How The Atlantic went from losing $20 million a year to profitable (CEO Nicholas Thompson)

Nick Thompson 0:00 This was interesting because I had the most hate, uh, and the most anger internally, right? We ran a story. Like, I signed this deal, and then our journalism side, which is separate from the business side, runs a story called The Deal with the Devil. I never doubted that it was the right thing. Hundred percent confident. So the reason we did the deal is that the AI companies came, and they scraped all our data, clearly in violation of our terms of service, probably in violation of copyright law. The courts are gonna sort that out. And then they built competing products against us, right? So they did this, right? And we weren't savvy enough, enough to catch them and stop them in the beginning. So then the question is, all right, what should you, what should you do about that? So I basically said, "Look, we would like to be compensated, so we're either gonna sue and pursue this legally, or we're gonna make deals." And with OpenAI, we said, "Hey, here we are. Let's talk." And they said, "Great, let's make a deal. We will pay you for the right to license your content and the right to have RAG. We will include you in sort of planning sessions as we figure out the future of SearchGPT, and you'll become a, a partner as we rebui- as we build this new part of the internet." And to me, that's a much better deal than not doing that.

Jeff Berman 1:00 I'm Jeff Berman, your host. This week on the show, Nick Thompson. He's the author of a fantastic new memoir called The Running Ground. We'll get into his running life later in the conversation, but first I wanted to speak with Nick about his day job. He's the CEO of The Atlantic, and he's leading an extraordinary turnaround at the iconic magazine. [Instrumental music] This is Masters of Scale. Nick, welcome to Masters of Scale.

Nick Thompson 1:30 Thank you.

Jeff Berman 1:31 Uh, I've been looking forward to this conversation for

Jeff Berman 1:33 a while. You are now the CEO of The Atlantic. Um, why take on the challenge of turning around this iconic American institution?

Nick Thompson 1:42 So a couple things are important that somebody who just looks at my resume or just sort of knows me from my Twitter handle wouldn't know. One is that when I graduated college when I was young, I didn't intend to be a journalist. I didn't not intend to be a journalist. I just didn't know what I was gonna do. But then I eventually f- I found my footing, and I got some great jobs. And so I work at Wired, I work at The New Yorker, I go back to Wired to run it, and then the opportunity comes to be the CEO of The Atlantic, which is a big shift. And the way I thought about it was, like, my-- I'm, I'm a pretty good writer, I'm a pretty good editor, pretty good manager, but there's this concept of comparative advantage where what matters in life is not what you are best at, it's what you are best at relative to your peers. And I sort of thought that my comparative advantage was figuring out business models for serious journalism organizations, right? And if that's my professional comparative advantage, that's the thing that I am best at relative to my peers. I may not be-- I'm certainly not the best in the world at it, but compared to everybody else in journalism, I'm, like, in a higher tier. Certainly better-- Like, at The New Yorker, there are a ton of people who can write better than me, right? So many of them, right? Like... And how many of them are better at figuring out business models for serious journalism? Well, I don't know. Fewer. And so the opportunity came up. I was like, "Well, I should really test and see whether this works." So that's, uh, that's why I made the shift five years ago.

Jeff Berman 3:01 I met with David Bradley-

Nick Thompson 3:02 Uh-huh

Jeff Berman 3:02 ... about this job-

Nick Thompson 3:03 Oh, wow

Jeff Berman 3:03 ... when it was open. Um, I think I was maybe the seven hundred and twelfth person-

Nick Thompson 3:07 Yeah

Jeff Berman 3:07 ... he met with along the way. Um, and, uh, he made a much better choice, and I wasn't a-available for the role at the time.

Nick Thompson 3:15 Yeah.

Jeff Berman 3:15 But I, I, I walked away really struck by two things. Um, one, what an opportunity.

Nick Thompson 3:21 Yeah.

Jeff Berman 3:21 I mean, this is one of the most important institutions in American media, in American culture. Um, uh, and, and the chance to take it in, in decline and build it back up is off the charts. And at the same time, holy [beep] , th-this is a big hill to climb.

Nick Thompson 3:39 Yeah.

Jeff Berman 3:39 This is not easy. You've got a legacy institution in a, in a sector that's in decline and, and all of it. Um, w-when the opportunity presented itself, when you, when you were sitting there deciding, am I going to do this? Um, I'm sure you were excited about it for so many reasons, but how daunting was it?

Nick Thompson 3:58 You know, it's, it's funny to go back to that. So this was twenty twenty. I took the job, it was announced in December of twenty twenty, right? In the middle of COVID. And there were two really salient facts. One, I knew the economics of The Atlantic were terrible, right? And they'd been reported that they were losing twenty, thirty million dollars a year. They'd laid off twenty percent of their staff. They shut down the whole live team. They fired the whole video team, right? David Bradley had written this effusive memo. It was very complicated. You know, this is the time of George Floyd. It's the time of COVID. So I knew it was in deep financial trouble, right? I knew it was incredibly important. I grew up in Boston, where The Atlantic was founded, where it was based when I was a child. Like, this has-- it's a real cultural touchstone for me. Um, but the other salient fact was that the journalism was amazing, right? And I knew that 'cause I'd been competing with it, right? And I'd been running the newsroom at Wired while we were competing with The Atlantic on stories on COVID. And when I thought, you know, if the journalism wasn't amazing, not a fixable situation. But journalism's amazing. I know how to run a playbook where, you know, The New Yorker, we built a digital subscription model. We built a thriving website, advertising business, all kinds of ancillary business that, like, really worked. We did the same thing at Wired. Like, I know how to-- If the journalism's great, I kinda know how to work on building plausible economic models. So I thought, "I don't know. I bet you we can do this." So I said yes. Plus, David Bradley's so-

Jeff Berman 5:22 I mean-

Nick Thompson 5:23 ... charming.

Jeff Berman 5:23 [laughs] Uh, yeah, a, a remarkable human being-

Nick Thompson 5:27 Yeah

Jeff Berman 5:28 ... and, and very hard guy to say no to, I'm sure.

Jeff Berman 5:30 Every time you take a new job, it's a covered dish, right? You think you know what you're getting.

Nick Thompson 5:33 Totally.

Jeff Berman 5:33 You open up, and you just-- I didn't know there were raisins and almonds in this thing or what.

