Nicholas Thompson, CEO at The Atlantic: Leading with Integrity and Innovation

Scott Smith: I’m really excited to welcome Nicholas Thompson who is the CEO of The Atlantic Inside the Workflow.

Scott Smith: He has done some incredible things over the last decade plus building a family, building great businesses and products and excited to have him here today with us.

Nicholas Thompson: Great. Thank you,…

Nicholas Thompson: Delighted to be here.

Scott Smith: We were just talking beforehand about building a family and also at the same time I think when I saw you speak at the Zenes conference a couple weeks ago you really highlighted a lot of this new interesting areas with AI and…

Scott Smith: sort of the way that we are going to see things change with respect to how we talk to our customers interact with them as well.

Nicholas Thompson: Yeah. I mean,…

Scott Smith: But I wanted to maybe go back to sort of the beginning of your career and talk a little about how this guy today, looking great with the suit and everything, where he came from, how you got started. So, I’d love to know a little bit about how did you get into where you are now really early on? how did you start to navigate and figure it out?

Nicholas Thompson: how did I become a journalist or…

Scott Smith: Yeah. Yeah, I mean I think you’re CEO of The Atlantic now, so I mean there’s sort of this executive part of your role…

Nicholas Thompson: Yeah. It’s probably college.

Scott Smith: which is super important. You’re probably doing a lot of different things, but there’s also the part where being in journalism, working on Wired, all those kinds of things. How did it get started?

Scott Smith: Is this middle school, high school, elementary, college?

Nicholas Thompson: I wrote for the school paper in college but not as a reporter. I wrote as I saw the kind of the power that writing editorials could have and I started to enjoy the process of trying to make interesting arguments, write funny sentences and so I became a columnist for the school paper and then I started a newspaper. I was on the liberal side of the campus political spectrum and I started it with a very well-known conservative and we started a paper of thought and debate and so that paper was called the thinker and I sold ads for it and ran the business of it and…

Nicholas Thompson: so I would get liberals to debate propositions, you would get conservatives. It was pretty fun and maybe that’s the origin of it.

Scott Smith: Cool.

Scott Smith: And so on the ad sales side,…

Scott Smith: is this doornocking going to local businesses?

Nicholas Thompson: Yeah, I was going to do door knockocking.

Nicholas Thompson: It was I remember we sold a really big ad to the god we sold ads to the two ads I remember selling one we sold a big one to the campus sweatshirt store and…

Nicholas Thompson: then we sold ads to a sperm bank that wanted to advertise. …

Scott Smith: Nice. Yeah,…

Nicholas Thompson: you can sell ads,…

Scott Smith: and when you think back about some of those early experiences with these sort of different folks debating writing these opinion articles, did you ever have ones where you either really regretted them or where you were deeply excited about one specific product that I don’t know the result of that work that you put together where you look back and you’re like this one was amazing. I loved it.

Scott Smith: or I hate this one. This was embarrassing even to this day.

Nicholas Thompson: 

Nicholas Thompson: I think of the issues of that magazine. I’m pretty proud of all of them. there were certainly a lot of political views that I held back then that I argued for strongly that turned out to be wildly wrong. I mean, I spent a lot of my senior year in college organizing a campaign on campus and nationally to try to get the university to divest from companies that were doing business in Burma. And the logic was to penalize the dict dictatorship and to bring Angsuchi who was then the leading dissident she was under house arrest at the time and the sanctions are a Divestment is relatively ineffective tool and then when Angstanuchi became leader of Burma she turned out to not be particularly good.

Nicholas Thompson: So I’m not sure whether we got that one right.

Scott Smith: It seems like one of the things I don’t know…

Scott Smith: if nervous or also fascinated by the career path that you’ve had is that in order to be successful,…

Scott Smith: you have to have this willingness to have opinions and thoughts that could definitely be bad. Is there part of you that’s really stubborn or flexible or okay with being embarrassed?

Nicholas Thompson: Yeah. …

Nicholas Thompson: Being embarrassed. I’m fairly okay with changing opinions. I’m very okay with debate. my My opinions on different issues have varied a lot. There, many things that are core and stable, other things that have changed. I think that probably helps. I mean, the whole point of being a journalist is that You want to meet people. You want to learn new ideas. You want to learn new things. And so, if you’re someone who likes you sort of learning information across a variety of fields and likes challenging your own assumptions, it’s a great field to be in. and I do think that my position at the thinker, which was what it was,…

00:05:00

Nicholas Thompson: that publication back at Stanford in the 90s, was actually a pretty good model for the Atlantic, where the Atlantic, we publish people. if you agree, no one agrees with everything in the Atlantic because our writers disagree with each other. So, …

Scott Smith: right on that note,…

Nicholas Thompson: that was a good predecessor for this.

