Big Technology Podcast - Can The Media Fix Its Trust Problem? — With Nicholas Thompson

Episode Date: May 31, 2022

Nicholas Thompson is the CEO of The Atlantic and former editor-in-chief of Wired. He joins Big Technology Podcast for a nuanced conversation about why the media is losing the public's trust and whether it has a chance to regain it. Listen for a wide-ranging discussion on business models, politics, and the tech press's relationship with the industry's builders.

LinkedIn Presents. Hello and welcome to the big technology podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. And this is the fourth in our series of podcasts coming to you from Davos. And we are here in collaboration with Web3 Foundation and unfinished. Our guest today is someone I'm really excited to get. a chance to speak with. Nick Thompson is the CEO of the Atlantic. We're going to speak about trust in media, the economy at large, and then maybe how his fitness routine is going,

because I always see him running in Brooklyn. Nick, welcome to the show. Thanks, Alex. Yeah, I'm going to talk to you about trust in media, and maybe we'll talk a little bit about the Brooklyn bubble. But I really don't. I can't throw too many daggers because I see you running by while I'm eating donuts. So we're in the same media bubble out there. But I'm really glad to have a chance to speak with you. Yeah, it's great to talk with you. Thanks, you're inviting me on. So let's start with trust to me. I mean, it's really at an all-time low.

Every poll I look at shows how it's dropped even further and further. I didn't really know there was further that it could go down, but it keeps going. You've worked on the editorial side. Now you're on the business side of the Atlantic. What do you think is happening? Well, it's certainly going down. Remember Joe Biden's introductory joke at the White House correspondent's dinner that he was happy to be there because he could finally be in front of a group with a lower approval rating than he has.

why has trust in media declined well a lot of it is due to the filter bubbleization of America and people who don't trust media that's outside of their bubble some of it is due to the previous president we had who very much worked deliberately to drive down trust in media and a lot of it is due to mistakes that media has made some of it is due to social media is quite frequent to have often happen that you will have reporters or individuals from publications who are seen as proxies for the entire publication. Sometimes that brings love for the publication. Sometimes it brings down trust. So there's a whole constellation of factors, and it also ties into the decline of trust across sectors in America. But, you know, the one, here's the, those are all sort of

obvious reasons. The thing that I think is most interesting in there is most on my mind, the one sort of surprising thing I can add is I wonder whether it has a little bit to do with the subscription models. And my first job, or my first job where I set up the paywall is at the New Yorker and then it wired and now at the Atlantic. And initially when I set up that first paywall at the New Yorker, I had an assumption that shifting from a business that was fully supported or primarily supported by advertising to one primarily supported by subscriptions would have nothing but salutary effects on the journalism and on the relationship with readers. When you're supported by advertising, you have real incentives to push growth that can lead you in reason

to make decisions that aren't necessarily best for the readers. When you're incentivized by subscriptions, you're trying to build a relationship with your readers, right? You want them to pay you money. So shouldn't that be great? And all of the early data, the New Yorker suggested that subscriptions were incentivizing us to do all the things that people want. Over time, and I think during the Trump presidency, and if you look at many of the political

publications, it may be the case that having subscription business models incentivized publications to write more and more polarized stories and similar stories to feed into the same group of people that are buying subscriptions. If so, it's possible that the business model is leading to some of the decline in trust. I hope that's not true, but it is a potentially interesting hypothesis. Yeah, that's fascinating. And you can contrast that with advertising. The advertising business has largely been about a volume play. You try to get in front of as many people as possible. How do you do that? Oftentimes, it's through social media. And you write for outrage on places like Facebook and Twitter. So it seems like, I mean, news organizations have a choice whether to follow

these incentives or not. But the media business kind of sucks. It's a tough business to be in. And so these companies are stuck between a rock and a hard place, right? You can write for outrage and sell ads, or you can write for polarization and sell subscriptions. How do you handle that? Well, it's interesting about the outrage and ads. It's partly true, right? But they're different kinds of ads. If you're trying for, so now that I'm executive and not a journalist, I have a much more refined view of all this. If you're trying to, if you're selling programmatic ads, right, and you're selling ads through

on, you know, automated auctions. Yeah, definitely. More traffic, better. When you're selling ads to direct advertisers, you actually want particular kinds of content. In fact, nobody wants to put their brand next to outrage political content, right? So if you're trying to sell an ad to any of the Fortune 500 companies,

they're going to want to, they're going to say, we're not going to put it next to polarized and outrage content. So in some ways, selling direct sole ads doesn't push you towards polarized content. So does that mean you're going to drop your paywall? No, absolutely not. I think that the, I mean, the Atlantic strategy is very much to appeal to the broadest spectrum of people as possible. If you look at the range of opinions on the Atlantic website and you look at where our readership goes in, you look at the stories that best perform, it's very clear that we have a ton of people who come in and they, you know, they read David from, they read David French, right?

They're reading people who, they're not on the far right, but they're all Republicans, Arthur Brooks, right? One of our most read writers, he's an extremely well-known Republican. So the Atlantic publishes very heterodox opinions. We're building our business strategy. Even if we could get more subscriptions by publishing a narrow range of opinions, we wouldn't do that. Our objective, right, our founding motto of no party or click is to publish heterodox opinions across a broad political spectrum.

And ideally, that's be great for our business, too. So you've worked on the editorial side. You're in Wired. Now you're on the business side. One of the questions is, and I used to be on the business side, now I'm on the editorial side. So I've made the opposite. Which do you enjoy more?

I love the editorial side. But I'm actually kind of in the middle now because I'm running my own business while doing journalism. One of the things I always wondered about was some of the people who wanted to attack the press said that journalists are writing for clicks. Now, to make that argument more, sophisticated. I think what they were implying was that journalists were paying attention to the

business model and trying to do journalism that syncs with the business model. And for a while, I thought that was ridiculous. We never really spoke about the business model when I was in the newsroom at BuzzFeed or at age. However, what I'm hearing from you is actually the business model does sort of have an influence on editorial. Well, you know, if you talk about like what subscriptions incentivize, what advertising incentivizes. So, I mean, it does have to shape a little bit of the way that the editorial direction is. So, so unpack that a little bit. So, yeah, a couple of great points that you made there.

