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Today:
On The Rebooting Show: A conversation with The Atlantic’s CEO, Nick Thompson, on scenario planning for 2031
Rally Rd. is a marketplace where investors buy shares in rare collectible assets. Inside the app, compliance rules limit what they can say. So the real selling happens in their newsletter, Shiny Things, a weekly long-form essay that runs on beehiiv and never actually asks readers to open the app.
The strategy, when paired with beehiiv’s all-in-one growth platform, is clearly working: newsletter subscribers convert at 3X the rate of standard users, with a 20%+ lift in investment behavior and stronger portfolio retention.
And between Q4 2025 and Q1 2026, two major institutional partnerships opened tens of millions of dollars in tier-one supply, both attributed directly to the newsletter.
Owned audience, built right, doesn’t just drive engagement. It drives businesses to new levels of success.
“AI is transformative, totally amazing”
The cliche about plans is that they’re usually worthless but the planning is valuable. But at a time like now, media leaders need to have hypotheses of where the information space is going and a theory of the case for how their organizations will thrive in whatever environment they find themselves operating in.
The old maxim of focus on what you can control is nice in theory, but media is downstream of tech, so the focus needs to start there. Nick Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, sketched out three scenarios for me during our conversation at TRB Audience Summit earlier this month.
AI plateaus. The maximalists got drunk on Koolaid again and overestimated its capabilities. AI turns out to be a fundamentally “normal” technology that improves efficiency and reshapes but doesn’t disrupt incumbent businesses..
AI fundamentally overturns the information economy. Utter chaos. The web breaks down as the organizing system for information. People consume through new devices or ambient interfaces. Publishers enter a Mad Max situation where they scramble to build craft businesses around events, print and direct channels.
Massive disruption, with a recognizable journalism business remaining. AI turns out to be an interface shift as profound as the shift to the internet. Top tier publishers like The Atlantic invest in reporting AI can’t replicate, stronger connections between readers and writers, and direct distribution through its app, newsletters and print. It uses AI internally, earns what it can from the existing web and partners with emerging platforms to build new revenue streams.
Nick is betting on scenario 3 as the most likely while preparing for the other two.
“My view on AI is it is wildly transformative, totally amazing,” he said. “And we in journalism, in the knowledge economy, are at the center. The businesses that get disrupted are the ones that are closest to the way it was trained. We’re very close to it.”
From that strategy has flowed tactical decisions, including:
Bet on talent: The Atlantic has been on a hiring spree of top-tier journalists, including a new swathe announced today. “You recognize that AI’s going to change the media economy to even more empower individuals. So you try to change your institution to retain the finest individuals.”
Hedge on print: The Atlantic has expanded from 10 to 12 issues per year. Weirdly, a print strategy is now derisking in a world of agentic AI where personal assistants become the interface and the digital attention economy shrinks. “In a world where you can’t control digital distribution, the U.S. Postal Service is pretty great.”
Do the AI basics. Nick uses a bot to run the company, getting summaries of product and engineering discussions to flag areas that need his input. The Atlantic is automating parts of subscription marketing to boost viral stories in paid advertising on platforms.
Ally with aligned AI. The Atlantic has struck a deal with Parallel to signal micropayments bills to agents coming to ingest The Atlantic’s journalism. “It’s not, ‘Pay us and we’ll shut up,’ it’s, ‘Build a system that keeps a free, open, thriving media going, and it’s better for you, and let’s build that.’”
Go multimodal. The Atlantic has invested more in video, with a new YouTube show featuring David Brooks and “The Most Interesting Thing in AI,” in which Nick interviews leading AI figures. “We’re obviously gonna do more video, because people love to consume video. And younger people love to consume video.”
Nick identifies several moves already underway:
Expanded print from 10 to 12 issues. He explicitly ties this to uncertainty over digital distribution.
Partnered with Parallel. He describes it as a service that supplies information to AI agents and returns micropayments to journalists—an experiment in how The Atlantic could earn money beyond human visits to its website.
Used AI in internal operations. Through Glean, Nick runs daily bots across product and engineering discussions to identify decisions that need his attention. He also uses it to gather information colleagues would otherwise chase through multiple emails.
Automated parts of subscription marketing. They monitor stories’ subscription conversion performance. When a story crosses a threshold, AI feeds material into their Facebook paid marketing program.
Built his own video and podcast operation. Nick uses it to learn platform mechanics firsthand, including how informal videos perform on LinkedIn versus more produced videos on YouTube. He says that business also generates money for The Atlantic.
“You’re going to see a whole bunch of new media startups popping up that figure out how to use AI as a reporting tool, figure out how to make money in new ways that we haven’t thought of before, and thrive,” Nick said. “You’re going to have the barbelling of individuals and established organizations. You’re going to have a lot of downward pressure on companies in the middle: local newspapers, etc. And then I think you’re going to see a bunch of thriving startups.”
Troy and I ponder whether we’re in the midst of an interface shift with the mania around AI personal agents like Instinct and Meta’s Muse. Publishers will assume a familiar role as bystanders this battle plays out between massive tech companies. Even a newcomer like Instinct has a massive war chest with a $10 billion valuation. The cost of serving users with these agents – and the obvious privacy qualms of sharing with Meta (!) all your personal information – will mean that the AI companies will focus on their preferred form of advertising: taking a cut off transactions. For media, the downstream impact is people will be used to agents taking things off their plate, further eroding their already weak interface power. Publishers will increasingly be data suppliers. Listen
Plus: Breaker’s Lachlan Cartwright joins us to discuss Redbird’s deal to acquire a majority stake in Puck, Paramount’s takeover of CNN as part of the Warner Bros deal and Troy inquiries about his love life. Watch
Send me a note with your feedback by hitting reply. For sponsorship information, contact Richard Jamieson at [email protected].