Scott Smith: I’m curious too. So I guess there’s two different things. So I would imagine most people don’t have any idea how an article gets put together. And I’m sure there’s tons of books and movies, but can you talk a little bit about some of the behind the scenes, the sausage making, so to speak?

Nicholas Thompson: So at the Atlantic, I’m the CEO, so I don’t oversee the editorial side, but obviously I spent my previous job as the editor of Wired. Before then, I ran the digital newsroom at the New Yorker. So, the first step is where the idea comes from, which is pretty interesting because sometimes it’ll come from the magazine. And when I was an editor, particularly when I was at the New Yorker, I would take a huge percentage of my time trying to figure out ideas.  And sometimes I would go into a cocktail party and I would say to myself, “Okay, there are 20 people in this room and three of them have an idea that’s a really good New Yorker story, And it’s something that, we should write about.” And I have to find those three people and I have to figure out what that story is, And so you have to figure out a way of talking to them. And you can’t just go up to them and say, “Hey, do you have anything happened in your life that would make a good New Yorker story?” It’s kind of an annoying way to start a cocktail conversation.

Nicholas Thompson: I mean that even in fact the fact that you’re going into a cocktail party with that as your agenda can be annoying. My sister was like, “Oh my god.” When I was like one of her friends would be there, I’d be like, ” wait. Can you tell me more about this?” And she’d be like, “Jesus, he’s trying to find a story idea.” but in any case, so that’s part of it, right? where does the story Yeah.

Scott Smith: Hey, …

Scott Smith: it could be worse. I would imagine if you were an insurance salesman, always hunting for insurance leads. Yeah, it’s kind of the same thing, right?

Nicholas Thompson: And in some ways it’s the same, right?  But the difference is like if you’re trying to find a New Yorker story idea, it’s actually spurs a good conversation because sort of almost definitionally, I would think a New Yorker story idea is something where if the person is talking about it, the room is captivated, And so that made it less offensive than if I’d gone trying to sell them insurance. so that’s part one. You get the idea that the editor gets it, the magazine get it, the writer gets it, then it gets assigned, and then the writer goes out and tries to find all the details and interview everybody who knows something about it. And this all depends on the time frame. It might if it’s a story that has to run in four hours, you do it very quickly. If it’s a story that can run in four months, you do it very slowly. You go and you call everybody, you gather all your information, and then eventually you write it. And then once you’ve written it, you submit it. And then it goes back and forth with Your editor says, ” no, I think you’ve got this assumption wrong or you introduced this character in the wrong place or it would be better if you did this.”

Nicholas Thompson: go back and forth and then eventually it moves from this two-person relationship, writer and editor into this sort of organizational relationship where copy editors, there’s fact checkers, they’re lawyers, they all go through it. It’s always going back and forth to the writer and then at some point someone has the authority to say publish this. the New Yorker, it was always the most senior copy editor, interestingly, who had final authority. I mean, the editor-in chief, but in you would have it you’d have what was called a closing meeting where you’d go into a room and you’ be like, “Okay, the story is going to ship to the printer at 10 o’clock.” You have the fact checker, And the copy editor got to make a final choice.

Nicholas Thompson: Different places it’s different people has that final authority. sometimes it’s the writer, sometimes it’s the editor, sometimes it’s the lawyer. and then the story eventually appears on the internet or on a piece of paper.  Yeah.

Scott Smith: super cool.

Scott Smith: And if we could, I’d love to go back to your comments about writers not agreeing. when I think about building a product and building a team and building a great workplace with a great culture, obviously people don’t always agree.

Scott Smith: I worked at Facebook for four years and I saw lots of the execs who sort of, little feet battles and all this kind of thing. But how do you build a great business when you have such strong opinions and…

Scott Smith: then as CEO you’re trying to I guess navigate this complex situation?

Nicholas Thompson: Yeah, it’s interesting.