So it is true. I've always thought, you know, one of the critiques of Silicon Valley is that one of the critiques that Silicon Valley makes of the media is that the media is writing critical stories about Silicon Valley for clicks, right? And that, or they're writing critical stories of Silicon Valley because Silicon Valley advertising companies Facebook and Google compete with the media. And I was thought, and in fact, I still do think that that is kind of ridiculous. The reason journalists wrote critical stories about Facebook, Google, Silicon Valley is that they didn't like them, right?

They thought that the businesses were, you know, corrupted America, making bad decisions, right? All the critiques that were in the stories were like genuine, heartfelt critiques. Silicon Valley thought the motives were not pure. I think the motives were genuine and pure. I didn't believe in that. I do think that what I mean by saying that business models can influence, the kind of reporting is not that reporters will do anything because of the business model, right? In fact, the reporters generally don't know the business model. They don't really care about the

business model. Or sometimes don't care to the point of hurting their own careers. Perhaps. Or, you know, and they certainly, they're not impartly, they're not tracking it. They don't know how many subscriptions their stories generated. It's more the kind of reporters who are hired, the sections you expand into, the sort of the way you structure it all. But in the actual act of reporting, I don't think the journalists care at all about the business model. And in fact, you know, many of them don't track or follow it at all. But it is interesting because now I'm thinking back to my bus fee days and we did know very keenly how much traffic our stories were generating.

And was that good or was that bad? I think that was bad. Yeah. And I also speak to people. Well, it was bad, I think, combined with the fact that we were writing for audiences on social media. Yeah. And now I think I've done a 180 on this whole right for social media thing.

I don't think it's good for journalism because you see what performs and stuff that does play to identity and stuff that plays to outrage. And I don't think that was, you know, we did great journalism at BuzzFeed. They continue to do great journalism there. We want to pull it surprised last year. However, yeah, I think that overall, knowing those traffic numbers and knowing how you're getting that traffic, that could be pretty detrimental. It's an incredibly hard, and it's not my job now, right?

I'm the CEO. I'm not the editor-in-chief. I don't even, I don't read a single story before it appears. I don't know what we've assigned. I have zero influence whatsoever in all of the assignments. I don't have any influence on the writers we hire. I don't have any influence on anything there. So I can't really talk about how the writers and the editors use metrics at the Atlantic.

I can't say it wired, though. We tried to have a real balance where we didn't want people to feel like they had to write for clicks. And we certainly would, you'd never want someone. If they were choosing it, today I'm going to work on a story that's important, or today I'm going to work on a story that's going to generate a lot of clicks, which one do I choose? You'd never want them to choose the one that generates a lot of clicks. You'd want them to always choose the one that's important. So how do you set up an incentive system so that they can both understand how many clicks they're getting,

both so that they have some factors that are pushing them to write more and engage more of an audience, drive more subscriptions, how do you do that? So the model we chose it wired was to say, look, if you want access to the analytics, you can have access to the analytics. But we're not going to force you to access to analytics and we're not going to tell you. We'll send out an email at the end of the week that says which stories generated the most subscriptions, right? will, you know, and that will give like a little shout out. In fact, I think I sent a pair of like cool colored socks to whoever generated the most subscriptions that week. Like a slight push to have people thinking about how they're engaging readers and getting people to engage with

wired. So we tried to find like a middle ground where we made it clear that these things do matter to the business. They do matter to wired. You know, in general, the things that drive subscriptions were salutary. We want a little bit of a nudge, but we didn't want to get in that trap that so many other publications get into. We also didn't want to be in the area where, you know, more old school publications where there's a real aversion to the numbers. So that was when I last ran a newsroom in my last job, that's how we did it. I like that style. So you'd mentioned something else that I found interesting. Social media might have an impact on the fact that trust in the media is declining. And you said that in some cases it looks like some of the

more vocal reporters. I'm just going to paraphrase. On Twitter, are seen as a proxy for a publication. Oftentimes, that can be the most extreme reporters. Totally. Can you unpack that a bit? Sure. So it is often the case, actually not at any of the places that I've been at, where very vocal reporters who generate a lot of attention have different brands from

the publication, right? Where the publications brand is trying to be all the news that. it's fit to print, right? Take the New York Times. New York Times is very much trying to, it very much wants to be respected, plays it down the middle, tells you the facts. A lot of the reporters can be out there on Twitter, certainly in the past before they changed their Twitter policies. And on Twitter, first of all, you can be incentivized to say things that are a little bit extreme because that's the way the algorithm works and that's what gets you attention and that's what gets you engagement and that's what gets you followers. And secondly, things are taken out of context.

And so someone who wants to take hurt the New York Times can pull a tweet out of context and say this is the position of the whole New York Times. And it's like the worst statement of one person who works to the New York Times. And it's really not such a bad statement, but it's been taken out of context. So you can see. Sometimes they're bad. Sometimes they're bad. In general, I feel like the brand damage done to the institutions by the tweets of their reporters is more than deserved. I will say, though, the opposite is true, right?

The Atlantic's brand, right? We have some of the absolute best tweeters in the world. You look at Ed Young, you look at Derek Thompson, and you follow their tweet threads, and they're wonderful, and you could not have a better reflection of the Atlantic brand, right? Force of ideas, spirit of generosity, in following the Twitter threads of some of these writers. So there are wonderful brand enhancements that come from having your writers on Twitter. So it's a, it's, you know, push and pull. So Dean McKay, the editor-in-chief of the New York Times, did some.

and a note out to their reporters being like, cool with the Twitter. That's not going to happen at the Atlantic. Again, that wouldn't be my decision. That would be Jeff Goldberg's decision. I'm on the business side. But from where you sit, you don't really see the necessity. Yeah, I mean, our writers, well, you know, I don't know exactly Dean Bacay's motivations, but I think his, a couple of things.

