Memos are again flying in the Foggy Bottom offices of Atlantic Media, home to a number of Washington’s thinkier titles.
As part of the same initiative, the storied Atlantic will be “significantly expanding coverage of politics and policy” in the Beltway, noted the company in a release. This Washington-based publication will now be opening a Washington bureau, a brand of territorial monster generally appended to news organizations based in other cities, like New York. And in a move with implications for a profitable local industry, the Atlantic will gobble up National Journal’s events arm — National Journal Live — combining it with the Atlantic’s already formidable events business.
David Bradley, the quirky Atlantic Media chief executive and chairman, put the rationale this way in one of his patented staff bulletins: “For the last five years, The Atlantic and National Journal have been in gentle competition, with two event staffs and two advertising staffs competing in this same Washington space. Separating the businesses, giving one free rein with its public website and events, the other dedicated to a premium audience with premium product, is a strategic decision that could be made only at my level.”
The new Atlantic Washington Bureau — an “informal” appellation, writes Bradley — will have “its own dedicated editorial, advertising and events staff of 25 to 30,” according to the memo. How these folks will upgrade the Atlantic’s Washington coverage will be the preoccupation of politics editor Yoni Appelbaum, the new Washington bureau chief; in turn, Appelbaum will report to TheAtlantic.com editor John Gould. To reach its staffing goal, the Atlantic’s Beltway operation will recruit from the ranks of the National Journal as well as outside company walls.
Atlantic Editor in Chief James Bennet tells the Erik Wemple Blog that the journalistic staffing level of the bureau has yet to be determined. That said, it will drive traditional Washington-bureau beats, like the White House, Capitol Hill and lobbying. As for the federal bureaucracy, Bennet says, “I don’t want to park people at the agencies, but I do want them roaming through the agencies.” Nor does he want a White House correspondent who hunkers down in the briefing room. “If there was a conspiracy to take the best reporters in Washington and take them captive and keep them from covering better stories, you couldn’t devise a better trap than the White House briefing room,” says Bennet.
The Atlantic is a cadence-spanning publication — staff writers do massive projects as well as Web updates — and the new Washington reporters will be “paced in accordance with life on the Web,” Bennet says. So how will the team differentiate itself from all the other Washington journo outfits that are similarly chartered? “I can sound really pompous about this stuff really quickly, but I think where we distinguish ourselves is really paying attention to the ideas in contest” in Washington, he says. “There’s a meaningful clash of ideologies as well as interests and a real clash — and an interesting one — of ideas as to how you best further the interests of the country.”
That’s a much more inspirational mandate than “Hey, get more likes on Facebook.”
Changes in the National Journal side of the operation are more complex. The organization churns out a number of informational products: National Journal, a print magazine whose shuttering by year’s end was announced over the summer; NationalJournal.com, the free Web site that will move toward a premium model by Feb. 1; the political tipsheet Hotline and National Journal Daily, which are currently subscription services and will remain so; and Next America, a sub-site run by renowned political reporter Ron Brownstein.
Strategic heads have to be spinning at National Journal’s Watergate offices. As reported previously in this blog, the storied site in 2010 sought to take its Beltway offerings to a broader audience as part of a plan to become “national consumer brand” — just the way Rosslyn-based Politico had done after its launch in 2007.
Which is not to say that it dumped its premium business altogether. In 2011, National Journal staged a smart, fancy-schmancy upgrade of its longtime premium “subscribers” to exalted “members.” With membership comes the loving and guiding policy hand of the National Journal. Washington trade associations, big-time lawyers and lobbyists who pony up the five-figure price of admission get all kinds of policy briefings, ready-for-action PowerPoint presentations, hobnobbing events, customized material on NationalJournal.com and the like.
“We have all these other strategic services that will help your companies do their jobs better in Washington,” then-Atlantic Media President Justin Smith told the Erik Wemple Blog in a 2013 interview. “And that’s because we felt like differentiation is the name of the game in an increasingly commodified information” ecosystem. “We’ve gone from a relatively defensive position of selling subscriptions . . . to what we believe is a totally differentiated and more offensive position of saying, ‘Look, we do what no one else does.’ ”
Moving toward a renewed emphasis on the premium content for the 1,000-plus member organizations simplifies things for National Journal President Poppy MacDonald. The needs of this group, she notes, are “sometimes different from what we’re writing for a national consumer audience and what gets a lot of traffic.”
Another micro-adjustment to the company’s strategy emerged in early 2014 with the hiring of Richard Just to transform the National Journal magazine into a purveyor of long narratives in the tradition of the New Republic. That didn’t work out, as the print edition is headed to the scrap heap.
There was a time when such strategic agony wasn’t necessary. National Journal launched in 1969 as a subscription service named the Government Research Corporation. Along with competitors like Roll Call (founded in 1955) and the Hill (founded in 1994), it proceeded to make a great deal of money. These publications eased into a gilded vein of revenue supplied by so-called “issue advertisers” — essentially giant companies and lobbies that needed to place their promotions in front of big shots on Capitol Hill, the White House and the federal agencies. Until about a decade ago, the riches were absurd. A former Roll Call employee once told this blog about a bonus day in the late 1990s: “Everyone at Roll Call got $20,000-plus bonuses. People were crying in the hallways,” he said.
Politico and a bunch of Web competitors barged in on the party in the 2000s, and the honey pot suddenly turned into a collection of teaspoons. The turbulence caused big changes in the market: Roll Call bought Congressional Quarterly and proceeded to experiment with its own balance of free and premium products; Politico first presented itself as a mass-consumer product but later launched Politico Pro, its own version of the paid Beltway information service. And National Journal has explored every millimeter of the free-to-paid spectrum.
Enough talk about strategy. What about the workers? According to Atlantic Media, the National Journal will lose about a quarter of its 175-strong staff, a number that includes sales and administration. On the editorial front, National Journal had about 80 editorial staffers before the company announced the cancellation of the National Journal print magazine. That number has since fallen to 67; the changes announced today will push the numbers down to the 35 to 40 range. “What is not clear to me is how many terminations this will entail,” writes Bradley in his memo.
National Journal is incentivizing its people to stick around during the transition to the renewed premium strategy. Those who stay until after Jan. 31, 2016, will get a 12-week bonus in addition top two weeks’ severance for each year of service. Even those who bolt for other opportunities before the cutoff will get six weeks’ pay as a thank-you gesture.
The incentives are linked to the bummer of losing a general audience. Bradley notes in his memo: “Knowing that many of our editorial staff joined National Journal with an expectation that they would be writing for the broader public, suspecting their disappointment with this change in circumstance, we have decided to offer the editorial staff a universal buyout. But, as in fact, we don’t want to lose most staff, we will pay the buyout whether or not a staff member elects to leave. I understand the cost to the firm, but am not clear how staff will think through this choice set before them.”