Nicholas Thompson: The culture that we have on the business side of the Atlantic, it’s a little bit of team of rivals where I don’t say, “Hey, you’re all going to do this. Go do it.” I say, “Okay, here’s our general objectives, right? we hold these values and we have these business goals. figure out how to do it. And sometimes the consumer marketing team will have a different view from the product and tech team, right? And obviously there’s some inherent tension between the ad sales team and the consumer marketing team because the consumer marketing team wants a reader to be driven to drive to buy a subscription, which can mean putting up the payw wall. The advertising team wants them to see as many ads as possible, right?

00:10:00

Nicholas Thompson: And so you adjudicate disputes, you set up values, but you try to set up a system where everybody feels like they can make their argument, they’ll be heard, and decisions will be made based on the merits, not based on silly things.

Scott Smith: Yeah, makes sense.

Scott Smith: I think one thing that’s interesting about the team of rivals is how often Abraham Lincoln’s team tried to conspire to become president,…

Scott Smith: so I hope that’s not happening too often to you, but if you know Yeah.

Nicholas Thompson: If it is,…

Nicholas Thompson: I don’t know about it and they haven’t succeeded yet. But, maybe when I walk off this Zoom, I’ll see a force banded out in front of my office here. Yeah.

Scott Smith: So you mentioned ads, pay walls, subscriptions. Obviously, I think when I was growing up, I grew up in New Jersey and, in my dad’s office, he actually had a print of the New Yorker in our study.

Scott Smith: And I think over the last 10 20 years, news agencies, media companies have kind of changed the approach that they bring revenue in. Can you talk a little bit about…

Nicholas Thompson: Mhm. Yeah.

Scott Smith: what it’s been like at the different organizations you’ve worked for and how it changes the dynamic of maybe great writing versus, I don’t know, trying to get people just to come that day more eyeballs.

Nicholas Thompson: 

Nicholas Thompson: Yeah. It’s a really important question. So, interestingly, the business model at the last four jobs I’ve had, which is at three places because as twice has pretty much been the same. It’s been subscription driven with advertising as an important addendum and then sort of some third revenue models of the different places.  Wired. We had a very successful third revenue stream of affiliate revenue where you recommend products like hey we check these 12 humidifiers you buy one wired gets a referral fee. So that was a good third business that Wired had that the others don’t have. The really interesting question is not then how the business model has changed at my organizations but how it’s changed in media.

Nicholas Thompson: So there was a period where for a long time newspapers and magazines had this amazing monopoly in advertising right and if you wanted to reach people who cared about sports you would advertise in Sports Illustrator. if you wanted to sell golf balls you would advertise in golf digest. Facebook and Google came around. They built this better ad product and suddenly you could reach people who want to buy golf balls by just targeting their interest on Facebook.  And so that kind of ad business started to collapse and at the same time classified ads which are hugely powerful for local newspapers those collapsed and went to Craigslist. So business model was kind of cut apart.

Nicholas Thompson: So then there was this period where all these new media startups came up, venture-backed, and they used the sort of brilliant analysis of social media to get tons and tons of traffic and tons and tons of readers and they had ad network sales, they sold some direct sold advertisements and it was fabulous for a short period of time and then the social networks pulled back.  And so now all the local newspapers have been screwed and their business is kaput and all these new media startups are now screwed because social media no longer sends as much traffic and they’ve built up all this debt. And so they’re all screwed. And so we now move into this period right now where the publications that are succeeding the most tend to be ones that have built deep relationships with their readers, subscription based relationships. They’re not dependent on social media platforms.

Nicholas Thompson: And they have thriving subscription businesses, which fortunately the Atlantic does, the New Yorker does, and Wired does. and so, our revenue mix right now is primarily subscriptions. we I don’t know, be about 40% of our revenue from advertising.

Nicholas Thompson: And then 60% from subscriptions and the subscription part growing most rapidly. Yeah.

Scott Smith: That’s awesome.

Scott Smith: That’s such a great background. Thank you. I think one of the things that I do as CEO and…

Nicholas Thompson: Yeah. Mhm. Yeah.

Scott Smith: I’m definitely curious how you kind of approach it, but I have all these different mechanisms to collect customer and user feedback. we have customer emails, cancellations for subscriptions, and I probably spend a few hours a week trying to read all of it or use AI to summarize it and help, it’s a lot, right? So, in your case, you’re not only trying to increase the number of subscriptions, you’re trying to have great writers. how are you thinking about building a great product and at the same time building a great business? Because I think sometimes it can be tough.

