I'm just going to put this here, for lack of a better spot and in case anyone is interested. At one point in the Trump thread, I wondered whether The Atlantic had changed hands. They were hardly talking about him (or politics and world news) any more. On a day when there was plenty of significant news in the US and abroad, most of the articles seemed rather like fluff.
Well, it seems I was right. A majority interest was bought by The Emerson Collective. Based on the social justice focus of this company, though, there's no reason to suspect they're going soft on Trump. Possibly trying to attract a different audience, though, or grow it in a different direction.
Just because it's useful to know where your news media is coming from:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/28/busi ... stake.html
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....
....By acquiring a majority stake in The Atlantic, Emerson Collective — which focuses on education, the environment, immigration, and social justice issues — expands its portfolio of media and entertainment investments. It is an investor in Axios, a media company started by the Politico co-founder Jim VandeHei and its former star reporter, Mike Allen, and in Pop-Up Magazine. Last year, it took a minority stake in Anonymous Content, the production and talent management company behind the movie “Spotlight.”
The organization also helps support several nonprofit journalism organizations, including the Marshall Project, Mother Jones and ProPublica....
A much longer article on the Emerson Collective, from the Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/sty ... edirect=on
Emerson Collective did not appear to conform to traditional models of philanthropy. Its worldview seemed more or less clear — center-left politics with a dash of techie libertarianism — but its grand plan was unstated while its methods of spurring social change implied that simply funding good works is no longer enough. The engine Powell Jobs had designed was equal parts think tank, foundation, venture capital fund, media baron, arts patron and activist hive. ...
She set up the collective as a limited liability company rather than a foundation, not unlike the three-year-old Chan Zuckerberg Initiative established by Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg. This gives flexibility to do more than just make grants to nonprofit groups. ...
Emerson invests in private companies, Powell Jobs said, not because the goal is to make money but because Silicon Valley has shown her that “amazing entrepreneurs who … are 100 percent aligned with our mission” can find solutions that might not occur to a nonprofit. Emerson is also able to back advocacy groups, launch its own activist campaigns and contribute to political organizations....
The LLC structure also means Emerson need not disclose details of its assets and spending. “The majority of her philanthropy, no one knows about,” Arrillaga-Andreessen said. ...
To make sure Emerson is thinking as audaciously as the entrepreneurs all around it, Powell Jobs will go on “tech tours” ... “She wants people to innovate in their sector — education reform, getting the Dream Act passed. So Emerson has become like an accelerator for causes around social change.”
I have no idea whether or not The Atlantic will continue to be a centrist voice. Emerson claims they will stay out of the magazine's affairs:
... When she met the magazine’s journalists after the deal was announced, she vowed to stay out of editorial decisions with words to the effect of: There’s a door between Emerson and the Atlantic, but it only swings from the Atlantic into Emerson; it doesn’t open in the other direction. “That went over really well,” Bradley told me. “That’s what our staff was talking about: ‘Will the Atlantic have a party line on … her issues?’ ”
Still, she is taking a deep interest in the ambition and position of the enterprise in an ever more digital media landscape. Lattman, the former Times editor who is in charge of Emerson’s media investments, now serves as vice chairman of the Atlantic. Powell Jobs told me his responsibilities are mostly on the business side. Earlier this year, the magazine decided to hire some 100 employees in the coming 12 to 18 months, a 30 percent increase, half in the newsroom, to augment coverage of Washington, Hollywood, technology and other subjects..
“She runs really deep,” Bradley said. “She will do a six-hour meeting and really get into the detail. And in those sessions, you hear not just social-justice kinds of ambitions, but, ‘Where are we taking this? What can we do with it?’ … There’s a fantastic competition setting in right now … to be the English-language journalism enterprise for the world. I think there will be more than one winner. … The Atlantic is really interested in doing that run, and she’s very interested in doing that run.” He continued, “She’s also interested in technologies that we’ve begun in, but we’re not as serious as she would have us be and as we will be. Podcasting would be a good example. Video. … And while we have real technology talent, you won’t be surprised that the Atlantic’s principal gift isn’t to operate on the frontiers of technology. And she said, no, it should be.”...