Nick Thompson 5:37 Right.

Jeff Berman 5:37 Right? So when, when you got there-

Nick Thompson 5:39 It's actually when you take a bite that you realize-

Jeff Berman 5:40 Well, that's where-

Nick Thompson 5:40 ... the raisins and almonds. [laughs]

Jeff Berman 5:42 Right. Right, right. And, and cumin on top of it.

Nick Thompson 5:44 Yeah. [laughs]

Jeff Berman 5:44 Um, when, when you got there, w-what did you see? What did you learn where you were either like, "Holy [beep] , I can't believe we have to deal with this too," or where you were like, "Oh my gosh, this opport-- I didn't realize how big this opportunity here was"?

Nick Thompson 5:59 Um, well, it's interesting because when I came in- I saw a couple opportunities that didn't matter, right? I was like, "Wow," right? Like, "They haven't digitized their archives," right? "That's crazy. Like, go back to 1857, like, the archives aren't readily accessible. Like, let's just do that. It'll cost $2 million to do it, and then we'll generate, like, tons of traffic, Google SEO, right? Like, we'll be able to run, like, an archival playbook like we did at The New Yorker where, you know... And we digitized the archives. It's a great project, so glad we did it. Does it generate millions of dollars? No, it does not," right? Um, second thing, I was like, "Well, you know, at Wired, we built this incredible affiliate business model," right? We review gadgets that people buy. We get an Amazon commission. I was like, "We'll do that through books at The Atlantic. We'll figure out. We build that." It generates, like, $7,000 a year, right? It doesn't matter. What did matter, right, was, "Okay, wait. We have this paywall, and we have this great journalism. Let's figure out the math, and then we'll just do hundreds of tests." I think we ran 230 tests last year on different variables involving essentially the paywall. And so we just start this kind of... This actually comes from covering the tech industry, right? Where you watch and, like, how does Am- you, you cover Amazon and, like, A, they have this brilliant idea, and part of the way they execute is they just, every variable gets tested 1,000 times, and if something is 1% better, they change it. And so we start this kind of culture data science, iterative testing, and turns out that, like, changing the math on the way the paywall works and the way the paid marketing works and the way the offers work, like, suddenly our subscription growth goes, you know, from da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, right?

Jeff Berman 7:32 You start to see the hockey stick.

Nick Thompson 7:33 You know, and we see a hockey stick, and that's what takes us from losing a lot of money to making money.

Jeff Berman 7:40 The Atlantic is easily in my top tier most valuable subscriptions.

Nick Thompson 7:44 Right.

Jeff Berman 7:44 I mean, I'm in that cohort where if I woke up tomorrow and you're like, "Yeah, we're doubling it," I'd be like, "Well, I, I'm in. Okay."

Nick Thompson 7:50 Great.

Jeff Berman 7:50 "Don't test me in that pool, please."

Nick Thompson 7:51 Great. Hold on. Uh, note to self, I'm writing this down.

Jeff Berman 7:54 [laughs] But w- was there, was there an inflection point on the subscription piece where you, you said, "Oh, this is, this is gonna work. We, we, we can really do this"?

Nick Thompson 8:02 When you're The Atlantic, you don't publish that many stories, but you publish a lot of hits, and you have people out on MSNBC and, uh, all over the radio talking about it. It turns out that actually you can have a very hard paywall. Now, there's a trade-off there, though. You have a hard paywall, A, it hurts your advertising business, and B, maybe it hurts your brand.

Jeff Berman 8:20 Mm-hmm.

Nick Thompson 8:20 And C, maybe it's not great for democracy, right? Well, 'cause you, you're in this business 'cause you want people to get your information, and so you suddenly have to square all those things, right? And we had this meeting bringing together all the stakeholders, and I was kinda like, "You know, this is what the numbers show we should do." And we didn't go to zero 'cause all these trade-offs, but we [laughs] went much tighter, and we built a very sophisticated paywall that... The goal when you have a paywall is if someone's not gonna subscribe, you want them to read the article.

Jeff Berman 8:47 Mm-hmm.

Nick Thompson 8:48 Right? And if someone is gonna subscribe, you want them to pay to read the article. And problem is you can't know. You can't, like, interview every person about their subscription propensity and whether they've memorized their credit card number or whatever all the factors are, and so you have to guess, and you guess based on what the story is, based on what the referral source is, based on all the information that you have about them. And if you can set your paywall rules so that you guess correctly more often and incorrectly less often, you're in really good shape. Maybe you set different rules for people who are coming in from Google search and people who are coming in from Drudge. What about if they're coming in from Twitter, if they're coming in from at The Atlantic? What if they're coming in from somebody else? And so you can kind of, like, make a bunch of rules based

Nick Thompson 9:23 on that.

Jeff Berman 9:23 In year two when you saw subscriptions actually drop-

Nick Thompson 9:27 Yeah

Jeff Berman 9:27 ... was there a moment where you had a crisis of conviction about this?

Nick Thompson 9:30 Yeah, totally.

Jeff Berman 9:30 Yeah.

Nick Thompson 9:30 I was terrified.

Jeff Berman 9:31 So what, what, what happened?

Nick Thompson 9:33 Um, I was just worried. I was like, "Well, maybe I'm not good at this," right? Like, you know, maybe, like, I came in with all this confidence. We could run The New Yorker playbook, the Wired playbook. But what I knew is, like, I knew the team I was building was amazing. The team was getting better and better, right? And, like, morale wasn't dropping. Like, it wasn't like people were starting to fight. When an organization goes up, it's kind of like everybody's happy, right? Like, you, you have to re-manage it, and you have to figure out, like, reporting lines and flows of information. When an organization's going down, you can have a great team and, like, everybody's mad, right? And we weren't, we didn't have that. And I also had said, it was, like, my first all-hands, I said to the staff, I said, "We wanna get to a million subscribers," really hard goal, "and we wanna get to profitability," really hard goal, right? "And, um, when we get there, everybody gets a 10,000 or 10% bonus." And, um, so I started in 2021, and 2022 was, like, ominous, and then 2023 it starts to pick up. I think it's the summer of 2023 where-

Jeff Berman 10:31 What, what happened that summer?