Scott Smith: Sometimes maybe the content that you’re putting out you’re really excited about,…

Scott Smith: but it doesn’t quite hit keep people retained in the way maybe you want. Is that a complex way to think about it?

Nicholas Thompson: …

Nicholas Thompson: we have a very simple way of thinking about it, which is maybe not the best for the business, which is the journalist write whatever the hell they want, And they don’t tell us…

Scott Smith: Okay.

Nicholas Thompson: what they’re going to write and we can’t tell them what they should write.  And so we then make it’s like I don’t know you’re selling pots and pans and you hire a bunch of people to design the pots and pans and then you go and sell it and build the store, you just take whatever they’ve designed and if they’ve designed it with they’re not flame resistant or their three handles you just figure out how to sell it. so all that journalism comes first. and it does create complexities, Because there’s certain kinds of journalism that is much easier to monetize, right?

00:15:00

Nicholas Thompson: If I’m trying to sell an ad, here are some innovative, solutions to climate change, I can sell a lot of ads against that story, If you write a story about hey, here are some details from, this prison in El Salvador, who wants to buy an ad against that, but the journalists write whatever they want to write and then we figure out how to sell it. So, it’s a unique dynamic. but it works much better at other publications. Sometimes the business side will say hey why don’t you write more of these stories or…

Nicholas Thompson: why don’t you do a little bit of this or sure it would be really helpful for us if you did this and then the journalism gets corrupted and nobody trusts it. So our currency is trust and…

Scott Smith: I can’t imagine…

Nicholas Thompson: one of the ways we maintain trust is that I never meddal in the core part of the product.

Scott Smith: how hard that must be. I mean, Are you the kind of person who is just h like is you’ve been able to sort of be okay with it?

Nicholas Thompson: No, totally. Totally. And no,…

Scott Smith: right.

Nicholas Thompson: and also…

Nicholas Thompson: because I refresh the Atlantic site and every now and then there’ll be a story, trashing someone I’m like about to make an ad deal with and I’m like, ” we just kind of laugh.” Yeah,…

Scott Smith: Fair enough.

Scott Smith: I love that phrase, by the way. Currency is so you mentioned a bunch of the different categories of media providers. I’ll probably use the wrong language.

Scott Smith: apologies. But I think that the question I’m curious about too is when you think about I don’t know…

Nicholas Thompson: it’s fine.

Scott Smith: if competition is the right word, but just I guess when I think Reed Hastings talks about his competition, it’s like sleep, how do you think about competition? or whenever I watch the news, maybe this isn’t the right analogy, but you see a hundred people taking photos of let’s say President Trump and…

Scott Smith: so presumably you got a hundred media companies that you got to compete against there. Is it just go back to making sure that you’re writing great content, making sure those writers are happy, and that’s how you guys win. Okay.

Nicholas Thompson: We have to write better content and…

Nicholas Thompson: different content. I mean, if there’s 100 people taking pictures of President Trump, probably we want to be doing something that the other 99 don’t, right? we’re not big enough to cover everything, And so if we cover anything, it has to be sort of smart, interesting, So when you need come to the Atlantic site, everything you’re seeing has to be different from what you’re seeing on newspaper sites and what you’re seeing at Reuters and the AP.

Nicholas Thompson: The competition question is fascinating because we compete for talent right with the New York Times Washington Post but we don’t really compete for subscribers people tend to subscribe they’ll probably subscribe for the New York Times and us the Washington Post and us if we’re directly competing for subscribers it’s probably with the New Yorker maybe it’s with the economist maybe it’s with the FT and then interestingly we also of course compete you mentioned Reed Hastings particularly with young readers like we’re competing with social media right we’re competing with do they get their information from the Atlantic or…

Nicholas Thompson: do they get their information from Tik Tok do they get it from influencers do they get it from Atlantic writers and so there is that level of competition and as we try to improve our demographics and get more younger readers we need to win more of Yeah.

Scott Smith: Yeah. …

Scott Smith: so on that note, you think about I guess the medium whether it’s social media or v maybe just keep it simple text video. are you guys leaning in heavily on the video side? how do you think about where to invest given these new changing dynamics, technologies, mediums?