One, I think he was rolling back kind of on the opposite directive, which was, hey, guys, go out there and engage, right? And a lot of the reporters were saying, I don't want to be out there, you know, people are attacking me, they're doxing me. Like, it's not fun to be on Twitter. So I think that he was partly responding both not to the potential effect on the Times brand, but also reporters who felt like they were being pushed to be on social media. And so at the Atlantic, where we haven't gone out and said, hey, go be on social media. We don't have to roll anything back. Interesting. I hadn't heard that second thought about how reporters felt the pressure there. What do you make about the argument that, that the news media is too woke. I mean, you look at the trust in the media, and it sort of tracks the approval rating of the progressive brand of democratic politics. So what do you think there?

I think that it's really important for, you know, all these media publications are based in large urban areas. They are, you know, the people who go into media have a narrower range of politics than readers. But I also think that people who go into media try very hard to, you know, tell the stories in the fairest and best ways they can. So there's a lot of different pressures at play.

Do I think that media is too woke? I mean, I think there are probably some publications where that's a real issue. I don't think, I mean, at the Atlantic, where I work now. Actually, I'll answer it from a Wired where I did oversee the editorial side. You know, Wired, the politics of the staff were very different from the politics of the readers, right? And the staff, I don't, we never asked everybody how they voted, but I would guess it was not 50% Trump, 50% Hillary Clinton, right, based on the Wired staff. But the readers have Wired include all of these old libertarians, right? Wired comes out of, you know, partly out of the counterculture.

One of our founders is a, was a hardcore, is a hardcore Trump support, right? Total make America great a gang. Who is that? Lewis Rossetto. You follow his Twitter feeds. He was quite critical of the response on COVID, quite supportive of Trump. And wired comes from this place of wanting to dismantle existing systems and build new systems. And that can lead you to a lot of different directions.

So my directive to the staff was, you know, we all have different politics. We all have different views in the world. Our objective is to serve our readers and to cover the tech industry and the fairest and best possible way we can. So one of the things that I would often talk about is if you're writing a story, And it has a political component. If it deals with Trump, right, it deals with Trump's FCC regulations. It deals with the Mueller report. Do your best to put yourself in the mind of someone who completely disagrees with all of your prior policies, right?

And if you have a friend like that, read your story aloud to them, right? Or run your assumptions by them, right? And just make sure that you're not letting your assumptions and the general assumptions of the politics of a, you know, reasonably liberal staff get in the way of presenting the facts in the clearest, fairest lights to our broad base of readers. How do you square that then with the fact that, you know, from my perspective, the discourse or the relationship between the tech press and the tech industry is, seems to be at an all-time low right now? Yeah.

Well, and this is the hardest part of my job at Wired where, one of the hardest parts of my job at Wired. Wired initially was a publication about optimism, right? And it basically viewed all of the tech companies as positive forces in the world because they're remaking society, right? And we were cheerleaders and champions. And we would write about fraud and, you know, we'd write about bad things that happen. But Wired was a champion. And by the time I became editor-in-chief, I worked there from 2005 to 2010, right?

And I went to the New Yorker for six years, and I came back to be the editor-in-chief in 2017. And by 2017, this is after the Trump election, and it's clear that the perception of tech has profoundly changed. and the sense that tech is an unadulterated force for good in the world no longer existed as you may be aware secondly these people who even in my first round at Wired were outsiders were now kings right they're the richest people in the world they're the most powerful people in the world and they need to be challenged and so I came in and I said look our job at Wired is to

maintain that sense of optimism to be excited about tech to look at the wonderful things that tech can do for the world but also to write about it you know clearly and fairly and to do the deepest investigative reports that we can about what tech is doing wrong. I wrote a lot about Facebook, wrote a lot about some of the troubles at Facebook. I always tried to, always tried to make sure it was as accurate as possible, as fair as possible. And over the time that I was the editor-chief of Wired, the reporting on Silicon Valley changed dramatically. And then there was a backlash from Silicon Valley, which started to dismiss reporters, you know, stopped being friendly

to reporters, started to attack reporters on Twitter, started to denounce the incentives of reporters. It became a really hostile relationship. And what I wanted for Wired was for Wired to be a place both where reporters critical of Silicon Valley felt like they could come and do their best work and do their best reporting and where the people who worked in Silicon Valley wanted to read it because they were still smart insights and they wanted to talk to us because they trusted us that we would tell their stories right. And that wasn't a balance that, you know, if you would get, you've got.

Mark Andreessen were sitting right here, he'd say that I, you know, did not succeed at that. Other people would say that, you know, we did succeed at that. But that was certainly the ambition. So I feel like this conversation needs to talk a little bit about this whole free speech debate going on right now. Because there is a view that reporters out there are hall monitors, you know, basically spending their time finding content that they don't like and asking it for it to be taken down. And it's really come into focus with the Elon Musk situation with Twitter where Elon says that he doesn't want content moderation anymore. And there's a lot of negative stories about Musk's potential to take over Twitter. Where do you stand on that?

And do you think that is the media's role to play to look at content practices inside these social media companies and sort of do the work for? I mean, there's this famous tweet type of tweet that went around back in the day, maybe around the 2016 election, where like reporters would be like, I'm doing Facebook's work for free. Look, I'm finding all these stuff that they refuse to take down. And that didn't go challenged, and now it is starting to go challenged. Well, I think that, I actually don't think that that's a, I think that since 2016, the tech companies have massively invested in their content moderation, right? The amount of content, the amount of compute resources and the amount of humans, right?

There are probably more people at Facebook looking for offensive content than there are journalists in America. I mean, I don't know exact statistics, but it's like they're, that's not quite true, but they're, what, 30,000 people at Facebook who do content moderation? They almost, yeah, probably almost trumpet, yeah. Right? So, okay, let's put it this way.

There are 30 times as many people doing content moderation at Facebook as there are reporters at the New York Times, right? Newsroom is about 1,000 at the times, 30,000 people, something like that. So Facebook has a lot of people doing that. Is it the role of journalists to find that kind of content? A, it's really the role of social media companies.

