In the spring of 2006, owner David Bradley surprised the publishing
world by selecting a guy with scant editing experience to be his
new editor. (Other than spending 1989-1991 as an editor at the
Washington Monthly, Mr. Bennet spent most of his career as a
reporter, covering the New York metro beat, including City Hall,
the White House, the auto industry, various campaigns and the
Middle East -- he was Jerusalem bureau chief -- for The New York
Times. He also twice served as a staff writer at the paper's Sunday
magazine, including one stint under Adam Moss -- a previous Editor
of the Year winner.) Back then, Mr. Bradley told the Times that he
believed Mr. Bennet had a "selfless nature" which would make him a
great steward of the now-152-year-old institution. He was right
about his new hire, and prescient about a coming shift in the
culture of magazines. Three years later, we're in a
post-celebrity-editor moment; gilded-glossy chiefs -- those who are
left, that is -- have become caricatures in all the wrong ways
(suddenly their imperiousness seems more about desperation than
entitlement) as they rule rapidly shrinking kingdoms.
Meanwhile, Mr. Bennet manages a rapidly expanding editorial
franchise where the talent rules. "I really do believe that we rise
or fall on the strength of our writers and bloggers," he says.
"They're the stars." He proceeds to name-check them (to list them
all would necessitate reprinting The Atlantic's masthead), raves
about his staff of editors -- and then e-mails later to
specifically emphasize that he thinks his deputy editor, Scott
Stossel, is a "genius" and his literary/national editor, Ben
Schwarz, is "brilliant."
We selected Mr. Bennet as Editor of the Year in part because of
the number of times we've found ourselves saying -- or have heard
others say -- "Did you see that story in The Atlantic about...?" Or
"Did you see what Andrew Sullivan wrote about...?" (Sullivan is the
most prominent blogger at TheAtlantic.com.) And the line-up of
heavy hitters that participated in the publication's recent two-day
"First Draft of History" conference -- including David Axelrod,
Timothy Geithner, General David Petraeus, Janet Napolitano, and Tim
Armstrong, not to mention interviewers such as Maria Bartiromo and
Charlie Gibson -- was simply astonishing. Other recently announced
editorial brand extensions include opinion aggregator TheAtlanticWire.com and an
as-yet-unnamed business-news site to be launched by newly signed
media columnist Michael Kinsley.
|
SMART MOVE |
---|
An editorial approach that embraces every platform
and uses each one to get across ideas and stories that keep people
reading, talking and arguing. |
When Mr. Bennet arrived in 2006, The Atlantic was facing some
challenging circumstances: For one thing, it had no official
editor. Managing Editor Cullen Murphy had been holding down the
fort since Michael Kelly resigned in 2002; Mr. Kelly, who missed
reporting, was then killed while on assignment in Iraq for The
Atlantic in April 2003. And just before Mr. Bennet's arrival, the
editorial staff had been uprooted from its home (since 1857) in
Boston when Mr. Bradley decided to move the magazine to D.C.;
various key staff members decided to quit rather than move.
Early on in his tenure, Mr. Bennet decided to step back and get
his staff to focus on why The Atlantic matters. He says the
magazine's mission is, simply, "advancing provocative, original
thinking on consequential issues, and doing it in the print
magazine in the way that print best supports, doing it digitally in
the way the web best supports, and also doing it in the live space
with events.
"We clarified that mission," he adds, "and we've been working
ever since then with a fair amount of discipline about what we're
trying to accomplish."