Starting today, Jeffrey Goldberg is the new editor in chief of The Atlantic, filling a position left open by the departure of James Bennet to The New York Times in May. Goldberg is the 14th EIC in the paper’s 159-year history.
Goldberg has been with The Atlantic since 2007, when he joined as a national correspondent, creating hundreds of features and reported pieces and 11 cover stories during that time. His most recent, an April cover on “The Obama Doctrine,” was turned into a live talk between Bennet and Goldberg, in retrospect a chief-to-chief conversation.
Before joining The Atlantic, Goldberg had been a a Middle East and Washington correspondent at The New Yorker. He started out as a police reporter at The Washington Post and also worked as a columnist for The Jerusalem Post, New York bureau chief of the Forward and a writer for The New York Times magazine.
Although Goldberg has been with The Atlantic for almost a decade, he will be “figuring out the place” for the next two months, telling The Atlantic’s Krishnadev Calamur, “I want to try and sit with everyone and really just interview them about what they do and what they want to do; treat it like a story for a couple of months.”
As Atlantic chairman David Bradley describes in a memo to staff, his and president Bob Cohn‘s search began with a list of 500 suggestions. “For this moment in time, I think Bob and I know the next-generation leadership at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and so forth as well as do those publications’ own owners,” he writes. “But, at least for us, Jeff is something set apart. At the outset of the search, one of the nation’s legendary editors asked: ‘Have you focused on Jeff Goldberg? There’s no greater journalist writing in the country today.'”
For them, Goldberg’s journalism was greatest selling point. “Jeff was first a great journalist. He is, in himself, the property we prize. Our confidence in Jeff is that, understanding talent, Jeff will lead a great-talent enterprise,” writes Bradley.
As Bradley tells it, though he and Cohn were locked in on their decision, Goldberg took a bit of convincing. “In the end, the editor appointment was a harder call for Jeff than it was for Bob and me,” writes Bradley.
As editor in chief, Goldberg, who reports to Cohn, will be responsible for the publication’s print, digital and video efforts.