Nick Thompson 10:32 It was when we started making, kind of the test started working.

Jeff Berman 10:34 Mm-hmm.

Nick Thompson 10:34 And, like, maybe it just took enough time to gestate. Maybe it was some changes in personnel. But it's sort of I'd been there, when I was there a year and a half, that's when you could start to see when you look at kind of the leading indicators, oh, wait, actually, like, the numbers everybody else sees are bad, but the numbers I see are good. And then by the winter of 2024, it was like, "Oh, wow, now everybody can see the numbers are good," and then by the end of the year we were, like, profitable and had reached a million subscribers-

Jeff Berman 10:57 Mm-hmm

Nick Thompson 10:57 ... so everybody gets paid. Um, and everybody was incredibly excited about that. But there's, like, there's a period, so I guess it's about 18 months from when I start to when the indicators look good, and it was probably about a year, that sort of the year to 18-month period where I was like, "God, huh."

Jeff Berman 11:10 Yeah.

Nick Thompson 11:10 "Maybe I should have stayed a journalist." [laughs]

Jeff Berman 11:12 Yeah. Well, and, and, and i- incredible w- where you guys are now.

Nick Thompson 11:16 Yeah.

Jeff Berman 11:16 Your, the goal was a million subscribers. When you came in, you were at?

Nick Thompson 11:20 Uh, I c- maybe we were 800, but we were not growing, right?

Jeff Berman 11:22 Okay. Yeah, right, and you were losing $20 to $30 million.

Nick Thompson 11:25 Yeah.

Jeff Berman 11:25 And so to be where you are now-

Nick Thompson 11:27 And now we're at 1.46, right? And we're making, I can't say exactly how much we're making, but we're making good money. I mean, we take the money we make, and we hire new people, so we don't... The goal of The Atlantic is really interesting. You know, we're owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, who obviously doesn't need revenue from The Atlantic as her principal source of income. Um, but she doesn't like being taken advantage of, right? And she likes, you know, she likes the things she owns to make money and be sufficient and be serious and not to treat her like she's an ATM. And so the way we run it is, the way I think of it, not everybody in the organization agrees, is you have to be profitable, and you'll do everything to be profitable. And if you're not gonna be profitable, then you make hard choices and all that. If you are gonna be profitable and you're gonna make $2 million, well, then you can take 1.9 and put it back into the most valuable things in the organization, ideally to grow and have more influence and hire more great journalists. You're gonna make 4 million, maybe put 3.9 back in, and so that's the way we're running it.

Jeff Berman 12:21 Mm-hmm. Um,

Jeff Berman 12:24 one of the decisions you made, uh, after digitizing the archives is to do a big licensing deal with OpenAI.

Nick Thompson 12:30 Yeah.

Jeff Berman 12:30 Um, there are a lot of media companies that are doing these deals. There are some that are, are hesitant to do them. Why did you do that deal?

Nick Thompson 12:39 This was interesting 'cause I had the most hate, uh, and the most anger internally, right? We ran a story. Like, I signed this deal, and then our journalism side, which is separate from the business side, runs a story called The Deal With the Devil, right?

Jeff Berman 12:50 Mm-hmm.

Nick Thompson 12:50 And we run all these stories that are kind of attacking our deal, and there's a lot of commentary, and I do this all-hands, which is quite aggressive. I never doubted that it was the right thing, 100% confident, um, and, you know, remain so. So the reason we did the deal is that the AI companies came, and they scraped all our data, clearly in violation of our terms of service, probably in violation of copyright law. The courts are gonna sort that out. Certainly in violation of kind of every sort of ethical standard, and then they built competing products against us, right? So they did this, right? And we weren't savvy enough, enough to catch them and stop them in the beginning. So then the question is, all right, well, should you-- what should you do about that? The thing that's not useful is just kinda, like, stamp your feet and be frustrated. And unfortunately for many of my peers, the strategy has been stamp your feet and be frustrated. And so I basically said, "Look, we would like to be compensated, so we're either gonna sue and pursue this legally, or we're gonna make deals." And with OpenAI, we said, "Hey, here we are. Let's talk." And they said, "Great. Let's make a deal. We will pay you for the right to license your content and the right to have RAG. We will include you in sort of planning sessions as we figure out the future of SearchGPT, um, and you'll become a, a partner as we rebui- as we build this new part of the internet." And to me, that's a much better deal than not doing that. Now, I can see the arg- the New York Times argument here. Let's sue. Go get 'em, right? And we are, you know, party to law-- other, another lawsuit, and who knows? We've reserved all rights. Um, and so that's kinda the approach I've had, which is either we'll ... There has to be a fair exchange of value.

Jeff Berman 14:16 Right.

Nick Thompson 14:16 Right? And if there isn't a fair exchange of value, well, then we'll use whatever methods of pressure we can, whether it's, you know, lawsuits or whatever. And so that's how I have approached it.

Jeff Berman 14:26 So if you look at the last 20-ish years, basically since the rise of social media, um, uh, with YouTube in particular being useful here, there are sort of two directions that it seems like this has gone, right? Three. One is the NBA, where it's like we're, we're leaning into YouTube, we're gonna figure out how we build a global audience here, and we're gonna work with the platform to make this happen. Um, two is Viacom just sues YouTube. Like, "We're, we're not gonna play ball. We're gonna sue you."

Nick Thompson 14:51 Yeah.

Jeff Berman 14:51 The New York Times, OpenAI. Um, and then three is, uh, more of a Netflix, where the traditional media companies just became arms dealers to Netflix, licensing content to Netflix, where all of a sudden, eventually Netflix is, is displacing and replacing them and now buying them.

Nick Thompson 15:08 Yeah.

Jeff Berman 15:08 Um, when you look at h- how have you informed this decision about doing the OpenAI licensing deal with this data from the last two decades or so?

Nick Thompson 15:17 What we've seen in the relationship between the media companies and the tech industry and the tech platforms, and I view these guys as, like, the new tech platforms.

Jeff Berman 15:24 Mm-hmm.

Nick Thompson 15:24 Right? And they will probably have a similar role to what Facebook and Google had. You know, I view a couple things. One, none of these partners can be trusted, right? Not because they're bad people. They're good people. They're friends of mine, right? They-- But they're capitalists, and they're self-interested, and they would rather they make money than you make money, and if you can both make money, they're happy, right? But they don't actually really care that much about you. So you shouldn't rely on their goodwill, but you should rely on their economic incentives. So as a result of that, build as-- y- you gotta build direct relationships as much you can. We expanded our print magazine, right, in part to have direct relationships with people. We work really hard on our app to have direct relationships with people. We build our newsletter product, right? Those are all about direct relationships, so there's no algorithm in the middle. But with the algorithmic players, the key is to develop an ecosystem that is mutually beneficial. And in the old internet, we had a mutually beneficial ecosystem, right?

Jeff Berman 16:12 Mm-hmm.

Nick Thompson 16:12 Google scrapes the internet, scrapes us, but then it has links, right? There are all kinds of different ways where you can have a mutually beneficial relationship. With the AI companies, we don't have that yet, and them paying one-time licensing fees, that's not it. What has to happen is the AI companies, whether it's Gemini, whether it's ChatGPT, whether it's Perplexity, whether it's Claude, someone has to figure out a model where there's a real exchange of value, and it could be modeled on what Pro rata has done.

Jeff Berman 16:38 Mm-hmm.

Nick Thompson 16:38 So what Pro rata has done is they've built a search engine. You search for something. They identify, okay, the answer comes 6% from The Atlantic and 4% from The Guardian, so therefore we'll give 3% of the revenue to The Atlantic and 2% to The Guardian, right? There's, like, a direct payment relationship. That's a really good model. You can imagine a different model where Gemini says, "You know what? We're trying to make The Atlantic whole because they've given us all this data, and they've given us all this stuff that we're doing RAG on. We're gonna run our algorithms, and we're gonna identify who's a high-propensity subscriber, and if there is one, we're gonna put, like, a call-out to The Atlantic, or we're gonna put a link to The Atlantic subscription page." That's an amazing exchange of value, right? Perplexity could do that too. Claude could do that as well, right? So you can imagine all kinds of different mo- What about subscription integration, right? What if you're an Atlantic subscriber and you authenticate it with ChatGPT, and then when you search in ChatGPT, you either get The Atlantic to inform your answer or you don't. And what if we only do a deal with ChatGPT, or what if we only do a deal with Gemini, right? And then there's a way that we're making money and they're building a better product for their consumers. Now, what hasn't happened is any of those things.

Jeff Berman 17:40 Right.

Nick Thompson 17:41 Right? And what I hope happens in the next year is that one of those big companies says, "Oh, you know," right? Like, "We're gonna figure this out so that we can build a model for the future internet that works as well as the old model did."

Jeff Berman 17:53 How do you get them to see that it is, it is in their long-term interest to work with you rather than just cannibalize you?

Nick Thompson 17:59 Yeah. Okay, amazing question. So part of the problem, part of the reason we have less leverage than we did in the last round is that they all think that their ultimate end value is gonna be infinity, right?

Jeff Berman 18:08 Mm-hmm.

Nick Thompson 18:08 And there are a couple of ways you can do that. So one, and I wish we, the media industry had done this sooner, is block them from scraping you.

Jeff Berman 18:15 Mm-hmm.

Nick Thompson 18:16 Right?

Jeff Berman 18:16 Yeah.

Nick Thompson 18:16 And so initially, we were like, "Gosh, they're scraping us? Huh." And then we're like, "Okay, well, we'll put a robots.txt file up, and we'll say, 'Hey, please don't scrape.'" And that's like a, you know, no trespassing sign, right? You know what? You know how much they care? Zero, right?

Jeff Berman 18:28 Yeah.

Nick Thompson 18:28 So then it was like, okay, then Cloudflare comes in, and they're actually good at blocking bots. So now we have a nice dashboard, and we can say, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no," and so we block them. So that gives us a little bit of leverage. So now what are the other points of leverage? Well, you could move up the stack and have people somewhere else in the stack of information supply, right? You can imagine an ISP, right? What if Verizon said, "You know what? No more scraping these publishers," right? "And in fact, if you're an AI company and you're not properly compensating publishers, like, you know, like, that's not good, right? And we'll have to be part of that conversation." Well, then suddenly somebody with more leverage. It's not, Verizon's not gonna do that. But you can imagine that. That's one point of leverage. Second point of leverage would be legislation, right?

Jeff Berman 19:06 Mm-hmm.

Nick Thompson 19:06 It's not gonna happen in the United States, you know, but it might happen in Europe. It could happen in Australia, right? And then once there is legislation, then things change. Another point of leverage would be lawsuits, right? Anthropic just had to pay out billions of dollars to authors. What if we start winning, right? And, like, the case law has been a little mixed so far, but you can imagine, we start winning lawsuits, well, then that changes it. And then another lever is public pressure, right? And, like, what if... You know, my view is that if we, once one of these AI companies comes out and actually does the right thing for the publishing industry and the right thing for content creators and the right thing for Hollywood and the right thing for authors, once somebody does that, like, maybe they'll get the reputation as, like, the ethical AI shop. And then things will be much better, right? And that will actually be good for their brand. And you can imagine a discussion like, "Huh, wouldn't it be good to have the reputation as the ethical AI search engine as opposed to the unethical one?"

Jeff Berman 19:59 If you spend any time on LinkedIn, you've probably seen Nick Thompson's videos there. Even after moving into his new job at The Atlantic, he decided to keep publishing his popular daily series, which has evolved from the most interesting thing in tech to the most interesting thing in AI.

Nick Thompson 20:17 I, I think I stopped for, like, two weeks-

Jeff Berman 20:19 Mm

Nick Thompson 20:19 ... when I took the job. And then I remember the first one I posted, one of the first comments was like, "Dude, you're CEO of The Atlantic. Why are you still doing this?" And then I remember thinking, "Well, you know what? It's actually a really good learning mechanism." And so it's a way to, like, force myself. You become CEO, you can spend all your time, you know, doing things that are helpful to your job, but you're not learning about the world in a way. That's what's best about being a journalist. So it's like a learning and forcing mechanism. And then I actually realized it's good for our business.

Jeff Berman 20:45 Mm.

