Old media meets Silicon Valley as The Atlantic gets a new majority owner: Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective.
In another example of old media colliding with the tech world, The Atlantic is getting a new majority owner from Silicon Valley: Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective.
The deal includes the magazine, its digital properties, live events business and consulting services, the Emerson Collective announced Friday in a news release. Terms of the deal were not announced.
David G. Bradley, the chairman and owner of Atlantic Media, will remain at the helm for three to five years, he said in a memo to employees Friday. So will the magazine’s top editors. But Emerson Collective’s purchase of a stake in the Washington, D. C.-based magazine comes with the understanding that Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, might eventually buy it outright.
In his memo to staff, Bradley alluded to Powell Jobs’ tech ties.
“What I loved about Laurene from the first is that her confidence was forged on a different coast, ” Bradley said in the memo. He also said he had been thinking of “who next will take stewardship of this 160-year-old national treasure? To me, the answer, in the form of Laurene, feels incomparably right.”
Palo Alto-based Emerson Collective, which Powell Jobs founded in 2004, is known for its work in education and immigration reform and other social-justice causes, but it has other investments in media, including news publications Axios, ProPublica, Mother Jones, California Sunday Magazine, online magazine Ozy and movie-production company Anonymous Content.
“What a privilege it is to partner with David Bradley and become a steward of The Atlantic, one of the country’s most important and enduring journalistic institutions, ” Powell Jobs said in the press release. “The Atlantic was co-founded 160 years ago by a group of abolitionists including Ralph Waldo Emerson, who is a primary inspiration for our own work at Emerson Collective.”
With this deal, Powell Jobs becomes the latest tech billionaire to be associated with a well-known publication with a long history. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013. Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes bought the New Republic in 2012, but later sold it.
The Atlantic has been transformed from an unprofitable business to a profitable one since Bradley bought the magazine 18 years ago, the press release noted. It had an average of 33 million monthly unique visitors in the first half of 2017. The magazine says 80 percent of its revenue comes from online ads, its events business and consulting services, while 20 percent comes from print — a drastic turnaround from a decade ago, when 85 percent of its revenue came from print ads and subscriptions.
“The Atlantic has had a remarkably good set of instincts for both embracing the web early and continuing to change in step with the social web, ” Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, told the Washington Post recently.
