Since its founding in 1857, the Atlantic has remained committed to producing high-quality, independent journalism. Today that mission is the foundation for the company’s growth strategy, which achieved a major milestone last year when it reached 1 million subscribers.
In this edition of AAM Media Matters, Megha Garibaldi, The Atlantic’s chief growth officer, shares how the brand combines editorial excellence with audience-first thinking, its thoughtful use of AI and how data provides a common language that leads to greater collaboration and meaningful insights.
The Atlantic’s longstanding mission of creating quality, trusted journalism is one of the main reasons it met its subscriber goal.
“The foundational piece of this is excellent, high-quality, independent journalism, which is in line with our historic mission,” said Garibaldi. “We constantly see the incredible work that our journalists are putting out there and our audience’s reception to it.”
The company also uses audience data to identify topics of interest and gain a better understanding of how readers consume content. This feedback led to The Atlantic’s decision to return to publishing 12 print issues per year.
“Our data showed that subscribers crave our magazine in physical form so they can read it from beginning to end.”
Assessing how its audience engages online also led to expansion across platforms like Apple News, Reddit and TikTok. On the product side, The Atlantic used this feedback to roll out subscriber-focused features like gift linking, alerts for new content from favorite authors and live events for subscribers with journalists and editors.
“We are constantly thinking about how we can build off our incredible journalism and where we can deliver value to our subscribers,” Garibaldi said.
A strong data culture is also at the core of The Atlantic’s growth strategy. By sharing a unified dataset across departments, teams can collaborate to identify opportunities, risks and product ideas.
“Data is a common language that makes it easy for our teams to work together,” Garibaldi said. “Our teams have regular check ins about what we’re seeing in the data and how we’re using it. Our data is quite democratized, which gives everyone easy access and allows us to have cross-departmental conversations.”
As a longtime member of the Alliance for Audited Media, The Atlantic shares its print and digital audience metrics through AAM’s Media Intelligence Center and Magazine Media 360° report. Garibaldi said having a single, independently verified source of data benefits both internal strategy and external communications.
“It’s useful to have a verified point of view that pulls together subscription data from all the different platforms and products we have in the market. It also helps clients in the B2B space or within the industry at large better understand and appreciate what we are doing and how we are growing.”
While AI presents both opportunities and challenges, The Atlantic is using it in ways that align with its mission.
“We are not using AI to write and create journalism. Journalism is the work of our writers and editors, and that is something we are safeguarding,” said Garibaldi. “We are exploring how AI might help us improve our targeting or increase efficiency in our tech stack. No matter how we decide to use it, our goal is to keep the principles of human created journalism intact.”
Garibaldi added that as the industry shifts and new technologies are developed, it’s important for publishers to identify opportunities, but be selective.
“Publishers have limited dollars, resources and time. The key is to narrow your focus, pick a few areas that might be your best opportunities for success and experiment. But be ready to quickly pivot to another opportunity if one doesn’t work as expected.”