Subscription growth, which had skyrocketed in thanks to the Covid pandemic and the presidential election, had come back down to earth. For the first time, the number of subscribers had plateaued and started to slightly decline. But Thompson was optimistic, according to four employees who saw the presentation and spoke on the condition of anonymity. The company would lose just a few million dollars in , Thompson projected, and turn a small profit in Hitting that target has become more complicated since Trump left the White House and the pandemic let up.
That is a challenge being felt throughout the news industry. Cable news networks saw a surge in viewership while publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post enjoyed strong subscriber growth. Ta-Nehisi Coates, who left The Atlantic in , has an article included, while some other prominent voices associated with the magazine, like Conor Friedersdorf or Yascha Mounk, do not. Kevin D. Williamson, the right-wing troll who was controversially employed by The Atlantic for about two weeks in , is nowhere to be found.
To understand where that voice comes from, it helps to look at any job posting on the Atlantic Media website.
This is a publication that selects for a certain mode of gentility and then further polices how its writers are permitted to express themselves. The Atlantic believes our country is flawed and complex, born in slavery but always aspiring to a more inclusive definition of freedom.
It believes America has always held within it the capacity for rebirth and renewal; that in spite of our diversity and divisions, we can and must seek unity; that partisan strife can be overcome; that lessons from history, which seem to appear about 20 percent of the way through any given article, can inspire us to embrace our better angels; that old-fashioned concepts like honor and duty and fairness have a place in twenty-first-century America; and that our many pressing problems—inequality, a broken public health system, online radicalization, right-wing conspiracy theories, structural and environmental racism, climate change, all of it—can be dispassionately diagnosed and addressed.
First : In Literature, to leave no province unrepresented, so that while each number will contain articles of an abstract and permanent value, it will also be found that the healthy appetite of the mind for entertainment in its various forms of Narrative, Wit, and Humor, will not go uncared for. The publishers wish to say, also, that while native writers will receive the most solid encouragement, and will be mainly relied on to fill the pages of The Atlantic, they will not hesitate to draw from the foreign sources at their command, as occasion may require, relying rather on the competency of an author to treat a particular subject, than on any other claim whatever.
In this way they hope to make their Periodical welcome wherever the English tongue is spoken or read. Second : In the term Art they intend to include the whole domain of aesthetics, and hope gradually to make this critical department a true and fearless representative of Art, in all its various branches, without any regard to prejudice, whether personal or national, or to private considerations of what kind soever.
The publication of Darwin's Origin of Species was two years away, but loud rumblings in the halls of science had already warned the keepers of religious faith that serious challenges lay ahead. The largest wave of immigration in the nation's history was pouring through the cities of the eastern seaboard.
Though he would become President in four years, Abraham Lincoln in was no more widely known nationally than any former one-term Congressman is today. But the clouds of secession had begun to gather, and few believed that North and South, still joined by weak bonds of vexing compromise, would not soon be torn asunder.
Among educated people throughout the United States the issue of slavery was obviously one of great moment. But so, too, was another matter, and in the baldest terms it might be said to have involved an attempt to define and create a distinctly American voice: to project an American stance, to promote something that might be called the American Idea.
It was this concern that brought a handful of men together, at about three in the afternoon on a bright April day, at Boston's Parker House Hotel. At a moment in our history when New England was America's literary Olympus, the men gathered that afternoon could be said to occupy the summit. They included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and several other gentlemen with three names and impeccable Brahmin breeding—men from the sort of families, as Holmes once noted wryly, that had not been perceptibly affected by the consequences of Adam's fall.
By the time these gentlemen had supped their fill, plans for a new magazine were well in hand. As one of the participants wrote to a friend the next day, "The time occupied was longer by about four hours and thirty minutes than I am in the habit of consuming in that kind of occupation, but it was the richest time intellectually that I have ever had.
The first issue of The Atlantic Monthly appeared in November of , and the magazine, which billed itself as a "journal of literature, politics, science, and the arts," was an immediate success.
Lowell unswervingly trained his attention on American writers, providing a home both for the younger American talents, whom he cultivated, and for the established ones. The magazine thrived. Within two years the circulation of The Atlantic Monthly had risen above 30, The number of paid subscribers today is roughly ,; newsstand sales average more than 50, copies a month.
All told, we estimate, at least 1. We would like to think that the magazine our readers are getting today is, at least in its tone—in its stance toward the world—similar to the magazine that James Russell Lowell and his friends first brought forth. The Atlantic Monthly 's Declaration of Purpose, which was printed in its first issue, went like this: "In politics, The Atlantic Monthly will be the organ of no party or clique, but will honestly endeavor to be the exponent of what its conductors believe to be the American idea.
It will deal frankly with persons and with parties, endeavoring always to keep in view that moral element which transcends all persons and parties, and which alone makes the basis of a true and lasting prosperity. It will not rank itself with any sect of anties: but with that body of men which is in favor of Freedom, National Progress, and Honor, whether public or private. One thing that The Atlantic Monthly is not is an antiquarian enterprise, a museum piece.
In , we won the prestigious National Magazine Award for Reporting and were nominated for National Magazine Awards in the General Excellence category—the magazine industry's top honor—and in the fiction category.
0コメント