With consecutive quarterly growth in both print and digital advertising sales, The Atlantic has emerged as a vanguard in an industry harassed by declining ad revenues and falling circulations. And the credit, its executives say, belongs to the "digital first" strategy it embraced four years ago.

The Atlantic, a monthly magazine on politics, foreign affairs, economics and culture, made $1.8 million in 2010, its first profitable year in decades. In October, digital ad revenues topped print for the first time, up 86% year-over-year, but not at the sacrifice of print. In fact, The Atlantic sold more print ads in October than it had in any other month since David Bradley acquired the title in 1999. Traffic to its three web properties — TheAtlantic.com, TheAtlanticWire.com and TheAtlanticCities.com — recently surpassed 11 million uniques per month, up a staggering 2500% since The Atlantic brought down its paywall in early 2008.

Five years ago, no one could have foreseen that The Atlantic, a 154-year-old publication founded by a collective of New England intellectuals, would have become a leader in the so-called digital age. Even in 2008, digital only made up 9% of total ad revenues, says publisher Jay Lauf.

A Tough Decade



The Atlantic is headquartered in Washington, D.C. Photo courtesy of Richard A. Bloom.



David Bradley, a seasoned entrepreneur who had acquired The National Journal in 1997, purchased The Atlantic from Mort Zuckerman for $10 million in 1999. In its first year, losses totaled $4.5 million. By the time Bradley relocated The Atlantic's headquarters from Boston to Washington, D.C., in 2005, he had lost some $30 million on the venture altogether, with losses soaring as high as $8 million in 2002 alone.

“Atlantic had so serially failed that it was overwhelmingly likely the next thing we would do was fail, and the next thing we would do was fail," Bradley recalled in a New York Times interview last year.

Bradley says a succession of strategic hires in the last half of the decade turned things around for the magazine, however. Among them: James Bennet, the New York Times correspondent who became editor of the magazine in 2006, and Justin Smith, who became president of Atlantic Consumer Media in 2007 after leaving his post as president and publisher of The Week.

Bradley's hiring antics are famous. In 2007, he lured national correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg away from the New Yorker by sending ponies to his house, charming his children.

"He's incredibly persistent and makes you feel like you're God's gift to journalism," Goldberg said of the incident. "The charm is incredibly disarming."

We were no longer going to be 'The Atlantic, which happens to do digital.' We were going to be a digital media company that also published The Atlantic magazine."

Bennet was pulled in through a series of long conversations; Smith, through dinner and a three-page, single-spaced letter Bradley emailed the next day. It helped that Smith had recently gotten into a "significant disagreement" with The Week's owner over the need to invest more in digital.

"He said that he really needed someone to come someone help him with The Atlantic, which had been losing money for years," Smith recounts of his discussions with Bradley. "I was just getting out of print media; I didn't want to do more print media. But he said that, once we'd turned The Atlantic around ... we'd use it as a platform to build a global digital media company. That proposition really drew me."

Smith arrived at The Atlantic's offices in mid-2007. He worked doggedly his first few months, announcing in October that The Atlantic was going to adopt a digital-first strategy. "We decided to prioritize digital over everything else. We were no longer going to be 'The Atlantic, which happens to do digital.' We were going to be a digital media company that also published The Atlantic magazine."

That must have been a frightening prospect for a number of people, I suggested in a conversation with Smith at The Atlantic's offices last month.

"It's easier to be 'digital first' when your legacy business is not strong, when you have nothing to defend," Smith explained. "At the time, all we had to defend was red ink."

Breaching the Divide



The Atlantic's three digital properties attract a monthly audience of 11 million.



The first step in The Atlantic's newly minted strategy was to dismantle the paywall on TheAtlantic.com, which the company did in January 2008.

Smith says that no one expected the paywall to be disabled permanently, although the The Atlantic's content, including every article that appears in print, is still available freely on its website four years later. Rather, it was an experiment to see how big its audience could be. Even though the magazine continued to enjoy a prestigious reputation, its readership was small: At the time Smith joined, it had a circulation of about 450,000, and another 500,000 visited TheAtlantic.com on a monthly basis, he recalls.