To me, all the new hires suggest that the claim of non-interference might not be entirely true. And "business side" could mean a multitude of things. I've definitely noticed a shift in content, especially recently - fewer detailed and well-rounded articles on important and/or difficult topics, a lot more entertainment and movie reviews, and everything generally getting shorter (and, subjectively, it looks to be leaning more left on a lot of topics).
One thing that bugged me is that the recent articles include one with no pretense at objectivity where a reporter asked Hillary Clinton her views on Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook and then basically validated them as correct, presumably because she agrees with them. My main issue with this is that it was presented as a straight news/ analysis piece, not an editorial, which The Atlantic marks as "Ideas." Admittedly, there can be a fine line sometimes between analysis and editorial but this one is clearly over that line.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... an/605485/
And I was a little bothered to see an article written by Elizabeth Warren that lays out her policy ideas, but nothing by any of the other Democratic presidential candidates:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... rs/605497/
Especially placed 3 articles down from the article "Bernie Can't Win"
I'm fine with hearing Warren's views, but I'd be much happier if the ran a section where they gave all of them the opportunity, instead of singling her out.
btw, I generally agree with Warren's goals and views here, but the article is pretty much just a political speech/ platform, and not really a discussion of the situation in the Middle East.("First, I would make the cornerstone of my approach to ending these wars the renewal of efforts to forge diplomatic solutions based on realistic objectives...." )
And this is certainly a political speech, not a Middle East analysis: "In Syria, we must pursue clear and achievable goals that will not require resources we never intended to commit.... Instead of playing games with troop deployments and missions, we should use our remaining leverage to negotiate a fragile balance among Syria, Turkey, Russia, and Iran; mitigate the humanitarian crisis; and keep ISIS fighters in prisons." All that is lovely - but how the hell are we going to pursue clear and achievable goals in that quagmire? I don't know, and she doesn't say. Or even hint that she realizes it will be difficult and maybe impossible.
If she'd written a general essay about the Middle East situation, or a knowledgeable analysis of Trump's blunders, and not a campaign speech/platform, I'd feel differently. Honestly, I could have written the same article and I have no special knowledge of the Middle East beyond what I read in the news.
At the very least, they should have labeled it what it is - her policy goals by a presidential candidate. It seems dishonest to have it be labeled just as an editorial by Elizabeth Warren, U.S. Senator from Massachusetts.
This, and the Hillary Clinton editorial not labeled as an opinion piece, struck me as disappointing and not something I would have expected from The Atlantic.
EDIT: Then again, they do still have occasionally articles like this one, which is a promising sign. I stumbled across it by looking up one of the new authors. IMO, it's a gem and worth reading. A few quotes below, to get the flavor of it. :
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... ns/605365/
The Enemies of Writing
A writer who’s afraid to tell people what they don’t want to hear has chosen the wrong trade.
...Why is a career like that of Christopher Hitchens not only unlikely but almost unimaginable? Put another way: Why is the current atmosphere inhospitable to it? What are the enemies of writing today?...
First, there’s belonging. ...writers are now expected to identify with a community and to write as its representatives. ... The group might be a political faction, an ethnicity or a sexuality, a literary clique. The answer makes reading a lot simpler. It tells us what to expect from the writer’s work, and even what to think of it. Groups save us a lot of trouble by doing our thinking for us.
... Belonging is numerically codified by social media, with its likes, retweets, friends, and followers. Writers learn to avoid expressing thoughts or associating with undesirables that might be controversial with the group and hurt their numbers. In the most successful cases, the cultivation of followers becomes an end in itself and takes the place of actual writing.
As for the notion of standing on your own, it’s no longer considered honorable or desirable. It makes you suspect, if not ridiculous. ....
