Inside ‘Signalgate’: How The Atlantic navigated a national security scandal

When government officials accidentally included Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, in a Signal group chat discussing U.S. military plans, all hell broke loose. The Atlantic’s CEO, Nicholas Thompson, joins Rapid Response to discuss the scandal now known as “Signalgate,” revealing insider details about how the story came to be and sharing how the publication thinks about fostering its success as a business while maintaining editorial independence.

This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by Robert Safian, former editor-in-chief of Fast Company. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.

I have to ask you about one of the biggest news stories of the year: The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, included in a group chat on Signal by U.S. National Security Adviser Mike Waltz. Other leaders, including the secretary of Defense, are there. Sensitive military plans are discussed. When did this first come to you? Are you consulted in advance by the editorial team on how to approach coverage, or do you read about it once it breaks for the rest of us?

I’m not consulted. I don’t know what they’re going to publish today. I don’t know what the next cover of The Atlantic is. For a story like this, I certainly knew that something important was going to be published, because there’s a lot that you have to do as an organization when something like this happens—you have to make sure your comms officials and others are ready to go. So I knew that something was going to happen, but I read it maybe right about when everybody else did. In fact, I believe one of the first five people to read the story was my 11-year-old son because I was with him. So right before it went live on the site, we got to read the story.

Even after I read it, I didn’t realize the impact it would have. When we published the second story, and we published the chat transcripts, I was on an airplane when that went live. The second I read that, I knew that was going to be massive because of the texture, the color, and because the administration had spent the previous day saying that what was in the chats was not classified, and that The Atlantic was mischaracterizing it. So, it was very clear that that was incorrect, and that meant the story was going to go wild.

I know there’s the story that obviously brought a lot of attention, but the general environment since Trump took office again has been a high degree of turmoil. Is that turmoil good for your business? I mean, your audience is more eager to be part of it.

Our business is subscriptions, and clearly more people really respect our brand. They care a lot about trust. They like fact-check journalism. We stand for all those things, and subscriptions are up substantially. Advertising is more complicated, because advertisers don’t want to be around political tension. So there’s some headwinds, right? Our advertising numbers are terrific. They’re up above target, but we’re not crashing our advertising numbers the way we were not long ago. Then the more interesting thing is if you look at the media ecosystem from 2016 to 2020, there’s a real business risk. I haven’t done the analysis, but if you were to do a regression analysis of how much publications leaned into being resistance publications and their long-term economic prospects, I think there’s probably a negative correlation.

I think that there’s some deleterious things that happen to your publication if you become a resistance publication, and it affects your brand. It affects your readership. It affects the way social media algorithms work. It tunes your audience in a way that probably isn’t helpful. Now, that’s not a risk for The Atlantic because we are so at our core or founding statements as we are of no party or clique. We would never become a resistance publication, and it’s so counter to the way Jeff Goldberg and the editorial team see the world. They would 100% have published that story about Joe Biden. If Donald Trump does something that they think is amazing, they’ll write a story that says he’s amazing.

But as a general media executive perspective, I do think that there’s a temptation. There was a temptation in the first Trump administration. I think there is in the second Trump administration to eat the sugar of anti-Trump coverage, and it’s not healthy in the long run.

It’s interesting, too, because a lot of brands, they get positioned or pigeonholed as being either part of the resistance or part of MAGA, sort of one side or the other. I saw some report saying that Trump’s biggest gripe was that Waltz had your editor’s number on his phone. I could see from an editorial point of view, that’s like a badge of honor like, “Yeah, we’re in there.” From a business point of view, does your relationship with the administration get more complicated about who you can reach and what your reputation’s going to be?

Well, I don’t think there’s a huge problem for journalists reaching people in the Trump administration. You read Jonathan Lemire’s piece every day. He’s always like, “I talked to five people on the inside of this decision, all of whom requested anonymity, right?” They’re clearly talking to us. It’s no surprise that Goldberg was in Waltz’s phone. Our reporters talk to lots of people in Washington, because people in Washington care what is written about them in places that people read. So, they may denounce us and say, “It’s a horror, The Atlantic,” but God knows they’re all reading it.

From a business perspective, there are risks. There are ways the federal government could retaliate against us on a business side. You can imagine certainly with ABC, CBS. They’ve gone after the owners, and you can imagine an administration going after our owner. We’ve tried to game all this out. We’ve tried to see whether there are points of leverage. I don’t think there are any. I don’t think there are any risks, but who knows, right? The Trump administration has proved very adversarial to anybody it perceives as a critic, and who knows what happens.

You mentioned advertising dollars earlier. Is that advertising risk higher if you’re seen as hostile to Trump?

Different advertisers have different views. Some don’t care. Our readers, we have almost precisely as many Republican readers as Democratic readers. We are reaching influential and affluent and highly read, highly educated people across the political spectrum. They’re a cohort that many advertisers want to reach, and so that’s a huge plus. I do think if there was a chance we were viewed as a resistant publication, that would be very bad for advertising. But I think the actual risk is advertisers think, You really want to buy a fancy watch when you’re reading a story about bombing Yemen? No. Right?

You’re in a mood to buy a fancy watch when you’re reading a story about some entrepreneur who’s built something cool or something that puts you in a different emotional mood. So the risk is really if your coverage becomes writing about the chaos, or writing about deportations, writing about El Salvadorian prisons. You want to buy a fancy watch when you’re reading about a prison in El Salvador? No, you do not. So, it’s more of a, What is the perception of what we cover? How many stories do we put of this kind? How many people read those stories? How do you fit the ads in? Again, the interesting thing about The Atlantic is that the business choices are all downstream of the editorial choices.

Goldberg could come up here and say, “By the way, hey, Nick, we’re actually only going to be covering torture and pillaging for the next two months.” Then I would just have to figure out how to sell ads. I wouldn’t say, “Hey, can you please write some stories about small businesses?” I would sell ads to companies that want to be around torturing and pillaging. I would just figure it out. So, we’re different from publications that work in the other way.

Your aspiration is not to operate it like Jeff Bezos at The Washington Post, and say, “We should cover this.”

It’s the exact opposite. That’s why I stay out of the editorial decisions. I never want that. When I knew there was something big coming, I just called Goldberg and I said, “I don’t know what the story is. I don’t want to know what the story is, but I want you to publish it no matter what.” And I said, “I’ll stand behind you no matter what it is, and no matter what happens.”

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