Nick Thompson 20:45 'Cause you know who's watching these videos? CMOs, right? And they're really important people to reach. And so you go into a meeting with a CMO, and you're like, "Hey, you know, I think you should advertise in The Atlantic." He goes, "Tell me more about it. By the way, I liked your videos," right? And it turns out to be, like, a really good marketing channel for The Atlantic. Now, I still do it as a journalist. It's, it has... I'm not talking about our advertisers. I'm not talking about our partners, and sometimes I'm upsetting them. I'm just saying what's on my mind.

Jeff Berman 21:07 Yeah.

Nick Thompson 21:07 And as soon as I stop doing that, then the things are worthless, right? As soon as it's canned, rehearsed, as soon as it goes through our comms channel, as soon as it goes through, like I'm testing with, then it's dead. The whole point is like, "This is Nick, unfiltered, what's on his mind."

Jeff Berman 21:20 It's going to be foreign for boomer CEOs. It may be a little uncomfortable for Gen X-

Nick Thompson 21:26 Yeah

Jeff Berman 21:27 ... CEOs, for leaders. Um, when you think about the next generation of leadership, are you advising CEOs and aspiring CEOs to be building their personal brand on these platforms as well?

Nick Thompson 21:40 I don't. I think it's very, it's quite mixed, right? And I couldn't do it. It would be the wrong choice if, A, I wasn't good at it, right? Like, and I, it's not that I'm, like, naturally particularly smart or whatever. It's just that I had all this time, I was on TV, right? You go on CBS for years, and you have two minutes to explain something, you get better at explaining stuff in two minutes, right? So I had all this training that makes it easier for me to do this, right? And I was an actor when I was in high school and college. And I was a street musician, too, right? Like, talk about a thing where you have, like, two minutes to impress someone. Like, street music is pretty good. You're always on, and then the subway comes, and, like, you have to stop. Um, and so it depends on the personality. And then two, there's a, there's an opportunity cost, right? And time is your most precious resource. And it has to really be worth it. And every 15-minute window is pretty valuable, right? So I, I don't... There are definitely some people where it's worthwhile, and there are some where it's not.

Jeff Berman 22:39 One last thread I want to pull on-

Nick Thompson 22:41 Yeah

Jeff Berman 22:41 ... in terms of leading The Atlantic right now. Um, you and I are sitting here having the con- this conversation the same week that Rene Nicole Good was killed in Minneapolis by-

Nick Thompson 22:51 Yeah

Jeff Berman 22:51 ... an ICE officer. We have an all-hands meeting today, our, our standard Friday meeting. I woke up this morning trying to find the words that I will share-

Nick Thompson 22:59 Yeah

Jeff Berman 22:59 ... with my team. How do you lead an organization of several hundred people who are deeply committed to The Atlantic's mission in a time of such turmoil?

Nick Thompson 23:13 Yeah. So that's a great and hard question. So I'll say a couple things. So one, the way The Atlantic is structured is that Goldberg runs the editorial team, I run the business team. We both report to the board. And what that means is that we have our own spheres of influence, church and state. Like, I don't know what they're gonna publish today. I have no idea. There's a couple stories that have gone online since we started talking. I don't know what they are or what they say. Um, and that's good. Um, it also means that on issues like this, I'm very careful. My view is that as the leader of a media organization, if I'm gonna make a public statement on an issue, there's, like, a pretty limited range. I should make public statements about AI and scraping, copyright, freedom of speech, right? Freedom of the press, right? But I shouldn't be making statements about ICE. You know, I shouldn't be making statements about what happened in Minneapolis. Like, that's not... If it's anybody's role in the organization, it's Jeff's, right?

Jeff Berman 24:05 Mm-hmm.

Nick Thompson 24:05 It's certainly not mine. And so but that doesn't really answer your question. That's just about, like, public statements and internally, right? And so we have to, we have to make sure- Maybe I'll answer it this way. So we have a, you know, a set of sort of founding principles at The Atlantic, right? You know, spirit of generosity, right? Treat people well, right? Treat people with respect. But at the same time, force of ideas, right? You respect ideas. You argue it out, right? And you-- If you have an idea and you don't feel like you can state it, well then we're doing something wrong. And sense of belonging, like this is a place they wanna work, this is a place where they belong, and this is a place where their ideas can be heard, whether they are utterly traumatized by ICE or whether they think that guy who, you know, shot Rene Goode was doing the right thing 'cause his life was under threat. You wanna make sure these people feel, you know, welcome at The Atlantic, and that's a, that's a challenge management, challenging management problem. Our founding statement says, "Of no party or clique," right? Like we are not supposed to like take stands, even as journalists, right? We are supposed to be the place where there's a writers' collective. We do stand for truth. We stand for honesty. We stand for reality. Like we care about democracy. The things we care about, the core values that we have, but our job is very much not to be perceived or to be on like a partisan side. So we have Adam Serwer writing this. Like we have David Frum. You know who don't agree all the time? Adam Serwer and David Frum, right? But we publish both of them, and people can read and do that. And then for me personally, I feel like, a little back to what I said a minute ago, there's a subset of issues where I should speak publicly, right? Evan Gershkovich gets arrested in Russia, I should talk about Evan Gershkovich, right?

Jeff Berman 25:33 Yeah.

Nick Thompson 25:33 That is core to our business and what we do and what The Atlantic stands for. And if there's like a law coming about copyright, I will happily talk about that, but I'm not gonna talk about a law about ICE. Uh, and so we have that as the rule and the expectation.

Jeff Berman 25:46 N- Nick, we're in a moment where you've got a lot of legacy media, uh, talent leaving to launch a Substack podcast, et cetera, build effectively independent creator-led media companies.

Nick Thompson 25:56 Yeah.

Jeff Berman 25:57 Um, you've got extraordinary talent at The Atlantic-

Nick Thompson 26:00 Yeah

Jeff Berman 26:00 ... many of whom could go do this on their own. Uh, h- how, how does that-- how are you, how are you thinking about that as you lead the organization and bring talent on and keep them?