Nicholas Thompson: So, I’ve had that I’ll talk more about the way I saw it at the New Yorker and the way I saw it at Wired where those departments reported to me and I sort of managed that.  So my view then was that there’s an essential element of what makes the New Yorker’s DNA and the trick is to figure out on what platforms can you take that DNA and create content that feels true to the New Yorker but can win on that platform. So is it possible to win and to really get readers on Twitter? yes it is. Right? You can have a voice on Twitter and there people on Twitter. is it possible to win on Instagram? yeah.

Nicholas Thompson: You can start a sort of a cartoon Instagram, You can win there, You can do the New Yorker photography and win there. but you can’t like the New Yorker’s feature stories. you’re not going to win. So, you have to try to figure out how to take the voice and how to win on those different platforms. is there a way for the institution to play on Reddit? really. if people post our stories on Reddit, great. But there’s not really anything we can formally do there. and so it’s kind of the same thing for Wired and for the Atlantic. just try to identify where we can make great stuff and compete to your specific question in video. No, we do very little actually here.

00:20:00

Nicholas Thompson: there for a long time media organizations like the Atlantic, the Times and others thought that there’s this kind of hypothesis that you take a story and you have a long feature story you should also make a video and maybe you give the writer a camera and you get two bites of the same apple and the economics just never worked. video economics are extremely hard and they’re very different from media economics and very few people were able to do that in a way that was cost-effective and brand enhancing. So, I would love for us to have a creative video strategy. At Wired, we did have a very good video strategy where we figured out how to make repeatable YouTube series, right? Wired autocomplete, right?

Nicholas Thompson: where it’s kind of like you put celebrities against you while they’re on some kind of a junket, you ask them questions, you tie it into Google, it feels techy or you get somebody to do almost impossible tricks. we basically figured out how to succeed on YouTube with things that felt like wired. but that was a very different playbook from the ones that The Atlantic New Yorker and…

Nicholas Thompson: others were carrying out. so here at least in April of 2025, we don’t have an aggressive video strategy.

Scott Smith: All right.

Nicholas Thompson: We might in May.

Scott Smith: Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Of course.

Nicholas Thompson: In fact, I have a document here where I’ve been trying to work through different options on this, but we don’t have it yet. Ideally, we will have one in May, but we don’t have one in April.

Scott Smith: All right. Cool. it one just sort of quick aside. I was just think as you were talking through your career as a kid I grew up reading Popular Science, Mechanics and…

Nicholas Thompson: Nice.

Scott Smith: Wired and I think now I’m doing more of a bunch of the ones you mentioned earlier the Atlantic, New Yorker.

Nicholas Thompson: Cool.

Scott Smith: It’s just cool to think about how you’ve influenced and your companies have influenced things I care about.

Scott Smith: So, one other I guess thing that you talked about it at Zenesk and…

Nicholas Thompson: Yeah, I’ve been very lucky to work at amazing places.

Scott Smith: and one of the graphics that really stood out to me that I mostly just laughed was you had sort of a picture of people you’d find in Costco employee of the month,…

Nicholas Thompson: That’s it.

Scott Smith: And it was like Charles, Brian, Megan, and then it was like a robot named Steve. so the question is less about, robots, but I’m curious what is AI and how does it influence your writers, your business? How are you thinking about it? Wow.

Nicholas Thompson: It influences tons. So in individually I use it all the time constantly. if I look right on my tabs that are open right now I have a complexity tab a chatgpt tab and an anthropic tab. I use them for different tasks.

Scott Smith: Okay.

Nicholas Thompson: I also have a ai tab open. so I’m using them for all kinds of different research for learning for figuring things out quickly. yeah. So I was looking to see whether a person was still alive and it was kind of easier to query it in chatgpt. I was doing a little thing about how to block through robots.txt trying to solve a little bit the tech question. so this Sunday I used AI to fix my dishwasher where this big part had fallen out. I didn’t know what it was. I just took a photograph up and I was like where does this part go in the dishwasher? It told me I reassembled it and everything’s great.

Nicholas Thompson: My wife was like, “Wait, how did you do that?” I was like, “Magic.” so I use AI all the time just to be better at what I do. but it’s terrifying for journalists and it’s terrifying for journalism because, it does what we do. it thinks, it synthesizes. and so one of my central goals is to figure out how to make the Atlantic maximally resilient.  And so, how do you create a publication that is resilient to the forces that will change the way the web is structured and the way people consume news? How do you create news that is least likely to be replicated by all these chat bots I have open? Clearly, if you have reporting, if you are presenting facts that have never been presented before, you can’t be out competed by a chatbot. You’re presenting if you are summarizing stuff that has been presented before, you can be competed.

