Bob Cohn is currently serving as a resident fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics. Cohn is also the president of The Atlantic, a literary and cultural commentary magazine distributed in print and online, founded in 1857. Before working at The Atlantic, Cohn worked for Newsweek and Wired magazines. Cohn has been named Publishing Executive of the Year by Adweek and was president of The Atlantic over the time period that saw it win Magazine of the Year in 2016 and best website in 2013 from the National Magazine Awards.
Harvard Political Review: What did you do before coming to Harvard?
Bob Cohn: I’m Bob Cohn, and I’ve been a long-time journalist in a variety of different roles. My most recent role was at The Atlantic, where I was for five years the editor of our digital operations, TheAtlantic.com, some other digital properties we had, and then for the last five years I was president of The Atlantic.
HPR: Many journalists have expressed concern that changing media consumption habits will endanger traditional news sources. How did you deal with this shift when you were at The Atlantic?
BC: The major story of my eleven years at The Atlantic was the shift from print to digital. When I got to The Atlantic in 2009, we were basically a print magazine with a small digital presence and a small live events business. And over the course of those 10 or 11 years, we became much more multi-platform and shifted both our delivery patterns of our journalism and the revenue sources that we had into a much more digital environment, to the point where when I left we were getting more than 80 percent of our revenue through non-print sources; when I arrived it was 20 percent.
HPR: Did you get any pushback to any of the reforms you proposed to meet that challenge, and if you did, how did you address them?
BC: It’s funny, the story of legacy media transforming into digital operations when they’ve been successful has largely come with pushback. If you look at the successful transition properties — the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, some of the networks, etc., not to mention a lot of legacy magazines from Conde Nast, Time Inc., and Hearst — pushback is fairly common. The Atlantic was a little bit different in that we were a relatively small business when I arrived. There had been no recorded evidence of The Atlantic ever making a profit in its previous 150 years, so it was largely a magazine where wealthy men lost a tiny portion of their wealth over time. So whereas the New York Times or Time Magazine or Vogue Magazine need to worry about the shift away from the huge amounts of money they were making in print, The Atlantic was never making huge amounts of money in print. So the tension you would get from diverting, pushing away from print was not there. In fact, for us it was more existential — to find a digital footing, to get a digital audience, and to get digital revenue — than it was for some of those other properties. And we largely grew our way out of the problem. Whereas these other properties had to migrate people from their print platforms to their digital, and they had to teach print writers how to write for the web, teach print salesmen how to sell for the web, we largely hired our way out of the problem because we were a relatively small staff. So it was almost completely additive, and as a result a lot of internal tension was avoided.
HPR: Thinking not only about the shift toward digital media but toward shifting media consumption patterns, especially social media, do you think that shift has been good or bad for journalism on the whole?
BC: We can talk about Facebook as what I think of as a “frenemy” of The Atlantic and other publications, but on the “friend” side it was a huge driver of audience. When I got to The Atlantic we had two million monthly unique visitors, and when I left my editorial role we had about 20 million uniques; we grew about 10-fold during that period. And some of that was through increasing our staff and increasing our output of stories and getting better at the business and the journalism of digital, but a lot of that was on the back of social, and Facebook — the amplifying effect of Facebook was a huge bonus for us. On the flip side, when you’re in Facebook Instant Articles or you’re in the Facebook environment, you don’t really own the relationship with the reader. And so, sometimes, they’re reading your content within the Facebook ecosystem and not The Atlantic ecosystem — there’s still ad revenue but it’s not as much ad revenue as there might have been because you’re sharing it with Facebook or with Apple News. So these social platforms have been excellent for overall boosting the size of the audience, but the cost is that the data and the relationship can sometimes be owned by the platform and not by the publication.
HPR: You mentioned Facebook. Do you think attacks against “fake news” by the president have been received any differently by long-form outlets like The Atlantic than your peers in cable news?
BC: Well I think the question of fake news — or the allegation and the bumper sticker of fake news — has put publications like The Atlantic and others really on notice. It is always imperative to get your facts right and be accurate, because that’s the duty of good journalism. Now you have the added layer of this administration using the allegations of mistakes and so-called fake news as a political weapon, and attacking the press and journalists by name and publications by name, and they’ve been endangering the work journalists do, but that’s not really per se part of fake news. But the obligation to get it right is all the more essential, not just as a duty to your profession, but because you can’t give the president any ammunition to attack the First Amendment.
HPR: On that note, what would you say are the strengths and weaknesses of magazine writing compared to traditional newspaper reporting?
