How to save a magazine, with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The goal when you have a paywall is if someone's not going to subscribe, you want them to read the article And someone is going to subscribe. You want them to pay to read the article. And problem is you can't know. You can't interview every person about their subscription propensity. And so you have to guess and you guess based on what the story is, based on what the referral source is, based on all the information that you have about them. And if you can set your paywall rules so that you guess correctly more often and incorrectly less often, you're in really good shape. Maybe you set different rules or people who are coming from Google search and people who are coming in from Drudge. What about if they're coming in from Twitter? If they're coming in from At the Atlantic, what if they're coming in from somebody else? And so you can kind of like make a bunch of rules based on that.”
2026-01-15 · Masters of Scale · How to save a magazine, with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're the Atlantic, you don't publish that many stories, but you publish a lot of hits and you have people out on MSNBC and all over the radio talking about it. It turns out that actually you can have a very hard paywall. Now, there's a trade-off there, though. You have a hard paywall. A, it hurts your advertising business. And B, maybe hurts your brand. See, maybe it's not great for democracy, right? You're in this business because you want people to get your information. And so you suddenly have to square all those things, right? And we had this meeting bringing together all the stakeholders. And I was kind of like, you know, this is what the numbers show we should do. And we didn't go to zero because all these trade-offs, but we went much tighter and we built a very sophisticated paywall that.”
2026-01-15 · Masters of Scale · How to save a magazine, with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of dollars? No, it does not. The second thing I was like, well, you know, why did we build this incredible affiliate business model, right? We review gadgets and people buy, we get an Amazon commission. I was like, well, we'll do that through books at the Atlantic. We'll figure out, we build that. It generates like $7,000 a year, right? It doesn't matter. What did matter was... Okay, wait, we have this paywall and we have this great journalism. Let's figure out the math. And so we start this culture data science iterative testing and turns out that like changing the math on the way the paywall works and the way the pay marketing works and the way the offers work, like suddenly our subscription growth goes from.”
2026-01-15 · Masters of Scale · How to save a magazine, with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's interesting because when I came in, I saw a couple opportunities that didn't matter, right? I was like, wow, they haven't digitized their archives. That's crazy. Like, go back to 1857. The archives aren't readily accessible. Like, let's just do that. It'll cost $2 million to do it. And then we'll generate tons of traffic, Google SEO, right? Like we'll be able to run an archival playbook like we did at the New Yorker. And we digitized the archives. It's a great project. So glad we did it. Does it generate?”
2026-01-15 · Masters of Scale · How to save a magazine, with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The New Yorker We built a digital subscription model. We built thriving website advertising business, all kinds of answerly business that really worked. We did the same thing at wire. Like I know how to work on building plausible economic models. So I thought, I don't know, I bet you we can do this. So I said, yes. Plus David Bradley soaked.”
2026-01-15 · Masters of Scale · How to save a magazine, with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Funny to go back to that. So, this was 2020. I took the job, it was announced in December of 2020, right? In the middle of COVID, and there were two really salient facts. One, I knew the economics of the Atlantic were terrible, right? And they'd been reported that they were losing $20, $30 million a year. They laid off 20% of their staff. They shut down the whole live team. They'd fired the whole video team, right? David Bradley had written this effusive memo. It was a very complicated. This is the time of George Floyd. It's the time of COVID. So I knew it was in deep financial trouble. It's a real cultural touchstone for me. But the other salient fact was that the journalism was amazing, right? And I knew that because I'd been competing with it, right? And I'd been running the newsroom at Wired while we were competing with Atlantic on stories on COVID. And so I thought, you know, if the journalism wasn't amazing, not a fixable situation. But journalism is amazing. I know how to run a playbook where”
2026-01-15 · Masters of Scale · How to save a magazine, with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like at the New Yorker, a ton of people who can write better than me, right? So many of them, right? And how many of them are better at figuring out business models for serious journalism? I don't know, fewer. And so the opportunity came up. I was like, well, I should really test and see how this works. So that's why I made the shit five years ago.”
2026-01-15 · Masters of Scale · How to save a magazine, with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, a couple things are important that somebody who just looks at my resume or just sort of knows me from my Twitter handle wouldn't know. One is that when I graduated college when I was young, I didn't intend to be a journalist. I didn't not intend to be a journalist. I just didn't know what I was going to do. But then I eventually found my foot in and I got some great jobs. And so I work at Wired. I work at the New Yorker. I go back to Wired to run it. And then the opportunity comes to be the CEO of the Atlantic, which is a big shift. And the way I thought about it was I'm a pretty good writer, I'm a pretty good editor. Pretty good manager. But there's this concept of comparative advantage where what matters in life is not what you are best at. It's what you are best at relative to your peers. And I sort of thought that my comparative advantage was figuring out business models for serious journalism organizations, right? And if that's my professional competitive advantage, that's the thing that I'm best at relative to my peers. I may not be certainly not the best in the world at it, but compared to everybody else in journalism, I'm like in a higher.”
2026-01-15 · Masters of Scale · How to save a magazine, with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You run up here by the way, I was gonna run, it's like a little like then you stink during the interview, and it's like not great. Yeah, I should have done it.”
2026-01-15 · Masters of Scale · How to save a magazine, with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT