The Atlantic is creating senior leadership roles for three of its journalists: Ross Andersen becomes a deputy editor of The Atlantic, after four years as the top editor for Science, Technology, and Health; Caitlin Frazier will oversee strategy for audience and engagement; and Yoni Appelbaum will lead a major expansion of the Ideas section that he helped launch last year. These moves were announced by editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg.
“Our journalism is stronger than ever in good measure because of the work of our corps of senior editors, led so expertly by Adrienne LaFrance,” Goldberg wrote in a memo to staff on Tuesday.
Ross Andersen will become a deputy editor for The Atlantic, with a focus on conceptualizing and editing some of The Atlantic’s most ambitious reporting. Together with print editor Don Peck and deputy editor Denise Wills, as well as LaFrance and managing editor Swati Sharma, he will help the print magazine produce rigorous coverage of the sciences, and will work across the newsroom to sharpen features on a range of subjects. Andersen will also continue to write; in the past few years, he reported from Siberia on a radical scheme to address climate change by bringing back woolly mammoths, and from India for an expansive look at the science of animal consciousness. Andersen has overseen The Atlantic’s Science, Technology, and Health sections since 2015, growing all three desks and helping to open The Atlantic’s San Francisco bureau in 2018. With Andersen’s shift to deputy, the Technology section will be led by editor Ellen Cushing, Science by Sarah Laskow, and Health by Paul Bisceglio.