Laurene Powell Jobs's Organization to Take Majority Stake in The Atlantic (nytimes.com) 84
Emerson Collective, the organization founded by Laurene Powell Jobs, has agreed to acquire a majority stake in The Atlantic magazine, with full ownership possible in the coming years. From a report: David G. Bradley, chairman of Atlantic Media, will retain a minority stake and intends to continue running the magazine for the next three to five years. After that, Emerson Collective may purchase Mr. Bradley's remaining interest. "While I will stay at the helm some years, the most consequential decision of my career now is behind me: Who next will take stewardship of this 160-year-old national treasure?" Mr. Bradley, 64, wrote in a note to employees. "To me, the answer, in the form of Laurene, feels incomparably right." The leadership of The Atlantic, including Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief; Bob Cohn, the president; and Hayley Romer, the publisher, will remain unchanged and will continue to run the publication's daily operations (could be paywalled). The deal, which Mr. Bradley announced to the staff on Friday morning, also includes The Atlantic's digital properties, events business and consulting services. Mr. Bradley will continue to fully own the rest of Atlantic Media's properties, which include the National Journal Group and the digital media organization Quartz. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
Go Big or Go Home (Score:2)
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I thought publishing was dead.
Journalism is dead as a business. It is alive as a hobby for billionaires.
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Apparently Laurene has decided to skip buying a freaking island and is buying a freaking ocean instead.
Perhaps The Atlantic will freak less often now that she owns it.
The Atlantic is lousy now, but WAS once great. (Score:1)
Seriously, The Atlantic has really gone down the tubes in recent years.
I don't know why this is, but I do know it is true.
Many damned good writers who used to write for The Atlantic write for other publications now. William Langeweische is one who comes to mind. Maybe The Atlantic didn't pay well, or maybe the editors were bad.
I tend to doubt the magazine is going to get better being owned by the bored wife of a dead billionaire. The first mistake they need to
NOT make is publishing with the mindset of creat
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On the contrary, Mr. AC - over the past several months, the Atlantic has published a number of very cogent, insightful articles regarding the huge mess that embroiling the current Executive Branch of the US government.
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So says the Anonymous Coward.
Why don't all of you start magazines? (Score:1)
No, I'm quite serious.
We have name magazines like The Atlantic, which used to have a meaning, which for old people has a cachet, but you could reimagine it.
Not as a blog. Not as a vlog. Not as a zine. But as something ... more.
Why not an authentication subscription credential you wear on your sleeve of your mimetic jacket? Here at the UW we have all the tech to do that - low power background wireless, mimetic clothing, etc.
Do that. Add a daily blog NL component for those trapped by physical old style monito
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Re: Why don't all of you start magazines? (Score:1)
I agree. A nice red band on brown shirts will fit The Atlantic and it's audience quite well.
"Apple Products are Great!" raves the Atlantic (Score:2)
Expect a lot of pro-Apple articles in the future.
Damn (Score:2)
Is it too late to buy stakes in The Pacific? And how far from the coast do these stakes extend?
best wishes, Atlantic (Score:5, Interesting)
https://www.theatlantic.com/ [theatlantic.com] 3 trackers: 2 advertising, 1 analytics. Scripts from 12 sources on the home page. Content: primarily politics, some culture, science, tech, business, a poem, some in-depth analysis. No sports (yay!). It's not a terrible website.
The magazine was always a favorite of mine. In addition to the above there was creative writing, a bit of philosophy, and the cultural insights were among the best. I hope the future brings more.
Welcome to my hosts file (Score:4, Insightful)
Last I checked, blocking the trackers causes The Atlantic to put up a paywall, claiming that Firefox Tracking Protection is an ad blocker. I'm willing to look at ads, just not video ads and not ads tied to trackers. When I discovered that The Atlantic doesn't even know how to fall back to replacement ads that aren't based on a cross-site "interest-based" profile, I set the domain to 0.0.0.0 in my hosts file.
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I use the hosts file to keep burglars out of my house.
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Subscribe and the ads go away.
So just to be clear, if you sign up to be tracked in detail, then the tracking goes away? Thanks, but fuck them sideways in their fucking ears, and you too.
Atlantic doesn't accept WIRED sub nor vice versa (Score:2)
I already subscribe to Xfinity Internet through Comcast. But even if I did subscribe to The Atlantic, I'd see the same problem on WIRED and the INQUIRER, as they don't accept subscription credentials from The Atlantic. Why isn't there a service where I can subscribe to a large basket of sites? Back in 1999, we used to have one called Adult Check, because grown-ups can pay for nice things.
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You'll be missed.
Oh wait, no you won't.
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If a news and editorial site makes it part of its economic bargain that viewers must allow their behavior to be tracked across sites in exchange for access to the site's articles, then the news and editorial site deserves no readership.
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The Atlantic was founded by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Wadworth Longfellow, and Henry Wadworth Longellow among others. For much of the 20th century it was a kind of New England counterpart to the upstart (1925) New Yorker. Then in 1999 it was sold to a self-proclaimed neocon businessman and a few years later moved from its historic headquarters in Boston's North End to Washington DC., and hit a low point in 2013 when it published paid content from the Church of Scientology.