BC: The distinction between straight-ahead newspaper reporting and what we think of magazine reporting — which, in fact, is also practiced by newspapers, you know, the New York Times does excellent what we might call “magazine-style” reporting — because if you think about the province of magazines historically as analysis, and synthesis, and explanatory journalism, and narrative-driven journalism, those are things that magazines have done very well over a century. Those are also things that great newspapers do. So those things have been blurred, and [although] I think of The Atlantic as a magazine — we come out once a month in print — by far, the size of our audience, the size of our revenue, the size of our staff, those are driven by our digital platform, not our print platform. And yet we still think of ourselves as a real-time magazine, so we’re not in there with deep reporters covering every turn of the wheel on news. But you take a big news day like yesterday — when the speaker announces they’re going to open an impeachment inquiry — The Atlantic is in there writing about that, but trying to bring instant context and analysis, and not straight-ahead “here’s what the House caucus is doing right now,” but to back up and put it in some kind of context relative to Andrew Johnson or Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton, to talk about Trump’s norm-busting behavior in some kind of historical context, but in there in real time, and I think that there’s been a kind of convergence between magazine journalism and traditional newspaper journalism and even broadcast journalism. The web has made a great convergence possible, I think.
HPR: Looking back at your vision of the future of digital media 10 or even five years ago when you took the helm of The Atlantic, how accurate do you think your predictions, if you made any, turned out?
BC: I don’t think we had any idea what we were getting into. When I arrived at The Atlantic — first for the editorial job before I became president — the goal was simply to try to transition this great print magazine onto a digital footing and secure it and future-proof it going forward. I don’t think we knew what that meant in 2009 and 2010, we didn’t anticipate podcasting, video — web video existed, obviously but we didn’t know what role it would play, Facebook was around but the power of Facebook to drive audience hadn’t really been tapped into yet — Facebook wasn’t really a news operation, it was still a photos and friends kind of stuff. Twitter had been around for a couple of years, but it also didn’t have the kind of power it has now. So the important thing — and what made us lucky at The Atlantic — is to have some values that you know you stand for. We had 160 years of editorial values to guide us to be experimental, to be entrepreneurial, and to be willing to imagine that the founders of The Atlantic — Emerson and Thoreau and Longfellow and Harriet Beecher Stowe — would be tweeting, would have podcasts, would be on Facebook. They would use the modern tools to tell their stories, just like they used print back in the 19th century.
HPR: Thinking about how those values have been taking shape, how do you think your business leadership has been shaped by your time as a journalist?
BC: It was somewhat unusual that the person running The Atlantic as president came out of journalism, as I did for more than 25 years before I became president. And there might be some demerits in that, because I didn’t come out of finance or sales or marketing, but the upside is I came out of the editorial side, and I would think of it as, if you’re running Ford Motor, it’s nice to have spent some time on the factory floor. And I really know the product of The Atlantic, which is that we create content. If you’ll excuse the term, we are journalists. And it takes a lot of people — you know, the newsroom is less than half the size of the whole company — because we have all kinds of other job categories outside of the content creators, outside of the journalists, but the product we create is stories for readers, and that’s kind of baked into my background and my DNA and my experience as a reporter and a writer and an editor and a newsroom manager. And I think that there was some advantage to that when it came time to lead the whole organization.
HPR: Looking back on all the changes in your time in journalism and as a business leader, what would you say was the most pivotal moment in your career?
BC: Well oddly, it was many years ago. My first 10 years out of college I worked at Newsweek in Washington. And your listeners may not even know what Newsweek was or is, but Newsweek and Time were the great news weeklies at a moment when the news weeklies really were at a pinnacle of power in the national conversation. And I spent 10 years there — minus a little bit of graduate school — and my last role was covering first the Supreme Court and the Justice Department and the FBI and the Washington legal beat, and then I spent three years covering the Clinton White House. And so you asked what was a pivotal decision, it was leaving that and going to California to become a magazine editor when I hadn’t had any editing experience outside my college newspaper — and I had been a writer and reporter — and to do so not in mainstream journalism, but I went back to the magazine at my alma mater, Stanford, and I was the editor and also the publisher of Stanford Magazine for a little over three years. That set me off on a course first to be an editor — just a roll-up-your-sleeve story editor — but also to be the leader of a small organization. We only had 12 people and a relatively small budget, but I was 32 and I was in charge of it, and that was an important moment for me to say, “Okay, I kind of like this, I get to make decisions about what the cover is, and what the cover language is, and what stories we write, who writes them and how much we pay them, and then eventually how we fund the magazine with advertising and contributions from readers, etc.” So that kind of set me off on a different direction as an editor and a manager, and then I got back into more mainstream journalism at Conde Nast when I went to Wired magazine. But I had the tools of having been a very mainstream reporter at Newsweek, plus having some management and leadership experience at this quirky but awesome little magazine. And so I think that was important for me. And then definitely moving from the editorial side to the business side, which was a little more unusual as I was saying. And just to broaden the horizon, being someone who runs a media company in 2020 is quite a bit different and I would suspect more interesting than it was say 40 years ago or 30 years ago when I was starting this because the terrain is so much more complicated, and figuring out the way forward with all of the opportunities and challenges that the media business presents right now makes running these companies much more of an intellectual puzzle than it might have been say 30 years ago when it was more of a transactional advertising relationship with your funding sources. So that’s been a really interesting shift for me as well.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons / Anna Bross