What that meant more than anything else was forcing one of the nation’s oldest magazines to stop thinking of itself as a printed product.

Separations between the digital and print staffs in both business and editorial operations came down. The Web site’s paywall was dismantled. A cadre of young writers began filling the newsroom’s cubicles. Advertising salespeople were told it did not matter what percentage of their sales were digital and what percentage print; they just needed to hit one sales target. A robust business around Atlantic-branded conferences took off.

The strategy is not a cure-all template for troubled media companies, of course. The Atlantic, a tiny enterprise compared with vast corporate magazine empires like Time Inc. and Condé Nast, has only about 100 business and editorial employees and a circulation of 470,000. A scale that small means that a few million dollars could push the company over the top  an amount that would barely register on the balance sheets of many other publishers.

Since 2005, revenue at The Atlantic has almost doubled, reaching $32.2 million this year, according to figures provided by the company. About half of that is advertising revenue. But digital advertising  projected to finish the year at $6.1 million  represents almost 40 percent of the company’s overall advertising take. In the magazine business, which has resisted betting its future on digital revenue, that is a rate virtually unheard of.

It did not always appear The Atlantic would get here. The magazine has long enjoyed a certain intellectual cachet. It was the kind of publication devotees knew made them well read (“Did you see that piece in The Atlantic?”), and a destination for writers that burnished a résumé like few others (“As I said in my Atlantic piece ...”).