Promoting based on potential: How The Atlantic is putting a lot more women in charge

It’s not a shocker that a lot has changed at The Atlantic since it was founded all the way back in 1857. Perhaps more surprising, though, is how much has changed there in just the last two and a half years.

In 2016, women made up just 17 percent of editorial leadership at The Atlantic. Today, women account for 63 percent of newsroom leaders (see the masthead here; though this story focuses on the editorial side, there are a lot of women on the business side too). In 2018, 75 percent of new newsroom hires were women.

This isn’t an accident. The Atlantic — like other news organizations that have sought to diversify their staffs, though there’s still a ton of work to be done — has been intentional about hiring more women and people of color under the leadership of Jeffrey Goldberg , who was appointed editor-in-chief in 2016. Adrienne LaFrance , who joined The Atlantic as a tech editor in 2014, has risen through the ranks to become the publication’s executive editor , the first time in The Atlantic’s 162-year history that a woman has held that role.

(Adrienne is also a former Nieman Lab staffer, like her Atlantic colleagues Shan Wang and Megan Garber.)

And it’s worth noting that it was in 2017 that a majority stake in The Atlantic was purchased by the Emerson Collective, which has fueled a hiring spree and is, of course, run by a woman, Laurene Powell Jobs.

I spoke with Goldberg and LaFrance about how they are thinking about the hiring and promotion of women at The Atlantic. Here’s some of their advice.

Prioritize it.

Adrienne LaFrance: It’s very easy to say that you care about diversity or having women or people of color in leadership. It’s a different thing to actually make it happen. With every single hire you make, you’re making a choice. Our goal is to hire the very best journalists for whatever role it may be and not limit ourselves to just half the population.

Jeffrey Goldberg: [Women in editorial leadership] is a top-tier priority for me. It’s in the basket of the top 2 or 3 things I have to get done. We have some opportunities for expansion — like the [post-Emerson

[Women in editorial leadership] is a top-tier priority for me. It’s in the basket of the top 2 or 3 things I have to get done. We have some opportunities for expansion — like the [post-Emerson uptick in hiring ] — that give me the room to maneuver.

When you’re being sexist, recognize it.

Goldberg: I am lucky in that I have my own personal gender advisor. My wife [

I am lucky in that I have my own personal gender advisor. My wife [ Pamela Reeves ] advises Melinda Gates on gender issues. She introduced me to the concept — which you don’t have to be married to a gender specialist to understand — that women are judged on experience and men are judged on potential.

When I really thought about that early on as editor, it helped me to look at the world in a different way. I began to look, inside and outside the organization, at who did not fit traditional models of what editorial leadership might look like. I studied their potential, their innate leadership abilities, their competence and ambition — and I thought, I’m surrounded by amazing talent, and it’s under-utilized talent. Adrienne is a perfect case in point, but we’ve done this now probably a dozen times or more.

It’s cognitive. It serves the function of leveling the playing field, but the problems are cognitive and cultural. It’s understanding women and their potential roles inside organizations different than previously.

LaFrance: When I started here at The Atlantic in 2014, when I became the tech editor, there were no women who were more senior than me [in any section or in the print magazine]. When I became editor of the website, there had never been a woman in charge of the website before. Across the newsroom, we’re putting women in positions that they’ve just never held before. The only way to put women in leadership is to do it for the first time.

Embrace discomfort and remember: It will make your organization better.

Goldberg: My number-one goal is to find the best leadership talent to run The Atlantic. It’s in The Atlantic’s best interest, it’s in my best interest. By opening up the possibilities of younger people, women, and people of color, by imagining their rise in a deliberate way, I’ve just widened the pool of potential leadership. So it serves The Atlantic.

My number-one goal is to find the best leadership talent to run The Atlantic. It’s in The Atlantic’s best interest, it’s in my best interest. By opening up the possibilities of younger people, women, and people of color, by imagining their rise in a deliberate way, I’ve just widened the pool of potential leadership. So it serves The Atlantic.

There’s no quota system here, but there’s a lot of latent leadership talent inside The Atlantic and there’s a lot of latent talent in quality print journalism, generally.

LaFrance: We obviously want extraordinary journalists in every position. In some cases, maybe, the hiring managers are male and can see themselves in the [male] candidates, but it’s about making sure that you’re looking outside of your own experience and your own career trajectory to think about what various paths and skillsets people could bring to the role. It’s just always making sure that in your pool of finalists you have diversity, you have really strong finalists who are different from one another.

We obviously want extraordinary journalists in every position. In some cases, maybe, the hiring managers are male and can see themselves in the [male] candidates, but it’s about making sure that you’re looking outside of your own experience and your own career trajectory to think about what various paths and skillsets people could bring to the role. It’s just always making sure that in your pool of finalists you have diversity, you have really strong finalists who are different from one another.