At the same time, The Atlantic continued to build out a network of "big voices" for the web: recognizable personalities who would offer up analysis and opinion on the headlines of the previous day. Some, like Goldberg and James Fallows (a correspondent for Atlantic since 1979), bore more traditional print backgrounds. Others, including political writer Andrew Sullivan, who came to account for more than a quarter of TheAtlantic.com's traffic by the time he left The Atlantic for The Daily Beast in February 2011, had been blogging for nearly a decade.

In some ways, The Atlantic was primed for web journalism. The magazine had been established in the mid-nineteenth century by a group that included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Harriet Beecher Stowe, prominent American intellectuals then in the prime of their careers. In its founding statement, The Atlantic (then called The Atlantic Monthly) pledged to be "the organ of no party or clique, but will honestly endeavor to be the exponent of what its conductors believe to be the American idea," concerned with "Freedom, National Progress, and Honor, whether public or private."

The Atlantic Monthly quickly gained a following for its discussions on abolition, education and other issues of national reform, as well as for its fiction and poetry. Although the interests of today's Atlantic are further flung, both topically and geographically, its adherence to its original mission — that of being what co-founder Francis H. Underwood described as an "outspoken organ of opinion," representing multiple sides of a debate — remains strong.

It's The Atlantic's tradition as a "platform for voices" that makes it a natural fit for the web, says Bennet, who became editor-in-chief of the magazine at the age of 39. "We've never had a coherent ideology or a consistent sound the way a lot of publications do," he says. "To some people's minds that's been a weakness in print. But strong individual voices get heard on the web."

One of the challenges for any magazine brand in the fast-paced environment of the web is, of course, maintaining the polish and accuracy their print reputations are built upon. Bob Cohn, who left his post as executive editor of Wired to head up The Atlantic's digital operations in January 2009, remembers that he used to read every Wired story and photo caption five times before it went to print. "I learned early on that I couldn't even read every story we posted on TheAtlantic.com," he says. "You have to surrender to the chaos."

Still, The Atlantic would rather be late to a story than cover a story poorly. "The Atlantic's brand stands for quality and intelligence, and our first obligation, even in the barely controlled chaos of the web environment, is to maintain that reputation," says Cohn. "Being fast and being webby are essential, but quality is the most important."

The Atlantic Wire



The Atlantic Wire was established as an opinion news aggregator in September 2009.



Cohn's ethos was put to the test in September 2009, when The Atlantic launched The Atlantic Wire, an online aggregator for opinion news. A small team of full-time staffers were tasked to synthesize and analyze the takes from the U.S.'s leading commentators in rapid, pithy blog posts that liberally quote (and link to) their sources.

Scott Havens, VP of digital strategy and operations at The Atlantic Media Company, contends that The Wire is better described as a "contextualizer and synthesizer" rather than an aggregator. "We're reading an original narrative through the piece, pulling different angles, contextualizing fragments. It's aggregation 2.0 in some ways," he says, and we agree: The Wire is smart, and as valuable for its commentary as for its curation.

Under the leadership of former Gawker editor-in-chief Gabriel Snyder, who moved The Wire's headquarters to New York when he came on board in early 2011, the site now does a fair amount of mainstream news aggregation and original reporting, as well.

The Wire has done two things for The Atlantic: It has further established its editorial team as curators, helping readers cut through the mass of content put out on the web and in print each day; and it has placed The Atlantic in the news game for the first time.

"The web is a news medium, and you can't compete ambitiously on the web if you're not in the news flow," contends Smith. "[Before The Wire], TheAtlantic.com's strategy had been to do next-day analysis. Now we are set up to do that analysis instantly."

