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Bob Cohn

Bob Cohn - Bob Cohn is editorial director of Atlantic Digital. He has worked as executive editor at Wired and The Industry Standard and as a writer at Newsweek. More

Bob Cohn is editorial director of Atlantic Digital. He oversees editorial operations for TheAtlantic.com, The Atlantic Wire, and The Atlantic's mobile platforms.

Prior to joining TheAtlantic.com in January 2009, Cohn was for eight years the executive editor of Wired Magazine. He oversaw all editorial aspects of the magazine, helping to supervise a staff of 40 journalists and dozens of freelancers. Under his leadership, Wired was nominated seven times for a National Magazine Award for General Excellence and won the honor three times.

For nearly two years during the dot-com boom, Cohn was executive editor at The Industry Standard, a newsweekly covering the Internet economy. He directed a staff of writers and editors, planned and edited cover stories, and was in charge of editorial special projects, including the company's extensions into television, radio, international publishing, and new domestic magazines. During the late '90s, he worked four years as editor and, later, publisher of Stanford magazine, and as editorial director of the Stanford Alumni Association, overseeing the bimonthly magazine, the online department, electronic newsletters, and other communications programs.

Cohn began his journalism career at Newsweek, where he worked in the Washington bureau for 10 years. He served as the magazine's legal affairs correspondent, with responsibility for the Supreme Court, the Justice Department, and the FBI, and later was named the magazine's White House correspondent. He covered the presidency of Bill Clinton from 1993 to early 1996.

Cohn's work has been recognized with a variety of national awards for editing and writing. TheAtlantic.com won a Webby Award for Best Magazine in 2009 and in 2010 was nominated for a National Magazine Award for General Excellence in two categories: Best Magazine Web Site and Magazine of the Year (Print/Digital). During his tenure at Wired, the magazine was nominated for 11 National Magazine Awards and won six, including the three citations for General Excellence. At Newsweek, where he shared in more than a dozen awards, he was honored with the American Bar Association's prestigious Silver Gavel Award for coverage of the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation process. At Stanford magazine, a story he wrote on the university's affirmative action policies was named best article of the year in college magazines. The next year, Stanford was named the best university publication in the country by Folio magazine.

Cohn graduated from Stanford with high honors and later earned a master's degree in the Study of Law from Yale Law School as a Ford Foundation Fellow. A native of Chicago, he lives with his wife and two daughters outside Washington, D.C.
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The GOP's "Rebuilding Year"

By Bob Cohn

Jul 3 2009, 10:02 AM ET Comment

If Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty runs for president in 2012 -- and early signs suggest he is beginning to lay that groundwork -- he'll have two clear things to offer: He's an affable Republican who's shown he can win a key state, and he's a fiscal conservative who's ready to exploit any backlash to Barack Obama's big government. In an interview at the Aspen Ideas Festival Thursday, Pawlenty presented himself as a bulwark against federal spending. "The country cannot sustain the level of financial commitments that we have now, particularly in the entitlement programs. If we don't change it, we're going to have the government equivalent of the mortgage foreclosure crisis, and it's going to come relatively soon." (Video of interview to be posted on TheAtlantic.com early next week, along with video of other interviews from the Festival.)

Pawlenty, who was on John McCain's short list for vice president, is on every great mention list for 2012 GOP candidates. "I don't know what I'm going to do be doing three years from now," demurs Pawlenty, who announced last month he will not run for a third term next year. He says he wants to travel the country and speak out on issues, but beyond that, "I don't know what my future holds."

Pawlenty acknowledged that the GOP is struggling. The president is popular, the Democrats control the government, and the GOP is the victim of several self-inflicted wounds, namely Ensign and Sanford. "If the Republican party were a sports team and the coach and general manager were sitting here, he or she would say, 'It's a rebuilding year. We gotta get some new draft picks, we gotta make some trades, we gotta do things differently.' "

One question is whether Pawlenty, a married father of two who's a convert to evangelical Christianianty, would be able to claim that his is the party of family values. Pawlenty insists it can, but concedes that Sanford makes this positioning more complex, at least for now. "For Republicans and others, if you say you're about one thing and you do something else, people don't like that. It's a basic fact of life...We're going to have to earn back the support of the American voter, that's for sure."


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