The "Emer
Billionaires buying established news organizations (Score:2)
Between Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post, and Ms. Jobs buying the Atlantic...
Bottom line: Very wealthy individuals appear to believe that the problem with print media isn't the reporting, but the fact that printing presses are not needed as much as datacenters.
Re:Billionaires buying established news organizati (Score:4, Insightful)
The other bottom line:
Very wealthy individuals know that the quickest way to control what people think of them and their pet projects is to control the reporting behavior of the press.
You are not the customer. You are the product.
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typical (Score:3, Insightful)
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Another US billionaire using their money to manipulate public opinion and push their political views. This one didn't even earn their billions, they married into them.
To be fair, that's earning the money, especially when compared to simply inheriting it.
Re: typical (Score:1)
And especially if you need to remain married to a weird sociopath like Mr. Jobs.
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Laurene Powell's jobs organization. Indeed, a monster proofread fail.
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This one didn't even earn their billions, they married into them.
Nope. She married Steve in 1991, before he was a billionaire.
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Except Steve was still a multi-millionaire at that point.
Granted, she didn't marry into billions, but Steve did have a LOT of millions to toss around. Most of it went into saving Pixar at the time.
And to be honest, to go from 1991 to 2010, that's a pretty good marriage. Most don't last as long, so you know she wasn't in it for just the money, especially with the complexities of Steve
Every failing media gets bailed out... (Score:3, Interesting)
NY Times got bailed out, Washington Post got bailed out, most of the big networks are kept around as loss leaders by major corps...
Whether anyone finds them valuable is irrelevant... they don't have to make money, they don't have to sell issues, they don't need subscribers...
They're mouth pieces for billionaires.
Which is nothing new really, these things were always owned or controlled by some old family or other of the city or town.
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They used to be a necessary evil: someone needed to put the infrastructure in place to help disseminate information. These days, however, the Internet means that we can drop the "necessary" part: we don't need publishers anymore to publish.
Collusion between the media, politicians, and certain corporations resulted in a lot of power and wealth fo
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I want to believe too... but then I see everyone hanging out on facebook and twitter... and I rather think we're going to have more people influenced by a smaller set of interests going forward rather than the decentralized dream.
I base this entirely on what I'm seeing people do... these sites censor people, they filter information, they shadow ban... and everyone stays there locked into their echo chambers.
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All true, but even censored and manipulated, Facebook and Twitter are a lot more diverse than a small number of billionaire publishers and their paid lackeys. Furthermore, people can write longer, uncensored blog posts and simply point to them from Facebook and Twitter.
Medium term, there are a lot of efforts building a truly
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After this last presidential election showed just how powerful the internet is you can bet there will be a strong push to manipulate internet sources in the next election. I am interested to see in 2020 how much Facebook and Twitter cooperate with the manipulation and whether it will be enough to push people to other platforms.
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They used to be a necessary evil: someone needed to put the infrastructure in place to help disseminate information. These days, however, the Internet means that we can drop the "necessary" part: we don't need publishers anymore to publish.
Collusion between the media, politicians, and certain corporations resulted in a lot of power and wealth for a select group of people. These people are now screaming bloody murder and are trying to impose all sorts of controls on speech and content in order to be able to hold on to their old privileges and power.
Fortunately, it's not going to work.
No. It's akin to the brick and mortar retailers bitching about the unfairness of the mail order retailers, warehousing goods instead of absorbing the cost of an actual storefront.
There's a new boulevard to the voters' hearts and minds... get on-board, or get left. Behind.
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You don't see it until you see it... we could probably go over the last 10 years of WaPo and you'd see something you didn't see before.
I've got a bunch of English friends that say the same thing you're saying about the BBC... "It used to be balanced but now its just so biased."...
These sources have been like this for a long long time. LA Times I think you were citing as balanced? They've been absurd for decades.
---- From Los Angeles.
LA Times is generally good if they stick to data but even then they are oft
Re: Why do I care? (Score:3)
Yeah, I ws thinking that Slashdot finally found an article that was of interest to absolutely no one.
So Silicon Valley buys deeper into media. (Score:1)
They want to buy (and maintain) influence through the purchase and control of major publications.
Uh? (Score:2)
Which part of this is "news for nerds"? That the widow of a guy that used to manage engineers is redecorating her portfolio?
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Well, maybe if the summary had even mentioned who the fuck she was it would be a smidge closer. Other than the Atlantic, I had never heard of any of the players in the summary. Great journalism!
My favourite mag (Score:2)
I really worried when Goldberg took over, as I don't share almost any opinions with him and don't much like his way of looking at things.
But I think The Atlantic is good for me because it does have a plurality of opinions in it. They keep publishing Mark Bowden, who never met a military expense he didn't think should be doubled (go, F22!) and is generally alarmist about Threats To America; there's moderate conservatives like PJ O'Rourke, David Brooks, and Geo. Will, before you even get into them giving spa