McKay Coppins Joins The Atlantic as Staff Writer

The Atlantic has hired McKay Coppins as a staff writer, editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg announced today. Coppins will join The Atlantic’s Politics & Policy team, led by editor of TheAtlantic.com J.J. Gould, and politics editor Yoni Appelbaum. Coppins will also write about politics for the magazine.

The Atlantic’s distinctive political reporting has led to significant newsstand and audience gains. Since expanding Politics & Policy coverage this year, The Atlantic has tripled the size of its political reporting team—hires include staff writer Vann Newkirk and senior editor Adam Serwer—and grown audience to the Politics & Policy section of TheAtlantic.com by 200 percent. Among its competitive set, The Atlantic is also the only title to increase newsstand sales this year, having grown by 14%, driven in part by politics-focused cover stories.

“I’m thrilled that McKay is joining our already stellar politics team,” Goldberg said. “He is one of the brightest and most talented young politics writers in America, and Atlantic readers will quickly come to rely on his reporting and analysis.”

Coppins will join The Atlantic from BuzzFeed News, where he is a senior political writer and has been covering the 2016 election. He was previously a reporter at Newsweek, where he co-authored a cover story on the “Mormon Moment” and covered national politics.

Coppins is the author of the book, The Wilderness, about the battle over the future of the Republican Party, and a frequent contributor to MSNBC, CNN, and NPR. His work has also appeared in The Washington Post and The New York Times. In 2012, he was named one of Forbes’s “30 Under 30” and one of Politico’s ten “breakout reporters.”

TheAtlantic.com has grown dramatically in staff and audience over the past 12 months, bolstered by Politics & Policy and expanded coverage of science, tech, and health; culture; religion; and news. The Atlantic recently hired Jane Yong Kim as its Culture section editor, and Sarah Zhang as a staff writer covering science, tech, and health.