Washington, D.C. (October 11, 2016)—Jeffrey Goldberg is The Atlantic’s new editor in chief, The Atlantic President Bob Cohn announced today. As the media company’s fourteenth top editor since its founding nearly 160 years ago, Goldberg assumes the role as The Atlantic continues a surge of record growth in audience, revenue, and staff. In his new position, Goldberg will oversee editorial in print, digital, and video, while also providing guidance and counsel to the editorial teams at CityLab and the company’s events division, AtlanticLIVE. He replaces James Bennet, who left the company this spring for The New York Times; his appointment goes into effect immediately, and he will report to Cohn.
“Jeff's career as a reporter, writer, and commentator exemplifies Atlantic editorial values: he’s smart, creative, resourceful, and iconoclastic—and has a sense of humor to go with his core commitment to fairness and integrity,” said Cohn. “He takes over as editor in chief at a time when our digital and video teams are reaching more people and having more impact than ever before, and when the magazine cover is rightly seen by many as the most valuable real estate in American journalism.”
In a memo to The Atlantic staff this morning, Atlantic Media Chairman David Bradley wrote of Goldberg’s appointment: “In the world of modern media, The Atlantic needs to be a run-away success online, on social media, in video and in live events. Jeff’s assignment is to make The Atlantic an unequaled talent destination for all our editorial disciplines. It is talent, not format, that has drawn us to Jeff.”
Goldberg joined The Atlantic in 2007 as a national correspondent and has since authored 11 cover stories for the magazine and hundreds of features and reports. His most recent magazine cover story, “The Obama Doctrine” in April 2016, offers the definitive telling of President Barack Obama’s evolving foreign policy and its implications for America’s role in the world. His cover story from April 2015, “Is it Time for the Jews to Leave Europe,” was a National Magazine Award finalist. Goldberg has interviewed and profiled many world leaders for these and other pieces, among them Fidel Castro, Benjamin Netanyahu, David Cameron, and King Abdullah of Jordan. As a blogger in the nascent days of TheAtlantic.com, he and a small group of writers, among them The Atlantic’s national correspondents Ta-Nehisi Coates and James Fallows, helped shape the site’s voice and develop its audience.
As editor in chief, Goldberg will oversee editorial in the magazine, working closely with its editor Scott Stossel; in digital, working with editor of TheAtlantic.com J.J. Gould; and in video, working with Atlantic Studios general manager and executive producer Kasia Cieplak-mayr von Baldegg.
2016 marks the largest year of investment for The Atlantic, following record audience, revenue, and profit in 2015 and 2014. The Atlantic’s staff has grown by 50 percent in two years, with 50 journalists joining the editorial team in the past 12 months—bolstered by expanded coverage of Politics & Policy; science, tech, and health; religion; and news. Audience to TheAtlantic.com has grown nearly 30 percent year over year, and newsstand sales for the magazine are at their highest point in nearly a decade. Total revenues across businesses are projected to grow 20 percent in 2016, on top of 20 percent growth in both 2015 and 2014.
“I love The Atlantic, and I’m very excited to take on this new challenge,” Goldberg said. “The Atlantic’s core journalistic mission—to be the magazine of the American idea—has never been more urgent. I’ve worked at great magazines, but The Atlantic’s mission is singular; its staff is enormously talented; and its future is exceedingly bright.”
Goldberg is currently a Visiting Distinguished Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Magazine Award for Reporting, the Daniel Pearl Prize for Reporting, and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists Prize for best investigative reporting. He is a former Middle East Correspondent, and former Washington Correspondent of The New Yorker, and was also a writer for The New York Times Magazine and New York Magazine, where he covered organized crime.
He began his career as a police reporter for The Washington Post. He also served as New York bureau chief of the Forward. Goldberg is the author of Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror. A former fellow of the American Academy in Berlin, he also served as a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.