B, a lot of times when you do find that content, all you end up doing is drawing much more attention to it. But on the other hand, sometimes there's a really interesting story that explains a flaw in a social media company's algorithm or that shows a weakness or that shows a vector of vulnerability. And if a reporter finds it, that's a great story. And they should bring it to the public and push it out there. So it's a little bit of a mixed response, but I do think there are very worthy examples of reporters finding content that should have been taken down. I don't think that it's – if I were an assigning editor at a tech publication right now, I would not say, hey, you know, go look for the worst tweets that have not been taken down and make that your beat.

But in some situations, there's interesting stuff. Do you think if Elon Musk does close his deal with Twitter, that it's going to make Facebook look responsible by comparison? Or does it maybe make Facebook move more towards the less moderation? It's so interesting because Zuckerberg has always been out there talking about how he stands for speech and stuff like that. But they do have aggressive content moderation. Trump's not on the platform right now. however compared to the brand that that musk wants it's very different yeah i would have

i think i think that right it's true if must does end up closing this transaction which is a big if obviously um it could open up space for facebook to be a little looser on its content moderation um absolutely it could also create a brand halo for facebook if twitter becomes a place where you know the amount of toxic material becomes overwhelming to a greater number of people absolutely So that's a great, that's a great question. My guess is that in the short run, it provides maybe moves some more people over to Facebook who are on Twitter. If it's going to put a whole bunch of people on Twitter who weren't on Twitter, because they don't trust the content moderation of Twitter. Who knows exactly how it will play out?

But my guess is that there's a slight benefit to Facebook and that in the long run it probably does give Facebook a little more freedom to do less invasive moderation. Yeah, I asked Nick Clegg about that a couple days ago and he seemed pretty happy about the fact that Elon was making this move. Well, I think he's probably happy about it because. Because his percent, I mean, right now, it's not, it's not great for Twitter, right? The Twitter stock's not doing well. Twitter employees aren't particularly happy, right? It's not, you know, Twitter is a competitor to Facebook, certainly to Facebook's newsfeed. Now, if Elon does acquire it and does come in and fix it, and you should not underestimate that guy.

Yeah. And Twitter becomes this, you know, he somehow, Occam's Razor, somehow, like the same way he figured out how to make SpaceX work, same way I figured out how to make Tesla work when everybody said it couldn't work, somehow figures out, like the exact perfect. solution to content moderation, you know, everybody at Facebook says it's too hard, it's too complicated. And let's say he does figure it out. I don't know if Nick Clegg will be so happy about it then. You know, it's a great insight because we had Alex Redder on the show a couple weeks ago who was the former CTO of Twitter. And he said the one way Elon could expand the appeal of Twitter from where it is now, which is very niche, 217 million daily active

users compared to the three and a half billion people that use Facebook, although I think that's monthly. But he said one way that they could actually expand and get, you know, potentially get to that one billion users is to go into lifestyle content as opposed to where they are now, which is a very intentional move towards news and politics. They get into lifestyle. That means they're coming for the Facebook news feed. And they're coming for Instagram. I mean, I don't, I suspect that's not what Elon wants to do, right? But, you know, maybe he's going to end up hiring a great CPO or a CEO who sees some, you know, market path for them and off they go. I mean, the thing about Twitter that is so appealing to Elon is because they focused on politics and

technology, they massively overindex in influence versus their market cap, right? It's where everybody who sets the news agenda in the United States gets their news in the morning. So that's why he's, that I assume is one reason he's highly interested in it. I have a couple more questions about trust in media. Then we go to the break and then move to business models and fitness. So I actually read this really interesting story in the New York Times about Lara Logan, the former 60 Minutes correspondent who's taken a pretty hard right turn. There was a really interesting quote in there from Peter Klein, who is a former CBS producer. And he said, there's a system in place in newsrooms that offers checks and balances. Most of us need that

system. But she really needed that system. We knew that from the beginning. Now she's just unfiltered. I kind of found that quote absurd, that he's basically saying that newsrooms moderate reporters. And I do view, I do think there might be an issue that without being, being able to be, to go to the extreme sometimes, you know, reporters can get in line with the establishment and end up moderating. And when there's actually something bad, say, maybe it's not so bad. Or there's actually something impacting the American people or people worldwide in a way that's pretty detrimental, you know, not throw those punches because they're moderated by the tendency of newsrooms to be conservative. What do you make of that? I think that I, I, there's one way that

I think newsrooms should moderate in one way I think they should not. So I think that a really good editor should be able to work with a writer. Didn't read the Lord of Stoggin, but work with any writer and bring out the best in them. And maybe that means tempering their emotions, right? Because maybe the emotions and the politics take them away from the best kind of story. And sometimes it can mean accentuating them, like trying to find the story that makes the most passionate.

And I, as my time as an editor at The New Yorker and then at Wired, I would certainly, there's certainly some writers where I would look at them And I would say, okay, wait, now the five ideas they've just given me. I think the most appropriate one is the most modern one. And for some, it's the most extreme one. And others, it would be, you know what, let's take that one at the end of the spectrums to make it even more extreme. Because I knew that they were at their best when impassioned or the issue demanded, right, that kind of intensity. However, the part, the thing that the newsroom should always do is it should always make your story more accurate.

Right. You should, the editing process, the fact checking process, you should be able to remove errors. false assertions, a newsroom should absolutely be able to find that too. So to the extent that taking a story and bringing it to the truth and making sure that multiple opinions are heard and making sure that someone who's being criticized has a voice in the story, that is absolutely the role of the newsroom. But I don't think that you want to, you know, heat up all the cold water and cool all the hot water.