Nick Thompson 26:09 Yeah, it's incredibly, it's an incredibly hard issue, right? And, you know, we've lost people, right? Derek Thompson worked at, like came up through The Atlantic and now is on Substack, right? Um, so we have a challenge, right? So we have to make it so that the next Derek looks at the options, right? And you can make a lot of money on Substack, right? And you can make more money there than you can at The Atlantic, right? Where we have bans on what people can be paid. So we have to like figure out what is the value that we can give somebody that makes it worth it to stay, right? So we can give you copy editing, we can give you fact-checking, we give you editing, we give you social promotion, we give you the SEO value of being on The Atlantic, we give you the reach of The Atlantic, we give you the network of The Atlantic, right? And so we have to optimize all of those things. We also have to like figure out how we can let you do some of it, right? And so maybe, maybe you have this itch and maybe you want to go and do some independent stuff, not because you think you can make more money, but because you just wanna like, you wanna have a YouTube show, right? So okay, well you know what? David Frum has a YouTube show, right? And like, um, you know, we gotta like give people those opportunities and make it so that they can feel as fulfilled as they would being independent on Substack. We have to make it-- Like my job, you know what I want? I want every Atlantic journalist to wake up in the morning and say, "You know what? I think we're in good hands 'cause Nick's running this organization, and Nick and his team are out there and they're looking out for us," right? And one of the ways we're gonna lose people is the minute that doesn't happen. If I do a good job, you know, then I have a, a better chance of keeping them. Jeff Goldberg's job is to make sure that they've got the best editors making their stories better, right? And that we-- And then Jeff and I collaborate in making sure that like we're like putting it out in the world so they get as many readers and have as much influence and they're on the right stages. What I want us to be able to do is I want us to be a combination of the Yankees and the Devil Rays, right? I want us to be able to go out and find stars, right? I mean, we just hired Sally Jenkins. Everybody knows Sally Jenkins. It's like-

Jeff Berman 27:57 I, I, I grew up reading The Washington Post and-

Nick Thompson 27:59 Right. Maybe she's the best sports reporter in America. She's certainly a writer. She's like, she's awesome.

Jeff Berman 28:03 Yeah.

Nick Thompson 28:03 Everybody knows Sally Jenkins is awesome. There's 100% chance that Sally Jenkins comes on board and will be awesome for us. Great, right? So you hire those people. But you also make some bets on some 25-year-olds who you hire as fact-checkers and maybe you assign freelance stories to, and like the hope would be you do both, right? You can build up the young people and you can hire the proper stars. But like Derek is an interesting case, 'cause Derek came up through The Atlantic, and The Atlantic helped make Derek. And so maybe like the really smart 25-year-old is like, "You know what? I can't make it on Substack now, but if I go to The Atlantic for 10 years, I can on Substack," and we get 10 years of great work, right? I can guarantee you that David Bradley is delighted he hired Derek Thompson as an editorial fellow.

Jeff Berman 28:41 Nick's new book is The Running Ground: A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports. I have a bit of a confession to make, which is I, uh, got a pre-release copy of the book-

Nick Thompson 28:54 Yep

Jeff Berman 28:54 ... uh, in anticipation of sitting with you. Um, and I, I-- it took me a while to pick it up because I have such an aversion to running.

Nick Thompson 29:02 [laughs]

Jeff Berman 29:03 I'm not a runner. I've never been a runner.

Nick Thompson 29:05 Right.

Jeff Berman 29:05 I'm like allergic to the idea of running.

Nick Thompson 29:06 You saw that photograph on the cover and you're like, "No."

Jeff Berman 29:08 Right, yeah. And it's The Running Ground, and, um, I, I was, uh, going to Portugal for Web Summit and-

Nick Thompson 29:15 Oh

Jeff Berman 29:15 ... I get on the plane and I start reading the book, and, um, it's the best memoir I read in 2025.

Nick Thompson 29:22 Oh, that's awesome to hear.

Jeff Berman 29:23 And it's not even close. And it strikes me that is it, it's at least three books in one.

Nick Thompson 29:29 Yeah.

Jeff Berman 29:30 Um, it's very much a book about your father.

Nick Thompson 29:32 Yep.

Jeff Berman 29:33 Um, it's a book about you and your career and, um, your journey to get to The Atlantic. Uh, and, um, and it's a book about running.

Nick Thompson 29:42 Yeah.

Jeff Berman 29:43 Tell us about your father and, and specifically, what did you learn about your father in the process of researching and writing the book?

Nick Thompson 29:50 Big question. My father, remarkable guy, grows up in tricky circumstances in Oklahoma, and then it's like the world's fastest rise up the American meritocracy, right? Andover scholarship, Stanford scholarship, Rhodes scholarship, Stanford, marries into Paul Nitze's family. My mother comes from this prominent DC family, and like Scott Thompson's on top of the world, right? And then, um, it doesn't work, right? Like everyone's, "This guy's gonna be president. He's gonna be Secretary of State. He's gonna be president of the university," and It's kinda, you know, it's life's hard, right? You can be a really promising kid and a really promising student, and you can have what it takes to succeed at Stanford and not what it takes to succeed in Washington. And, uh, he starts to drink too much, gets a little depressed, you know, it's not really working, and then he comes to this realization that he's gay, um, after I'm born. Then by the end of his life, he's running something kind of like a brothel in Bali. He has this, like, ridiculous sex addiction. He's bankrupt. So, you know, watching his rise and then the downward trajectory of his later years, during which he's also a loving father and an interesting guy, um, it was hard to live through and it was hard to process as a writer. And so your question is like what I learned while writing the book. And [sighs] I think my view of him matured while I was writing the book. We-- I think forgive's not quite the right word, but to be more appreciative of the love he gave while also being entirely aware of the chaos he caused. And, you know, I have this insight that it's been sort of been bubbling for a while, and bubbling since I had a long car- conversation with my older sister in a, a car, in a U-Haul, actually, I think, um, that my father was both the person I was most like, the person I in some ways had spent my adult life trying to please and to live up to the expectations he set, and the person I was most desperate not to become. [chuckles]

Jeff Berman 31:35 Mm.

Nick Thompson 31:35 And, you know, people, a lot of men, a lot of women, they run towards their father, they run away from their father, and I, like, was doing both. [chuckles]

Jeff Berman 31:42 Yeah.