At present, The Atlantic Wire is in operation from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. ET, with an additional writer up for the morning shift (from 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. ET), and another on the weekends. During primetime hours, Snyder edits every single piece that goes up on The Wire — and if he's in a meeting, nothing gets published. Soon, Snyder says, The Wire will be a 24/7 operation, with a second editor to keep things flowing during the day.

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As The Atlantic becomes broader and faster, it's also going deeper. In February, TheAtlantic.com launched a redesign that divided its content into topic-specific channels: politics, business, culture, international, science & technology, national and food. (Culture and food have since been replaced by entertainment and health.) The Atlantic continues to staff up each of those channels, most recently bringing on Megan Garber of Nieman Lab to the tech channel, and Newsweek's David Graham to politics. TheAtlanticCities.com, a site designed to explore urban issues around the U.S. and abroad, was launched in September.

Community is another area under development. In May of this year, The Atlantic Wire opened up its editing room to the public for a month, inviting readers to pitch stories and give feedback on existing articles, as well as observe the pitching and editing process between full-time staff. It's something Snyder says he hopes to make a permanent aspect of the site, once he can identify a better technical solution to support it. (For the duration of the experiment, the editing room was moved to a public comments thread.)

In another community experiment that month, TheAtlantic.com launched 1book140, a monthly online reading and discussion club that spans the publication’s presences on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr, as well its website. 1book140 remains in operation.

Halo Effect



The Atlantic runs three websites and publishes 10 print issues per year.



Of course, none of this expansion would have been possible without strong sales and marketing teams to finance it. The Atlantic's business operations have undergone a digital makeover of their own over the past few years. When former Wired publisher Jay Lauf joined The Atlantic as publisher in March 2008, he made what was then considered a radical move: He told his sales team that they no longer had to meet separate targets for print and digital ad sales, a practice Lauf says many publications had put in place to protect their print revenues.

That's not to say that digital advertising has been easy money. Digital has proved tough terrain for many traditional advertisers, who have been forced to compete against highly targeted search and display networks, such as Google's. Lauf says his team has focused on putting together premium advertising experiences that span print, digital, events and (increasingly) mobile. Over the summer for instance, The Atlantic worked with Mercedes-Benz to develop a series of video interviews with speakers and attendees at its annual Aspen Ideas Festival.

"Advertisers see the value of being able to surround their target audiences in different platforms," Lauf says.

One of the most interesting aspects of The Atlantic's digital success is the unexpected effect it has had on print. Although Smith acknowledges that tablets and ereaders are cannibalizing print newsstand sales, both magazine circulation and print ad revenues are up, "largely due to the brand impact that our digital strategy has had," he says. "The dramatic growth in digital audience has in turn driven demand for the magazine, because so many more millions are now aware of it."

Looking Ahead



James Russell Lowell was The Atlantic's first editor. Photo courtesy of Richard A. Bloom.



Although The Atlantic is enjoying its success, the magazine isn't about to rest on its laurels.

In addition to hiring more channel writers and pushing The Atlantic Wire into a 24/7 news cycle, the magazine is also planning to experiment with new paid models for its longform content. Smith says that its longer stories can sometimes cost upwards of six figures to produce, and although it could potentially be supported by digital advertising alone, he believes there's an additional monetization opportunity for a premium, leanback reading experience for that kind of content.

"I think you'll see us experimenting with metered models on the tablet and desktop for longer content," says Smith. "It's not a huge newsflash though; we might experiment with a meter for a couple of months and take it back down, and try something else. It's all in the spirit of constant experimentation."

Looking ahead, Smith also said the magazine is looking to international markets, particularly big growth markets in Asia, as expansion opportunities. Original web video, as well as reader-generated content, offer further room for growth.

I asked Smith where he thought The Atlantic would be in five years.

"I think absolutely we will still be in print," he said. "And I wouldn't be surprised if our print rate base stayed stable and our online audience doubled. And I don't see why, given all the opportunities in digital and mobile and video and events, we wouldn't be able to double the size of the business again."

Given what we've seen, that seems perfectly feasible to us.