So along that lines, last fall, under your leadership, the Atlantic introduced a bunch of newsletters from individual journalists. I don't want to talk my book the whole time, but there has been this movement towards individuals, towards newsletters. I'm curious how that experiment is going for you, whether you plan to expand it, keep it the same size, and whether you think having this relationship built with readers and individual writers versus with readers and a publication might be a way to build more trust or what you make of the entire movement in general. Yeah, it's a big topic. It's a great issue. So in general, I mean, first off, the experiment has been a huge success. I love it. We're going to keep doing it. The idea behind it

was clearly there's this shift in power from brands to the nodes, right? You see this in every industry. You certainly see it in media, right? Where the brands are less trusted, less known. The individuals are more trusted, more known. It's because of, it's because of it reflects expanded by social media, right? And it led to the newsletter revolution. And so as CEO of the Atlantic, I was watching this. And you're watching our reporters get offers from newsletter companies. You're watching peer publications, thinking about newsletter programs. And so we said, well, okay, you know, they're great advantages to being part of the Atlantic. There's reputation and there's editing, there's resources. You know, this is a magazine founded in 1857, you know, abolitionist magazine. Like, it is an amazing

place to work. But they're also a huge advantage to being out on your own. Can we create a program that gets the best of both worlds. That incentivizes the writers, lets them have their own voice, lets them have a direct relationship with readers, but also lets them be part of the Atlantic. Can we build a business model that works for them and works for us?

And so we launched this program, subscriber-only newsletters, and we have nine writers, they're all fabulous, and they have direct relationship with their readers, but they are edited. They are incentivized to bring in people, and you can only read their newsletters

if you're a subscriber to the Atlantic. So the business case is that we all win, right? Charlie Worsell, who's almost certainly been, talking to you and about a million things for many years. Former colleague of mine. Yeah, of course. Former colleague of yours too.

You know, Charlie writes for the Atlantic. If you want to read his newsletter, which is absolutely fabulous, you've got to subscribe to the Atlantic. And so Charlie has incentives to get people to subscribe. And once they subscribe, they can read all of our stuff. They can read the other eight newsletters. We have an incentive to promote Charlie, which is why I'm promoting him right now. Subscribe to this newsletter, please.

And in theory, it should work for everybody. So far, you know, we're what, six months in? It's been great. The numbers are really good. the readership numbers are good. I think the newsletter writers are happy. Will we expand it? That's mainly an editorial decision, but economically it, you can certainly make the case for expansion. Okay. What does success look like? I guess, is it readership, money? Yeah, it's a couple of things. It's, um, it is readership. It is money, right? And those two things are

connected, but it's also, are the newsletters good, right? Do they reflect the Atlantic, right? If you had a newsletter that was bringing in lots of subscribers, but didn't feel like it was part of the Atlantic's. It wasn't written to Atlantic standards or it was, I don't know, filled with falsities, right? There are a lot of things? But, you know, one of the big questions is, are the stories good? And from an editorial perspective, when you read them, do you think they're good and do they feel like they're part of the Atlantic? And by that metric, yeah, they absolutely are succeeding.

They get edited. They do get edited. Not the same way that, you know, they're different kinds of editing for different kinds of stories. There's a whole spectrum from a print story to a long web feature to a short web feature to a newsletter. You know, when I was at The New Yorker, we used to do, you would have to do edit tests, different kinds of edit tests, right? Where sometimes we would say, okay, here, you know, here's a 3,000 word piece. You can have, you know, the weekend edit it, right? When I applied to be a senior editor in New Yorker, I had to edit something like 18,000 words of copy, right?

When I was the web editor at The New Yorker, we would sometimes say, okay, you have 10 minutes. to edit a story, right? And we'd give somebody a draft and say, okay, 10 minutes to give me the red line back, right? Because that's sometimes I have to work, right? You are editing the story, but because it's a breaking news situation,

you really only get 10 minutes or five minutes to edit it. So you're looking for errors, you're looking for all the things you look for in a very short period of time. So different kinds of stories get different kinds of editing. And newsletters are, again, I'm not on the newsroom. I don't exactly know how they're edited.

That's not my job. But different stories in journalism get edited in different ways. Okay. Nick Thompson is with us. He's the CEO of the Atlantic. We're coming to you here. from Davos. We'll be back on the other side of this break to talk about the state of the economy

and Nick's running routine. Hey, everyone. Let me tell you about The Hustle Daily Show, a podcast filled with business, tech news, and original stories to keep you in the loop on what's trending. More than two million professionals read The Hustle's daily email for its irreverent and informative takes on business and tech news. Now, they have a daily podcast called The Hustle Daily show, where their team of writers break down the biggest business headlines in 15 minutes or less and explain why you should care about them. So, search for the Hustled Daily Show and your favorite podcast app like the one you're using right now.

And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Nick Thompson, CEO of the Atlantic, former editor-in-chief of our. Do you prefer Nick or Nicholas? Nick. Nick. Okay, okay. Usually when I'm being introduced, it's Nicholas, but it's Nick. Okay, okay, sounds good. It's nice actually being here in person. I've been doing the podcast for two years, and it's been entirely, through Zencastor. Uh-huh. And it's really different and nice to actually be in a studio and sitting next to someone. So that's cool.

All right. Let's talk about the business, the state of the business world right now. Yeah. Put on your CEO hat. We've talked about editorial. Oh, yes. Now we can talk about business stuff. I'll sit up a little straighter here.

That's right. In my media role. It's all about synergies now. Button, button my suit. Put on my tie. We're in the middle of a bit of a crisis. We have inflation, that's sky high. We have the Fed raising rates and asset prices tanking.

Every time I read the year-to-date price of a stock or a cryptocurrency, it seems like it's down at least 15, 20%. I mean, then you get into the Shopify area, which is 70 or there are some even that are down 80 or 90%. We could go on. Supply chain's broken. We have war in Russia and Ukraine, which is, again, like causing shortages. is what's your, and you've been hobnobbing with some of the most important business people in the world over the past couple days. What's your take of what's happening and where we're headed? Well, I think we're headed into not a great place. I mean, I will say that the world is always in crisis. There always are a number of terrible things happening. A lot of the decline

you're seeing in crypto prices or technology stocks is due to overinflation during the bubble or during hype cycles. So yes, things are not headed in the right direction, but looking at certain indicators can lead you to think they're actually worse than they are. So from my perspective, what I'm trying to forecast is what will, you know, read or demand will be relatively constant. The number of people who want to subscribe to the Atlantic, I don't think will be too affected if there's a recession. Yes, it'll probably be harder to raise prices on subscriptions. Maybe some people will churn. They'll have a little bit of subscription fatigue. But the Atlantic also you know, excels in times of crisis. People come to trusted news sources, certain times of crisis.