Nick Thompson 31:43 One of the greatest set of documents that I got was the, his sort of his reviews as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. And I don't write about them a ton in the book. I tried and I kind of ended up cutting out most of the material. But they're these pretty vicious analyses by the dons, right? So when my dad was at Stanford, everybody loves him, right? I read his recommendation letters, and they're like, "This is the best kid we've had since Herbert Hoover, never seen a kid like this." Like, I've never seen recommendations like that. Goes to Oxford and it doesn't work, and the dons see something, right? And they write, you know, "This kid doesn't have the attention span to be a great academic," like, "He can't stay still," right? "You know what he should be? He should be a journalist."

Jeff Berman 32:23 Mm.

Nick Thompson 32:23 Right? And it's kind of interesting that in some ways I have the same trait. I like to do lots of things. I like to move around. I like new challenges. I like learning this. I like learning that. And I kinda think that my dad should've been a journalist-

Jeff Berman 32:38 Mm

Nick Thompson 32:38 ... like me, right? He's great to talk-- He's great talking to people. He's always interested. He's always curious. He's, like, unafraid of travel. He's unafraid of difficult situations. He's happy to sleep on the floor if there's something interesting he'll get the next day. Um, it was kind of interesting that I sort of wish, not that I had followed his footsteps, but that he had somehow figured it out-

Jeff Berman 32:55 Yeah

Nick Thompson 32:55 ... and done the same thing that I did.

Jeff Berman 32:56 Yeah. How does how your dad parented or didn't parent you affected how you're raising your kids?

Nick Thompson 33:03 Yeah, it's a, it's a-- that's a super interesting question because, um, my dad did a bunch of things that I don't do, right? Like, A, he was absent, right? I probably spent more time with my-- I spent more time playing sports with my kids yesterday than my dad did my whole childhood, right? So I am way more attentive and focused on them. I also don't push them as much as he pushed me. Like, he made it very clear to me that, you know, "Well, Nick, you're like, you should absolutely do the best at every single thing you do, and you have that capability. And if you don't do it, it's due to lack of effort," right? And that's an interesting lesson to get 'cause it's both good, it's good to get that support. You can also crash out if a parent believes that, right? And you can, you can have a hard time with that. It ended up being a good way to parent me for whatever reason. Um, you know, there is one thing that he did teach me that I 100% follow, which is, I mentioned that trip where he took me to Asia. It wasn't just that. He would like-- If I was with him and he was meeting anybody, if he had a meeting at lunch with a senator, he'd bring me, right? And I do that with my kids, right? Like, I, I don't know, my little guy got to interview Joe Biden one day when, like, I was interviewing him for CBS and the lights went out and couldn't do it, and he was like, "Hey, kid, come interview me," right? And, like, it was a cool experience for my child, right? And I bring them to everything I can. If they're free and I'm going somewhere, like, they're coming with me.

Jeff Berman 34:24 Love that.

Nick Thompson 34:24 Um, and I think it's-- they learn a ton.

Jeff Berman 34:26 Yeah. Yeah. There's so much. I mean, we always had the kids are at the table at the dinner party no matter what.

Nick Thompson 34:32 Yeah.

Jeff Berman 34:32 Right? You can be excused early, but there's a lot to exposing your kids to that adult world-

Nick Thompson 34:37 Yeah

Jeff Berman 34:37 ... and treating them like grown-ups in it.

Nick Thompson 34:39 Yeah.

Jeff Berman 34:39 It's powerful.

Jeff Berman 34:40 There's so many, um, obvious lessons from, um, the kind of running that you've done, the training that you've done that are applicable to the business world. What have you learned about yourself in that process, and how has that informed what you do as a organizational leader?

Nick Thompson 34:57 Well, there was a crazy thing I learned about myself that was really the impetus for writing this book. I had spent my 20s trying to break a three-hour marathon. I hadn't. I did when I was 29 years old, and then when I was 30, I ran a 2:43. And for people who aren't marathoners, like, that's quite a difference, right? Like, it doesn't sound like that big a difference, but it's a huge difference, and it happened in six months. Um, then right after I broke that 2:43, I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. I go through a really hard treatment. Not-- Um, um, you know, I don't wanna overstate it, but it's hard, and it's hard when you're 30 years old. Two years later, I come back and I run another marathon. You know, I run 2:43, right? Amazing. And then the next 12 years, you know what I run basically every marathon? 2:43, right?

Jeff Berman 35:38 Yeah.

Nick Thompson 35:38 And people make fun of me and they call me Mr. 2:43. Um, and when I was in that period, I was like, "Well, this is as fast as I can go." And right, like, you know, I ran, say I ran 2:42 at age 37 and 2:44 at age 35. I was like, "That's amazing," right? Then this crazy thing happens when I'm 43 years old and 44 years old, and it's not coincidentally right after my father dies. Suddenly, I run a 2:38. Whoa. That's very different, right? Now I'm going the other direction. Then I run 2:34. That's nuts. Then I run 2:29, right? And then I set the American record in the 50K. And so the observation that then led to the book was not, you know, why did, you know... It wasn't like Nick ran faster because he trained harder, right? That's not a very interesting book. What was interesting is I had this realization. It happened one day when I was running across the Brooklyn Bridge, and I sat down and I realized, wait, you know, the reason why I had been stuck at 2:43 was that I had, like, a mental block about going faster than I had been before I got sick. That was really interesting. And so that led me to believe that, or that led me to the realization that what makes you fast or makes you slow is often buried much deeper than you think, and it can be tied up in your expectations. It can be tied up in the way pain works. That leads to this interesting question, the second part of your question. So what does that, that thing you learned, how does it affect your business? And there's not quite a parallel. There are lessons, right? Like, one of the things about running, right, and one of the things I learned while training hard is you have to, like, to get better, you know what you have to do when you run to get better? You have to make yourself really hurt, right? Like, really. And you have to go at a pace that you don't think you can go at, right? And you can go and run a marathon and have a nice time every day. Right? And you can go run... I could, you know, if I wanna go run the Boston Marathon in three and a half hours, I can go out and I can run eight miles a day, couple 20-mile runs, and I'll go run that. If I wanna run it in two and a half hours or 2:35 or whatever my best possible thing I could do it in, it's three months from now, you know, there are about 30 days between now and then where I'm gonna have to, like, just withering pain, where at the end of it I'm, like, leaning over on my, you know, hands on my knees, like, heart rate is at its max, and I'm, like, very uncomfortable. And that's actually a good lesson for work, right? Sometimes you have to go at an uncomfortable pace, and sometimes you have to, like, just, like, charge into the thing you don't wanna do, and you have to, like, if you're trying to find the route around, it doesn't actually work, right? And that's, like, a lesson that you can learn in running pretty well. W- part of, part of the hypothesis of the book is that because running is so simple, it's just you. There are no teammates, right? There's no, like, judge. There's no subjective. It is all objective. You run the marathon, and from the time you cross the starting line to the finish line, there's an amount of time, and you either went faster, you went slow, and you either went faster, you went slower. Like, and it's on you. And if you went slower, it's 'cause of something you did, right? If you went faster, it's 'cause of something you did. And so you can learn these lessons really well because it's so direct. And so, you know, maybe the lesson I've learned from my training is more about pain and about pacing and about effort and about how you structure, like, an intense regime more than it's about the sort of the singular realization about the way pain works, the way memory works, uh, that triggered the book.

