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Laurene Powell Jobs's Organization to Take Majority Stake in The Atlantic (nytimes.com)
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. From a report: David G. Bradley, chairman of Atlantic Media, will retain a minority stake and intends to continue running the magazine for the next three to five years. After that, Emerson Collective may purchase Mr. Bradley's remaining interest. "While I will stay at the helm some years, the most consequential decision of my career now is behind me: Who next will take stewardship of this 160-year-old national treasure?" Mr. Bradley, 64, wrote in a note to employees. "To me, the answer, in the form of Laurene, feels incomparably right." The leadership of The Atlantic, including Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief; Bob Cohn, the president; and Hayley Romer, the publisher, will remain unchanged and will continue to run the publication's daily operations (could be paywalled). The deal, which Mr. Bradley announced to the staff on Friday morning, also includes The Atlantic's digital properties, events business and consulting services. Mr. Bradley will continue to fully own the rest of Atlantic Media's properties, which include the National Journal Group and the digital media organization Quartz. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
Apparently Laurene has decided to skip buying a freaking island and is buying a freaking ocean instead.
Seriously, The Atlantic has really gone down the tubes in recent years.
I don't know why this is, but I do know it is true.
Many damned good writers who used to write for The Atlantic write for other publications now. William Langeweische is one who comes to mind. Maybe The Atlantic didn't pay well, or maybe the editors were bad.
I tend to doubt the magazine is going to get better being owned by the bored wife of a dead billionaire. The first mistake they need to
NOT make is publishing with the mindset of creating "clickbait". Many of the articles in The Atlantic these days have ( sadly ) gone in that direction, which puts you in contention with idiotic trash like Gawker or Huffington or Salon.
No, I'm quite serious.
We have name magazines like The Atlantic, which used to have a meaning, which for old people has a cachet, but you could reimagine it.
Not as a blog. Not as a vlog. Not as a zine. But as something ... more.
Why not an authentication subscription credential you wear on your sleeve of your mimetic jacket? Here at the UW we have all the tech to do that - low power background wireless, mimetic clothing, etc.
Do that. Add a daily blog NL component for those trapped by physical old style monitors and a vlog zine component for similar hardware TV cable peeps, but reinvent the paradigm, and come up with a name that doesn't insult 95 percent of the human race.
Come on, it would take very little to do that.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Expect a lot of pro-Apple articles in the future.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Is it too late to buy stakes in The Pacific? And how far from the coast do these stakes extend?
#DeleteFacebook
https://www.theatlantic.com/ 3 trackers: 2 advertising, 1 analytics. Scripts from 12 sources on the home page. Content: primarily politics, some culture, science, tech, business, a poem, some in-depth analysis. No sports (yay!). It's not a terrible website.
The magazine was always a favorite of mine. In addition to the above there was creative writing, a bit of philosophy, and the cultural insights were among the best. I hope the future brings more.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Between Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post, and Ms. Jobs buying the Atlantic...
Bottom line: Very wealthy individuals appear to believe that the problem with print media isn't the reporting, but the fact that printing presses are not needed as much as datacenters.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Last I checked, blocking the trackers causes The Atlantic to put up a paywall, claiming that Firefox Tracking Protection is an ad blocker. I'm willing to look at ads, just not video ads and not ads tied to trackers. When I discovered that The Atlantic doesn't even know how to fall back to replacement ads that aren't based on a cross-site "interest-based" profile, I set the domain to 0.0.0.0 in my hosts file.
The other bottom line:
Very wealthy individuals know that the quickest way to control what people think of them and their pet projects is to control the reporting behavior of the press.
You are not the customer. You are the product.
Another US billionaire using their money to manipulate public opinion and push their political views. This one didn't even earn their billions, they married into them.
NY Times got bailed out, Washington Post got bailed out, most of the big networks are kept around as loss leaders by major corps...
Whether anyone finds them valuable is irrelevant... they don't have to make money, they don't have to sell issues, they don't need subscribers...
They're mouth pieces for billionaires.
Which is nothing new really, these things were always owned or controlled by some old family or other of the city or town.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Yeah, I ws thinking that Slashdot finally found an article that was of interest to absolutely no one.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
...or "a fool and his/her money are soon parted." Stupid investments (like the Atlantic) are how many very wealthy individuals lose the "very" part.
They want to buy (and maintain) influence through the purchase and control of major publications.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Please explain how wealthy people should invest. Cite your personal experience.
The other bottom line: wealthy individuals like to invest their money so that they make more money. No politics involved.
Which part of this is "news for nerds"? That the widow of a guy that used to manage engineers is redecorating her portfolio?
See that "Preview" button?
I already subscribe to Xfinity Internet through Comcast. But even if I did subscribe to The Atlantic, I'd see the same problem on WIRED and the INQUIRER, as they don't accept subscription credentials from The Atlantic. Why isn't there a service where I can subscribe to a large basket of sites? Back in 1999, we used to have one called Adult Check, because grown-ups can pay for nice things.
I really worried when Goldberg took over, as I don't share almost any opinions with him and don't much like his way of looking at things.
But I think The Atlantic is good for me because it does have a plurality of opinions in it. They keep publishing Mark Bowden, who never met a military expense he didn't think should be doubled (go, F22!) and is generally alarmist about Threats To America; there's moderate conservatives like PJ O'Rourke, David Brooks, and Geo. Will, before you even get into them giving space to Charles Krauthammer. (And after about 25 years, there are *still* people mad about the "Dan Quayle Was Right" cover when he said that two-parent families are better families.)
They give space to conservative viewpoints, but rarely outright nutty ones. And it's good for me to read stuff I don't agree with.