My guess is that our consumer business, our subscription business, remains, you know, reasonably countercyclical, you know, reasonably protected even during a down cycle. What's really at risk, of course, is the advertising business, right? Because companies are going to, you know, either in a recession or in preparation for a recession, cut their advertising budgets, and then they're going to cut it from thought leader publications, right? They're going to, you know, reduce advertising in publications that they're using for brand enhancements more than ones they're using for direct sales. So I need to forecast how a recession will affect our advertising business. So I am, of course, looking at that carefully. What do I think is going to happen? I mean,

I don't know enough or have particular insights to go outside of the, I think, the standard consensus view that we're probably headed into some kind of recession. It will probably be reasonably short. And we'll see what happens. What did you make from the body? language of some of the executives you've been speaking. It's funny. You know, the CEOs are a little bit worried, right? A little bit worried. But, you know, their numbers, their sales, they're pretty good.

But, you know, it's the bankers and the economists who are, you know, much more nervous and the, you know, macro economists are extremely worried. The thing that people are at Davos that I was most interested in the worry is actual war with China. Really? We're not just decoupling, right? Everybody's been talking about decoupling. Obviously, it's a major problem, both economically, socially, politically, geopolitically.

But the number of people who feel like we're headed towards some kind of a conflict is much higher than I thought. And I've been quite surprised by that. And it's extremely interesting that we're here at Davos, the world economic forum. And how many people from China are here? You know, not very many at all. But why the war with China? I mean, there's been no rumblings about that. Maybe I've missed them.

I mean, war, it's not like we're actually going to let me launching. You know, no one actually thinks that, you know, China is going to be launching ICBMs at the United States, but that the idea that the model was being, someone was making this argument to me last night at dinner, a prominent economic figure saying that the way that they predict that the way the U.S. treats the Chinese economy in a couple of years, would be like the way the West treats the Russian economy right now, that it's a complete isolation and block.

And I don't think that's going to happen. And I think it will be a tragedy if it does. I'm in favor of, you know, Chinese engagement in many, many ways. I've been arguing for a long time. And the advantages of trying to get the tech sector in the Chinese in the United States and China to cooperate much more than they do. I've been a, you know, as much as possible, given the obvious problems, have been in favor of cooperation with China. So it's certainly not what I want. It's not what I expect, but I've been surprised to hear that. You had an interesting moment with Ruth Porr at CFO of Google. Well, yesterday I interviewed the Fort Tech CEOs and Ruth's CFO of Google,

and we were talking about data sharing, right? And one of the Antonio Neri, the CEO of HPE, was saying that data is an asset that you should put on your balance sheets and every good at it was agreeing. You need to be able to share. That's interesting. Isn't it? No, I don't. And I mean, they're Silicon Valley companies definitely get away.

with a lot of creative accounting, but putting, like, your data asset on your balance sheet. I mean, I can certainly see the argument that it is an asset, like real estate, right? The data is absolutely an asset. It can be valued in some way. Maybe it should be on the balance sheet. On the other hand, yes, you can imagine. That's how I know there's a recession coming is because people come up with these crazy ideas to make the books look good.

I'm not, if Anthony were here, I'm not sure he would say it was a crazy idea to make the books look good, but let's press ahead to the China question. Yeah, yeah, let's get to China. We were talking about data sharing, and everybody on the panel was saying, yes, you need more data sharing, and you can insights, and I said, okay, with data sharing is wonderful, but China's not here, right? There's no Chinese tech CEO on this panel. And it's clearly a question that, you know, you could see, you could feel the temperature dropping in the room a little bit because it is an incredibly fraught question.

So, you know, it's a particularly fraught question for Google, which, you know, withdrew from China for legitimate reasons. I can't remember the exact story, but I believe it was the Chinese government trying to get access to an activist email account. Google said, we can't do business here. Don't be evil. do thought experiments, conversations among Google's executive team about going back into China several years ago, which we covered it wired. And I think Google is well aware, you know,

my guess is that there are a lot of people at Google who feel not only that it would be positive for Google's business, but genuinely positive for the world, right, for Google to be able to do business in China, but that they can't do that. And I brought that up at the panel And it was a, you know, you've seen, you've watched the video of the panel. You know, we moved on to other topics. Yeah, we'll link it in the show notes. Yeah. It's interesting also.

It was a really fun conversation. Yeah. I enjoyed it. It's interesting also with Facebook, right? You know, we've gone very quickly from Mark Zuckerberg offering, reportedly offering she the ability to name his child. Right. And learning Mandarin, right?

Yeah. To now using TikTok as a punching bag in order to help try to ward off regulation of Facebook, but the idea of Facebook ever going into China is now way off the table. Now way off the table. It's been a huge transformation. And I think, you know, I think, I think it would have been better. It's interesting that Russia banned Facebook, right, during the war, right? That's actually a good reflection on Facebook. And I've obviously got a massive critique of Facebook in many ways, but the fact that authoritarian governments do not want Facebook in their countries is a reason why you might want Facebook in authoritarian countries.

There is a concept called de-globalization that's been bettered about now with all the Western companies pulling out of Russia. And it does seem, this is going along with your China point, it does seem to be quite likely that we end up in a world with, instead of one global economy, maybe two or three splintered economies. What do you think the implications are of that? I think it's, I mean, I'm in favor of global integration of economies. I think it would be absolutely better for the world for there to be more integration. Now, obviously, in a situation like Russia, where you want to be able to affect the outcome of a war without,

actually going to war with them, you know, withdrawing and putting economic sanctions on them is a much better way to change the trajectory of the war, I think, than bombing them. So I'm in favor of economic sanctions and splintering there. What I really hope doesn't happen is that we end up in a situation where we're in something that was like the Cold War and where every country has to decide whether they want a Western technology stack or a Chinese technology stack, right? Are we going to use, you know, Huawei routers or are we going to use, you know, Erickson routers, right? Are we going to use Amazon? Are we going to use WeChat? Right? You don't want the world to be splinter that way. You want there to be every country to choose the best