Jeff Berman 38:36 Pretty much anyone who's ever led a team of human beings has had at least one person who has been their own worst enemy.

Nick Thompson 38:44 Yeah.

Jeff Berman 38:45 Um, w- when, when you come to that realization that it's actually your mindset that is the unlock to start shaving those minutes-

Nick Thompson 38:52 Yeah

Jeff Berman 38:52 ... and then chopping those minutes-

Nick Thompson 38:54 Yeah

Jeff Berman 38:54 ... at already elite numbers, um, h- when you've got someone on your team where you see themselves holding themselves back-

Nick Thompson 39:01 Yeah

Jeff Berman 39:01 ... h- h- how do you talk to them about unlocking the potential and, and getting out of their own way?

Nick Thompson 39:08 So the way I've tried to do it, and I've, I've just gone through annual reviews, so it's part of this. I like to sort of ask a question of, like, what is the, what is the biggest thing that you think you could accomplish here at The Atlantic? What is the thing that you haven't done yet that you wanna do? What is the thing that, like, we're struggling to get to that you think we can do, right? And I try to, like, help them. I don't say, "Hey, I think you should do this." I remember I started working with these new coaches at the beginning of that training cycle, and they were like, "What is the fastest you think you could go?" And I was like, "Well, you know, I think if I could run a 2:43 again at age, you know, I wanna run my age, two hours plus my age in minutes." And they were like, "Okay." And they kind of looked at me, and they sort of, they had a call afterwards, like, "This guy can go much faster. We can't tell him that."

Jeff Berman 39:52 Mm.

Nick Thompson 39:52 "We have to kind of lead him to that," right? And so that's the way I think about my employees.

Jeff Berman 39:57 Um, my last confession for you.

Nick Thompson 40:00 [laughs]

Jeff Berman 40:02 This is a big one, Nick.

Nick Thompson 40:03 Okay, let's bring it.

Jeff Berman 40:04 Uh, I'm, I'm sitting in the restaurant at my hotel in Lisbon at Web Summit-

Nick Thompson 40:10 Okay

Jeff Berman 40:10 ... um, uh, reading your book.

Nick Thompson 40:13 Great.

Jeff Berman 40:13 Um, and there is a story that you tell about being at camp in New Hampshire.

Nick Thompson 40:19 Mm-hmm.

Jeff Berman 40:20 And you have your first kiss.

Nick Thompson 40:21 Yeah.

Jeff Berman 40:22 And you describe this beautiful, raven-haired, curly-haired young woman.

Nick Thompson 40:27 I think I describe her like a Botticelli, right?

Jeff Berman 40:28 You do.

Nick Thompson 40:29 Yeah.

Jeff Berman 40:29 You do. And her name is Kerry Politz.

Nick Thompson 40:31 Yeah.

Jeff Berman 40:32 Um, I went onto my family group chat-

Nick Thompson 40:36 Uh-huh

Jeff Berman 40:36 ... with my mom and my dad, my brother, my aunt, and my cousin, Kerry Politz, who grew up in New Hampshire.

Nick Thompson 40:45 Wait, is your cousin?

Jeff Berman 40:46 There can't be that many Kerry Politzes out there. And I send a photo of this page of your book-

Nick Thompson 40:52 Are you kidding me?

Jeff Berman 40:52 ... to the g- I'm not kidding you

Nick Thompson 40:53 [laughs]

Jeff Berman 40:53 ... to the group chat. [laughs] And I go, "Kerry, this sure sounds like you. It's New Hampshire."

Nick Thompson 40:59 Yeah.

Jeff Berman 41:00 Um, your first kiss was with my cousin-

Nick Thompson 41:03 What? [laughs]

Jeff Berman 41:03 ... Kerry Politz.

Nick Thompson 41:04 That is crazy.

Jeff Berman 41:06 It's crazy.

Nick Thompson 41:06 Yeah. I hope Kerry is listening to this. Hi, Kerry, you know.

Jeff Berman 41:10 Yeah.

Nick Thompson 41:10 Had a, we had a great three-week relationship back in the summer of-

Jeff Berman 41:14 [laughs]

Nick Thompson 41:14 ... 1990. You know?

Jeff Berman 41:17 Stunning, stunning small world moment.

Nick Thompson 41:19 That is, that's, that's awesome.

Jeff Berman 41:20 Yeah. Um, Nick, thank-

Nick Thompson 41:21 She's a very good tennis player, too

Jeff Berman 41:23 ... she, and she's a great person-

Nick Thompson 41:24 Yeah

Jeff Berman 41:24 ... and a great teacher on top. She's a wonderful cousin.

Nick Thompson 41:26 That's awesome.

Jeff Berman 41:27 Um, thank you for being on Masters of Scale, Nick.

Nick Thompson 41:28 Thank you, Jeff. It was so fun to talk with you.

Jeff Berman 41:30 It's been great to talk with you.

Nick Thompson 41:30 We covered a lot of really interesting material here.

Jeff Berman 41:32 Yeah. Thank you. [upbeat music] Thanks again to Nick Thompson for joining us. His brilliant new book is The Running Ground, and as I said to Nick in our conversation, it was my favorite memoir of last year. I really encourage you to pick it up and give it a read. We'll put a link in the show notes. I'm Jeff Berman. Thank you for listening.