In 2015, PEN America, an organization I belong to and admire, gave its first Freedom of Expression Courage Award to Charlie Hebdo, the satirical French weekly. Four months earlier, two jihadists had slaughtered most of the paper’s staff at its weekly meeting in Paris. The award caused a lot of controversy among American writers. More than 200 PEN members denounced it, including some of the country’s most illustrious writers, and half a dozen table hosts refused to attend the awards ceremony. ...
Two years later, PEN gave the same Freedom of Expression Courage Award to the Women’s March.. ... After Charlie Hebdo, it became an award for American political activism. PEN was honoring heroes on its side—public figures whom the majority of American writers wholeheartedly support. The award became less about freedom than about belonging. As Charlie Hebdo showed, free speech, which is the foundation of every writer’s work, can be tough going....
Among the enemies of writing, belonging is closely related to fear.... It’s the fear of moral judgment, public shaming, social ridicule, and ostracism. It’s the fear of landing on the wrong side of whatever group matters to you. An orthodoxy enforced by social pressure can be more powerful than official ideology, because popular outrage has more weight than the party line....
....The idea that publishers exist exactly to shatter a consensus, to provoke new thoughts, to make readers uncomfortable and even unhappy—this idea seemed to have gone dormant at the many houses where my friend’s manuscript was running into trouble. Fortunately, one editor remembered why he had gotten into publishing and summoned the courage to sign the book, which found its way to many readers. But the prevailing winds are blowing cold in the opposite direction....
If an editorial assistant points out that a line in a draft article will probably detonate an explosion on social media, what is her supervisor going to do—risk the blowup, or kill the sentence? Probably the latter. The notion of keeping the sentence because of the risk, to defy the risk, to push the boundaries of free expression just a few millimeters further out—that notion now seems quaint. So the mob has the final edit.
Last year I taught a journalism course at Yale. My students...always wanted to write from a position of moral certainty. This was where they felt strongest and safest. I assigned them to read writers who demonstrated the power of inner conflict and moral weakness... But I could see that they were skeptical, as if I were encouraging them deliberately to botch a job interview. They were attracted to subjects about which they’d already made up their minds.
My students have come of age during a decade when public discourse means taking a position and sticking with it. The most influential writers are those who create a dazzling moral clarity. ...
Certainty removes the strength of doubt, the struggle to reconcile incompatible ideals, the drama of working out an idea without knowing where it will lead, the pain of changing your mind....
I hope The Atlantic pays heed to this article, though I suspect it's more likely to follow what's profitable and safe. One of my favorite things about The Atlantic in the past was that they had well-reasoned, thoughtful articles from people I didn't always agree with, but gave me different perspectives.
Politico also notes some changes. (I've definitely noticed some departures by writers, too. Many of the names Politico mentions seem to be national security experts and/or have a political focus.)
https://www.politico.com/news/2019/11/2 ... tic-072210
Powell Jobs’s presence at The Atlantic has been felt by an influx of resources since she arrived, with the company adding more than 100 employees — of which 50 are in the newsroom — launching a paywall, and unveiling a new redesign. The magazine on Friday added Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, who joins other post-sale recruits like George Packer, Peter Nicholas, Jemele Hill, Prashant Rao, and Dante Ramos....
There has also been noticeable churn, with the departures of politics editor Vernon Loeb and writers like Julia Ioffe, Rosie Gray, Natasha Bertrand, Taylor Lorenz, and Elaina Plott — the latter announcing Friday she was joining The New York Times. ...
There have also been several business-side departures in recent months, such as senior VP of global communications Emily Lenzner, chief business and product officer Alex Hardiman, and Cohn, who is currently on a short-term Harvard fellowship. ...
Bradley wrote Wednesday that an executive search firm has begun a “thorough and ambitious” search for a new Atlantic leader, who may hold the title of president or CEO. ...
So far, Bradley said, they have seen about 40 advisors and candidates for the position, which includes “current media leaders,” “editorial leaders making ‘the jump’ to business leadership,” “digital and product leaders,” and “rising stars from other industries.”..
btw, it's also gone mostly behind a paywall, maybe at least partly because they went from being profitable, before Powell bought it, to losing money when they expanded so suddenly.