routers based on, you know, router technology. So I'm worried we're headed rapidly in that direction, though. Yeah, I mean, it does seem like we are. We've long been moving that direction. There was this very interesting situation with Lithuania, where Lithuania has had some tension with the Chinese and their scientists published their computer scientists or researchers from the defense ministry of all places published this report that there was a Xiaomi phone with a list of blocked terms that could be turned on and off at will and I spoke with the deputy defense minister there it was really interesting to hear how this back and forth was what were the terms going on well a lot of it was like Tiananmen was initially they were all political and then when the

report came out the list swelled to like you you know, pornography terms for them to be like, no, this is just a typical advertiser block and then disappeared. Oh, wow. Interesting. That's fascinating. Yeah. Not surprising. Do you think Russia is out for good? No, I don't think it's out for good, but it's out for a long, long time. It's going to take a, I mean, we have no idea where, um, we don't know when this conflict will end. I mean, one of the most interesting dynamics, and you can see it here in Ukraine and all the conversations is that the West is now so supportive of Ukraine and Ukraine is doing so well that, that, you know, Now the question is, you know, at what point, when does the war end, right? And, you know, will it end when Ukraine has restored full territory to where it was in February of 2022 to where it was in 2014? Maybe a little more. I mean, we don't know what the final outcome is. Like the dynamics have changed so much. And, you know, standing ovation for Zelensky in the Congress hall yesterday or the day before yesterday. We don't know what the final outcome will be.

That's sort of point A. Point B is I do think that Russia under Putin is out forever, right? There's no way that when he's leading Russia, but you can imagine a different Russia with different leadership that wants to reintegrate with the world. Now, is that going to happen? The history of Russia does not suggest that that will happen immediately. But you can imagine that. You can imagine them coming back, but it will be a while. Could be a couple decades.

Could be a couple decades. could be less than a couple decades. I mean, how long did we go from, you know, the Nazi regime in Germany to German integration in the West, you know, not very long at all. Well, it took Hitler dying. Right. Well, so Hitler dying, it's going to take Putin dying or Putin being, I mean, we'll take, Putin will have to no longer be here, be a, Putin will have to no longer physically be in Russia

for, for any of that to begin. Let's end with this. I always selfishly like to ask people about how they stay mentally and physically fit and demanding jobs. So, like I said, like, I see you running in Brooklyn a lot. It's always like, oh, I'm going out on this street. I'll probably see Nick run by. How do you, you have a very demanding, very busy job.

Not only, you know, you mean you're doing the work. You're also out at conferences. You're speaking. You're at events. How do you maintain your physical and mental fitness? Well, physical mental fitness are very closely tied. I do run all the time. How do you carve time out for that?

Well, some of it is my commute. You know, run to the office. I've run to and from the office, right? And it's a wonderful break in the day. You have a shower at the office? Yeah, there's a shower on the floor at the office. I mean, I've had different, sometimes you shower at the gym next door. I've always figured out a way to do it.

I did that once. I used to, I would go in from Brooklyn into at-age offices in Grand Central, and I had a gym nearby. And I would like city bike in. And I used to be like, okay, I could just walk into the office. And then after a week of it, it was quite clear that a show. No, you can't. In order.

Wow, you work at Condi Nast. You ride the elevator at the end of winter. You take a shower before you get in your seat, right? Like it's, um, so, um, part of it has been working in my Q and part of it is just saying, like, it's a very important part of the, a day for me physically. It's a part of either spiritual elements to why I run, the meditative elements to why I run. So I just, you know, figure out a way to make time. Sometimes you turn it into efficiency, right?

You listen to podcasts while you run, you listen to audio books, right? So there are ways you can get, or I listen to recordings of interviews I've done if I'm trying to find the most interesting moments. So you can use the time efficiently. I also stay fit. I play a lot of soccer with my kids. We do a lot of pick up games. We'll join games in the park. So I do a lot of soccer with my kids and a bunch of running and try to stay healthy. Do you like block it out on the calendar? Because like sometimes when I'm like ready to run, there'll be like nine things that will pile up immediately. I'm sure that you have 19,000 things that pile up immediately. Well, yes, but you know, a lot of times I'm in a particular

cycle preparing for a particular race or the particular goal. And so, you know, you then kind of push some of the other stuff out. I mean, there are clearly times where I go running and there's probably something at work I should have done at that moment. But at this point of my life, I'm, you know, I do it every day. So there's, I'm definitely going out there. An hour? Two hours? It depends. Okay, so yesterday. I want to hear the full schedule. The full, I mean, it depends. It depends on what training cycle I mean. It's usually a 12 to 14 week cycle before every marathon or every, you know, whatever race I'm preparing for. Ultras too. And yep, I'm preparing. My next one is going to, I hope my next race will be a 50

mile in August that I'm preparing for. 5.0. Yeah. I have never raised that distance, but we'll see. So, for example, here in Davos, right? It's a, it's a, I showed up and I said, okay, it's first day, it's altitude. I'm just going to go run 30 minutes. I got a lot of stuff to do. I went out, and there's this beautiful mountain, Jacob Shore, and I saw a trail, and I was like, God, I'm going to run up that. I ran up, and it ran up a mountain, and ended up taking, I don't know, hour 45 minutes and I was a little bit late to the opening reception of Davos but that's the trade-off right probably would have been better for me professionally be right at the opening reception meet as many people as possible but hey it was a beautiful mountain next day you know