Nicholas Thompson: So figuring out how to make the business maximally resilient and then how to use it most effectively both on the editorial side and the business side. So it’s a thinking through those different questions is a key part of my job.

Nicholas Thompson: 

Scott Smith: Okay. Yeah,…

Scott Smith: I think slightly different area, but I use LinkedIn regularly and one of the things I’ve really noticed is some folks know how to write and some folks know how to use chat GPT to get something that they can publish.

00:25:00

Nicholas Thompson: Yeah. Yeah.

Scott Smith: And I think right now in many cases it seems so very obvious that post is written and sort of like this AI slop exists everywhere.

Scott Smith: But I can’t remember if it was you, maybe it was another speaker at that conference, but they talked about they’re working on a book and they kind of have a number of different writers that they have loved and they’re trying to sort of bring those authors and their styles in, but also to make sure that,…

Scott Smith: back to your point about having a moat being different, making sure that your voice shines through rather than chatt

Nicholas Thompson: Yeah, I never use chat to write.

Nicholas Thompson: And I’m writing a book about running. I don’t use chat to write any of it. I use it to help me research and understand stuff. I don’t use it to write because it’s bad. it’s many things…

Scott Smith: Yeah. Sure.

Nicholas Thompson: but it’s bad at writing B there’s kind of a legal question right if ChatGpt writes something for you who owns the rights to it right does chat GBT does Microsoft does I don’t know and you could if the Atlantic published something written by GBT what happens to the rights and then there’s kind of a fight about whether it’s ethical or not right the role of I use these bots all the time but they were also created by stealing our content and praise be to open AAI where we have a deal with them where they’ve paid to license it but the other companies have not.

Nicholas Thompson: So it’s a very fraught dynamic in writing. to the point you mentioned I do think that one of the ways you can get it to write and think better is to give it examples and to say hey I really like the way and so help me think through it in the way they might. I think that’s a useful kind of prompt.

Scott Smith: Right. Right.

Scott Smith: Absolutely. I have maybe two other quick questions to kind of wrap up, but I think one of them is more just you’ve been a successful guy. I think there’s a lot of people who are early in their careers and they’re just trying to figure out and sometimes it’s like I don’t know the template. I don’t know the playbook. I don’t know where to get started. And when you kind of look back on yours, it’s been awesome. You continue to do great things. I know it’s hard.

Scott Smith: but how do you feel when you meet someone that’s trying to get started in their career? What kind of advice do you typically like to give?

Nicholas Thompson: I did,…

Nicholas Thompson: it’s funny you should ask me that. So, this morning, I used to be on the board of the Stanford Daily. I was an undergraduate at Stanford. Love that place. And this woman who’d been editor, when I was on the board came by, and she’s just finishing up a fellowship at the New York Times, and she’s trying to figure out what to do next.  And so we talked about some of the trade-offs, right? Should you be a freelancer? Should you work for a company? Should you work for a local newspaper? Should you leave New York? Should you be in New York? And my view is in general, I favor when you’re young going to the institution where you will meet the best people and build the best network and have the best mentors. I favor being extremely ambitious, And going to wherever you think you can do the most work and the most exciting work. and really pushing it.

Nicholas Thompson: when I was young, I made some mistakes, not joining institutions, maybe believing in myself a little more than I should have and thinking that I could just make it all on my own as a freelancer. and then the other thing I’d pointed out is journa there are a lot of things that are hard about journalism, right? Our future is totally uncertain as a profession. but what’s one thing that is great is that it’s extremely meritocratic.  And if you have a good story, someone can judge it, If you’re a good doctor, it’s kind of hard to judge, you go in and you take a test and you’ve gone to a good med school or but if you’re a good journalist, you wrote a story and someone can read it, And that story is and so it’s actually a really good profession for ambitious young people. So she and I talked about all that.