At times, that means you have to keep going back again and again, and hiring takes longer than you may want.

This is just adopting a mindset that the work is never done. It’s not like you hire women or put women in charge and then say, We did it! It’s a continual state, working toward diversity.

Goldberg: Writ large, our goal is quality right now. We’re leading up to a subscriber model [to launch this fall]. We have to make more, better journalism all the time. I think we’re doing better than we ever have and I don’t know how to link that to the gender issues, but I think diversity sharpens the mind.

Writ large, our goal is quality right now. We’re leading up to a subscriber model [to launch this fall]. We have to make more, better journalism all the time. I think we’re doing better than we ever have and I don’t know how to link that to the gender issues, but I think diversity sharpens the mind.

We’re about 160 people at this operation now, not including freelancers. I think having a very diverse editorial organization — diverse in gender, race, age, ideology — when you put all these people in the same room in the same organization, especially inside a country that’s so fractured and polarized, I think you’re going to create moments of tension and discomfort. I think you’re also going to create much sharper journalism.

Twenty, 30, 40 years ago, The Atlantic was basically a bunch of white guys and some women in helping positions. I’m sure for them it was very comfortable, but they were just not being challenged in a daily way. Their assumptions weren’t being challenged, their story selection wasn’t being challenged, the choice about who gets to write stories wasn’t being challenged. And now we live in a situation inside this organization where, I hope, every assumption is overturned, and every decision is discussed and dissected through various prisms, including race, gender, ideology, and age.

And I think everything gets better [with more women], by the way. I used to cover the Middle East and I think the thing that hamstrings Middle Eastern countries more than almost anything else is that they tend not to tap into half their population’s potential and intelligence. When half the people are women and they’re just not being used for the betterment of society, you’re not going to be a dynamic country. It’s the same principle applied to any field, any place.

Acknowledge where you have fallen behind.

LaFrance: Our most core, loyal readers are disproportionately male. If you look at our overall audience, it’s more evenly split, but if you look at just the most active, loyal readers, they’re more male. We are actively thinking about how to bring in more women as readers and subscribers. I think you do that just through elevating quality, generally. We want to bring the smartest, best journalists across all the topics we cover and we believe that if we do that, that will reach women as well as men.

Goldberg: We continue to have a problem with the print magazine cover stories — with the gender and race issues when it comes to cover story writing. [Of the 15 print issues The Atlantic has published since January 2018, 11 had cover stories written by men. —Ed.]

We continue to have a problem with the print magazine cover stories — with the gender and race issues when it comes to cover story writing. [Of the 15 print issues The Atlantic has published since January 2018, 11 had cover stories written by men. —Ed.]

It’s really, really hard to write a 10,000-word cover story. There are not a lot of journalists in America who can do it. The journalists in America who do it are almost exclusively white males. What I have to do — and I haven’t done this enough yet — is again about experience versus potential. You can look at people and be like, well, your experience is writing 1,200-word pieces for the web and you’re great at it, so good going!

That’s one way to approach it, but the other way to approach it is, huh, you’re really good at this and you have a lot of potential and you’re 33 and you’re burning with ambition, and that’s great, so let us put you on a deliberate pathway toward writing 10,000-word cover stories. It might not work. It often doesn’t. But we have to be very deliberate and efficient about creating the space for more women to develop that particular journalistic muscle.

The more women you have in leadership, the more women you have in leadership.

Goldberg: One of the things I’ve noticed is that the more women there are in leadership, the easier it is for women to be in leadership. There’s this theory of critical mass — if you’re an organization that’s, say, 10 men in leadership and 1 or 2 women, women have to do a lot more just to stay in that leadership group. They have to do a lot more advocacy for workplace issues that men might not be thinking about.

One of the things I’ve noticed is that the more women there are in leadership, the easier it is for women to be in leadership. There’s this theory of critical mass — if you’re an organization that’s, say, 10 men in leadership and 1 or 2 women, women have to do a lot more just to stay in that leadership group. They have to do a lot more advocacy for workplace issues that men might not be thinking about.

[One case in point is the story of how women at The New York Times fought successfully for better parental leave, a story told in this week’s episode of The Double Shift, a podcast by 2017 Nieman Fellow Katherine Goldstein. —Ed.]

It was important for me not to just raise up and promote a couple of key women. I want to create conditions in which women and people of color don’t feel like they have to represent all the time, they can just do their jobs.

Nobody comes here to be the advocate for gender parity, the advocate for the inclusion of people of color. They come here to do journalism. We have to not just promote a few stars, but distribute this widely so that burden-sharing becomes tolerable within an organization.

LaFrance: It’s stunning when I look around at the colleagues of mine who are indispensable to our institution’s success, and who wouldn’t have been here in an earlier era. I wouldn’t have been here in an earlier era. It’s pretty remarkable to me just to see how much can change if you resolve to do it, and then do it.

Graphic design students Mackenzie Robinson and Bethany Faulkner created a “copycat” Atlantic magazine for a school project. This art is from their cover.

The Best Way For Jeffrey Goldberg To Help Diverse Journalists Would Be To Quit His Job

Photo: Ben Gabble (Getty)

On Thursday, Nieman Lab published a friendly discussion with The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg and the magazine’s recently promoted executive editor Adrienne LaFrance, in which they addressed the great progress The Atlantic has made in adding women to its staff. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your perspective) for what should have been a relatively puffy piece about the 162-year-old institution realizing that it’s actually good for news organizations to hire women and people of color, discussion about the discussion was entirely derailed by Goldberg’s explanation of why so many cover stories for The Atlantic are written by white men.

The evaluation and reevaluation of what Goldberg said has resulted in two camps: Those who think he’s a sexist old white guy who was perpetuating the worst tendencies of old white guys in media, and those who think his comments were disingenuously and perhaps willfully misread and that Goldberg was simply and unobjectionably pointing out that white men have historically gotten more opportunities than women and people of color to do ambitious journalistic work. Neither is quite right, and both are eliding what he actually said.

In the section of the article dedicated to addressing where The Atlantic has “fallen behind,” Goldberg said:

We continue to have a problem with the print magazine cover stories — with the gender and race issues when it comes to cover story writing. [Of the 15 print issues The Atlantic has published since January 2018, 11 had cover stories written by men. —Ed.] *

It’s really, really hard to write a 10,000-word cover story. There are not a lot of journalists in America who can do it. The journalists in America who do it are almost exclusively white males. What I have to do — and I haven’t done this enough yet — is again about experience versus potential. You can look at people and be like, well, your experience is writing 1,200-word pieces for the web and you’re great at it, so good going!

That’s one way to approach it, but the other way to approach it is, huh, you’re really good at this and you have a lot of potential and you’re 33 and you’re burning with ambition, and that’s great, so let us put you on a deliberate pathway toward writing 10,000-word cover stories. It might not work. It often doesn’t. But we have to be very deliberate and efficient about creating the space for more women to develop that particular journalistic muscle.

*[An Ed. note to the Ed. note: Three cover stories in this time frame were written by women (the January/February 2018 issue, the November 2018 issue, and the December 2018 issue), and there was one cover that featured a package of stories which included one written by a woman (the October 2018 issue). Nearly all the cover stories were written by white people.]

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This answer—specifically Goldberg’s apparent implication that white men are writing long Atlantic cover stories because it’s too hard for other non-white male journalists to do so—prompted a lot of pointed criticism from people who work in media. Many people, me included, felt that it was hilariously retrograde for the editor-in-chief of one of the country’s most storied publications to say that women and people of color can’t write cover stories because they’re “really, really hard” to write. Goldberg responded to the backlash on Twitter, first claiming that he was misquoted (throwing the Nieman reporter, who is a woman, under the bus in the process), then walking back his denial when it became clear that the reporter had taped the discussion, and finally clarifying that what he meant was simply to observe that white men are the ones who most often get the opportunity to write long cover stories. Then today, he tried to do further damage control in an interview with the New York Times.

Right on cue, reinforcements from the Reasonable Journalist Brigade charged in to explain what Goldberg actually meant. Witness an old white-guy staff writer at The Atlantic, who thinks his old white-guy boss is doing a great job:

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A man who dismissed Goldberg’s critics as having poor reading comprehension:

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Jonathan Chait and Will Saletan, of course:

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And another powerful media man who seemed befuddled by the response to Goldberg’s quote:

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This last tweet is key. If you read Goldberg’s quote as him saying that people who aren’t white men are generally incapable of writing 10,000 word cover stories—and, note, Goldberg did use the word “can” in his answer—that’s bad. If you read the quote as Goldberg saying non-white men aren’t usually given chances to write these stories at The Atlantic, that’s just him stating facts.

Whether you read what he’s saying as the former or, more generously, as the latter, what Goldberg said next is far more insidious than the obviously wrong assertion that women and people of color aren’t able to write 10,000 word cover stories. He said:

What I have to do — and I haven’t done this enough yet — is again about experience versus potential. You can look at people and be like, well, your experience is writing 1,200-word pieces for the web and you’re great at it, so good going!

That’s one way to approach it, but the other way to approach it is, huh, you’re really good at this and you have a lot of potential and you’re 33 and you’re burning with ambition, and that’s great, so let us put you on a deliberate pathway toward writing 10,000-word cover stories. It might not work. It often doesn’t. But we have to be very deliberate and efficient about creating the space for more women to develop that particular journalistic muscle.

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When you consider that the 10,000-word cover stories under discussion here are the ones The Atlantic actually runs, it seems clear that to Goldberg, diversity isn’t about simply getting the many, many, many talented and qualified women and people of color in media to write cover stories for his magazine about subjects that interest them, but about training them to write the sorts of cover stories he happens to like—ones that at least gesture at being sharp and provocative and are aimed to spark discussion and that, ultimately, affirm his worldview. The whole point of having a diverse group of people with diverse thoughts and opinions and interests and areas of expertise, though, is that you don’t end up with a bunch of turgid, boring white-guy articles that gesture at being sharp and provocative and spark discussion in narrow and predictable ways. It’s one thing that Goldberg doesn’t even seem to recognize that there are lots of non-white male journalists out there right now who are not only capable of writing in-depth cover stories but are in fact doing so; the even more serious issue, though, is that this powerful magazine man seems to think the solution to the problem under discussion is to teach women and people of color to be like him (or how to do work that satisfies him) rather than to support them in being the best possible version of themselves, and adjust his views accordingly.

That “journalistic muscle” that he says he wants to help women and people of color develop is, after all, a very specific one, involving writing overly long thinkpieces about Society, often premised on the unprovable conceit that an abstract concept is dead or dying. In the last half-year the only cover story a woman has written for The Atlantic is “The Sex Recession,” a handwringy screed about how young women aren’t fucking enough. To Goldberg, the end-all be-all of journalistic success that women should be striving for appears to be having a cover story for The Atlantic called “The End Of Men” or “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” or “Marry Him!”

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It takes a certain hubris to churn out a fatally boring, loosely researched 10,000-word take (incidentally, very few stories need to be 10,000 words long, but Goldberg wouldn’t be the first to confuse length and quality) meant to be slapped on the cover of a national magazine and “drive the conversation.” It also requires a certainty that criticism will attach to your ideas and not to you, personally. It’s a hubris, or confidence, white men in media seem to have aplenty, for what should be obvious reasons. Just take a look at staff writer David Frum’s recent cover story arguing that racist immigration policies are actually good; or the one by author and journalist Charles Duhigg about why “we’re” so angry; or the one by 60 Minutes correspondent John Dickerson about how being president is hard; or the sympathetic meditation on evangelicals and Trump written by George W. Bush’s former speechwriter Michael Gerson; or that disaster by transphobic lunatic Jesse Singal, who, by the way, also thinks Goldberg is doing great.

These fatally boring stories are usually written by well-known people with fancy platforms—people who are connected, and who use those connections, and who have reason to think that even if their provocations do spark backlash, it will be limited to discourse and debate, not very real threats to their personal well-being. The Atlantic has non-white guy writers on staff who could be writing better cover stories than John Dickerson or Michael Gerson or fucking Jesse Singal—and for that matter, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote the seminal magazine story of the decade for The Atlantic, though he’s since left—but, as Goldberg makes it sound anyhow, they’re just not there yet.

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Getting there evidently means being willing to write grossly engorged and fairly basic takes about the death of some abstract concept or aspect of society that reveals something about “us.” This dynamic becomes clearer when you consider who the “us” here is referring to. For The Atlantic, it seems to broadly be wealthy white people; more specifically, especially when it comes to 10,000-word cover stories, it seems to be people like Jeffrey Goldberg. Diversity is about more than training people who check off certain boxes to write like an old white man; it’s about being open to those people’s ideas and their experiences and letting them report on what interests them in ways that interest them, rather than, say, writing vague and expansive polemics about how democracy is dying or what have you because that is what a serious story is supposed to be. Goldberg, though, to all evidence, wants grossly engorged opinion pieces about how some aspect of society is dying and what it reveals about or means to an “us” that can be best described as wealthy, white, connected older men—an exclusive group characterized by, among other things, not having to think too hard about what diversity actually means beyond it giving one the ability to brag about newsroom gender percentages to a reporter.

If Jeffrey Goldberg simply thought that the problem of having so many white men writing Atlantic cover stories was a question of opportunity, he could have said that he wants to fix that by hiring any number of talented and capable non-white men to write them. (More than that he could have done so in the two-and-a-half years he’s been running the magazine.) That’s not what he said. Instead, he delivered a patronizing, fogey-ish monologue about “1,200-word web pieces” and “potential” and “creating the space for more women to develop,” in service of training people to think and write in a way that he deems acceptable.

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Sometimes people say exactly what they mean, and in doing so reveal problems and solutions they never intended to. The problem isn’t that not enough non-white male writers have proven themselves worthy of filling the pages of The Atlantic, but that Jeffrey Goldberg, in executing his specific vision for the magazine, has determined them not to be so. That’s a problem that comes with a simple solution.