I was busy I was preparing for panels I just went out and ran on the river next day I'd barely slept because it's stressful we're at altitude there's jet lag so I ran like two miles the morning three miles in the afternoon today I don't know it's 7 a.m. breakfast after a late dinner right then go running this morning but I blocked out time this afternoon. And I've said, I'm not going to schedule any meetings with, you know, at a window this afternoon. I'm going to go run in. And then tomorrow I'm going to go run a Parson with a couple of serious mountain running friends. So we're going to go do a real run. Oh, sweet. And then mental fitness. I mean, there's a lot of information coming at us in the news business. Obviously,

you're on the business side now. Do you, like, do you block out time for reading? Do you, when you see here's a question when you, so I want you to answer that one. And then also when you see an article come across like e-mail or texted to you or come across your Twitter feed, do you read it immediately or do you wait? Yeah, okay. So this is actually something I learned, something I've had to work on in my new job. It's one of the people often ask me what's different about being a CEO of an editor-in-chief. When you're an editor-in-chief, you have to read everything, right? Because you're constantly evaluating job candidates. You're trying to figure out how you can, you know, find an angle on a picture story. So one of the best things about being a journalist and being

an editor is that you're constantly getting smarter, right? Or your mind is degrading at a slower speed, whatever it is. But you're constantly engaged with that practice of learning new things all the time, and it's awesome. You become CEO and all the stuff coming. You is a little bit different, right? You're looking at business models, you have HR concerns. You're talking to the legal department, right? You're trying to forecast a recession. There's stuff where you're learning, but you don't have the same time to read to encounter new ideas. And it was a little bit into my new job where I thought, wait a second, I was some conversation about, I think it was a conversation about artificial intelligence, right,

and where AI is. And I was like, oh, my God, I haven't read a serious story about AI in a couple months. Like, what the heck, right? I love this topic. And it was at that moment where I said, okay, I need to figure out ways to structure my day and my life so that I, you know, I'm not going to have the same level of engagement with the news that I used to have. And so I did a couple of things. One, I said, you know what, I did this video series, most interesting thing in tech on LinkedIn every day. And it was a wired out.

I would do it every single day. And I'd talk for two minutes about what I thought was the most interesting thing in tech that day. And I did it because it's cool, builds a LinkedIn following, it's fun. But also because it's a forcing mechanism, right? You have to read the tech news and think about it because if you don't read the tech news or you say something stupid, like people will say your stuff. stupid. And so it's a really good forcing mechanism. And I said, okay, I'm going to start

making sure I do this at a regular cadence. Not every day, but doing it a bunch. And I started also writing a newsletter just with, here are the best things I read, which is, you know, one, it's a cool way to have a newsletter, a lot of people engage. You get lots of nice notes. But it's also another forcing mechanism to make sure that you're fully engaging with, you know, long form across the spectrum, across publications. And so take those two things. There's forcing mechanisms. And then I also started blocking out time my calendar, where this, you know, certain there's a certain part of the day that is devoted to

reading. And I start and I make sure I read as much of the Atlantic that's been published as I can, you know, and you look at my Twitter feed, you'll see there's a huge percentage of Atlantic stories out, both because I'm supporting the home team, but because they're great stories. So I do block out time on my calendar for that 100%. What's your relationship with social media?

I am deeply engaged in it. I spend a lot of time on it. I probably spend more time on LinkedIn than other platforms. In part, it's, I know that it's not the typical answer. It's happier. I mean, okay, full disclosure, I'm part of their podcast network, but I also think that they're much better and healthier social network. It's a healthier social network. It's not, you know, you can post something on LinkedIn. You post something on Twitter. You put something mildly

controversial. And then there's like this, you want to check your phone because you're terrified to like, oh my God, maybe somebody will misinterpret this or maybe like, you know, because of this, something will go wrong for the publication. Right. So you, you know, I have this kind of version, right, on Twitter, where as you post something on LinkedIn, you know, maybe you did said something wrong or maybe people disagree with it, but there'll be like a healthy conversation in the comments. So I post a fair amount on LinkedIn. I post a fair amount on Facebook. I have a public Facebook page where I post work stuff, interesting stuff. I have a personal page where I post stories about my kids. Obviously, I'm on Twitter following the news, but I'm

much less engaged with Twitter right now than I used to be. I'm posting pictures of my running career on Instagram. But the other element of it is, of course, course trying to study and understand the platforms to see where the Atlantic needs to be right and to see oh and I put I'm you know I'm on Reddit all the time too if you count that a social media or not but I love Reddit and part of it is to part of it is about the brand of Nick part of it is finding readers for the Atlantic and part of it is trying to understand how the Atlantic's business evolves yeah and I'm having the same thing with Twitter where it used to be the most important social network for me now I

just find myself like agitated and I'm really trying hard to cut back I just got this new app let's see It's called drafts. One of my followers told me about it, where you can just tweet from the app without logging into Twitter. And it's like you don't worry about all the people yelling back. So Chris Mimson, who's a former guest here,

has been talking about, like, what if you just logged into Twitter once or twice a day and just posted through the write-only apps? And I think that's much, I'm trying it. And I think it's a much healthier path. I'm just trying to be consistent on it. Yeah, I've done a bunch of things on Twitter to try to, I've changed my location to Guatemala

so that all the, like, trending topics you're in Spanish. Nice. So you don't actually, A, you'd get a little better at Spanish, right? And B, you're not sucked into the same garbage, right? I mute, I'm muted Trump during the Trump administration because otherwise it would be 100% Twitter. You know, might eventually have to mute Musk. It's all like all Twitter is now about Musk. But anyway, I try different mechanisms. There's a timer that turns it off after like 10 minutes. I deleted it from my phone. You know, it is, you know, it's a wonderful platform, but it's not, it's not great for your mental health it's not great for your productivity you got to spend some time on it but you got to keep

it pretty small before we leave do you want to shout out where people can follow you oh absolutely um you know i'm nx thompson i'm on you know you can just look for nicholas thompson there's a really buff ultimate fighter is not me the one in a suit is me um and so i'm on instagram lincoln then Twitter, Facebook, but you should really what you should do is you should subscribe to the Atlantic. That would be great. Thank you so much for joining. Thanks, Alex. It's really fun to talk with you.

Great speaking with you. Thanks, everybody for listening. We'll be back. Actually, this Wednesday in a regularly scheduled slot with a conversation with Eric Bronyoffson, the Stanford professor and author of Second Machine Age. I want to thank you for tuning in to our series of conversations from Davos and a special shout out to Simon Hibkins from Key Pictures. I get that right, Simon?

That's good. Okay. All right. Well, that'll do it for us today, and we will see you in a couple days. Take care.