Nicholas Thompson: I think one key lesson that I talk I’m just going to reiterate this point because it’s important. When I look at my career and I look at where things have worked, so much of it is you just meet people along the way and if you treat them well and you work hard with them and you do good work with them, it will come back and help you.  And so I sometimes give an example of my friend guy named Brendan Kerner. And the first job I ever had was at the Washington Monthly and I edited a book review of his and he thought I did a good job editing it. I put a lot of time and attention to it and he got hired as a fellow at New America Foundation. So he then recommended me to them. He’s like, “Hey, this guy’s a good editor.” So I got hired there. Then he sold the book to Penguin Random House to an editor, recommended me to them. Eventually he got hired at Wired. He recommended me as a senior editor.

Nicholas Thompson: Then I got hired at the New Yorker and so I got him writing for us at the New Yorker. so our lives just kept crossing where I liked working with him, he liked working with me. As we each moved up, we helped each other and not just because of some, network or friendship, but because we knew each other. And so the point of that story and I could tell that story with eight other people is that if you do good work with people like their careers, they will go to interesting places. They will hire you, the people I have here at the Atlantic, some of them are people here who were here when I took the job and came in, thought they were awesome. And a whole bunch of them are folks I worked at Wired, I served on a board with,…

00:30:00

Nicholas Thompson: At an old startup. So, I worked with at the New Yorker. So, you bring in, you work really everybody you’re working with eventually there will be another moment where your life intersects and just remember that.

Scott Smith: I think that’s great.

Scott Smith: Maybe just the last question like you guys The Atlantic has been at the center of a lot of news lately and I think one of the things that really fascinates me in there’s been a number of movies about journalism where I think you describe it as the closing meeting. There’s that sort of final moment where everyone’s coming together and…

Nicholas Thompson: Yeah. actually not.

Scott Smith: they’re kind of like we going to run Are we going to ship this?

Scott Smith: in this case it’s the conversation that happened on Signal, but you’re the CEO. I don’t know. Is the copywriter still the final word? I doubt it, so as CEO, are you the final person when these significant articles come out? how does that work?  Okay.

Nicholas Thompson: No, no. So the single one is a classic example. So Jeff Goldberg is the editor-inchief.  He and I talk all the time and I knew that something was coming but I didn’t know what it was and church and state rules they don’t obviously we have to like it was a story of a magnitude where I run the legal team I run the cyber security team right I run the product and engineering team we’re in charge of the servers right so you have to coordinate if there’s a big story but I didn’t know what the story was and so a few days before the story ran I called him up and I said

Nicholas Thompson: I don’t know what the story is about and I don’t want to know…

Nicholas Thompson: but whatever it is you should run it right and I will not block it and I will not complain and if the story brings consequences that are negative to the Atlantic I trust your judgment I trust you do it and so that was the conversation we had he said thanks not going to tell you what the story is and then he ran and then story did pretty  Yeah.

Scott Smith: It did.

Scott Smith: And actually just a quick addendum I guess on this talk, but we’ve talked a number of different times where you have the writers who basically build the product however they want and then they go out and sell it and you kind of hope you’ve got your editor-inchief who isn’t going to tell you about the story. it seems like there’s a lot of things sort of maybe out of your control so to speak.

Scott Smith: How do you stay reasonably calm and chill throughout what feels like a chaotic kind of process? At least to me.

Nicholas Thompson: Yeah, it is chaotic and…

Nicholas Thompson: it is like you could tell that it would be different if I didn’t trust Jeff and I thought there was a chance that he would screw it up,  and plished. imagine that story had been fake, And that actually Jeff had been duped, And that someone had created a fake group in order to entrap the Atlantic. That would it would be, very bad for our brand. but I trust him, And I trust the process and I trust the people and I’ve worked with some of them in previous jobs and I know them. So that makes it a lot easier to be relaxed.

Nicholas Thompson: The fact that the cupboard has been so great makes it easier to be relaxed.

Scott Smith: Amazing. All right,…

Nicholas Thompson: And then, there’s plenty of other stuff to do on this side of the house. So, I’ve got so many things to worry about with the product and engineering and the consumer marketing team. So, at some point things will go wrong, but it’s been four years and three months and everything’s been great. So, just keep the street going.

Scott Smith: Hey,…

Nicholas Thompson: Yeah. …

Scott Smith: thank you so much for joining us on this podcast and thanks for your time today.

Nicholas Thompson: thanks for inviting me on.

Nicholas Thompson: It’s great to talk. I’m so glad you saw the Zenes thing and like this and it was really fun to talk through all this.