Monday 7th December: Wired's Nick Thomson to join The Atlantic as CEO

December 07, 2020

Good morning! Today's Media Roundup is brought to you by Peter.

Writers and editors of the world rejoice. The search for a new CEO is over at the Atlantic and the 163-year old publication has recruited Nick Thomson to take over.

It's not often a wordsmith rises to the very top in publishing, money matters too much for that. But with a 15-year career at Conde Nast that saw him introduce paywalls at the New Yorker and Wired, Nick Thomson has a unique blend of content and commercial skills. And The Atlantic's backers - Lauren Powel Jobs and David G. Bradley - have put their faith firmly in his editorial chops.

“Nick is singular; we’ve seen no one like him,” they wrote in an email to staff. “​Nick brings a surround-sound coverage of relevant experience. Having been an editor, he is committed to the undergirding tenets of our work — superior editorial standards and complete editorial independence.”

We've been massive fans of Nick ever since Esther interviewed him for the podcast in 2019 (long before that actually) and we absolutely love this appointment.

The numbers are in on the “Der Standard PUR” subscription. With a 7 EUR a month ad-free option that doesn’t track users, Austria's Der Standard has reduced ad blocking, created new digital products that leave its journalism free to read and made the newspaper site GDPR compliant without risking ad revenue. Nice work.

This article from The Conversation argues that recent structural changes may finally be addressing some of the underlying problems with public interest journalism. We agree, government initiatives to stimulate public interest news have been good. But relying on the government's recently announced Digital Markets Unit to 'help contain the rise of the super-platforms', we're less convinced.

A new report from the Reuters Institute for Journalism looks at what we know and what we don't know about trust in news. It also examines what's contributing to an almost universal decline in trust and how media organizations are trying to fix it. Spoiler: Platforms and politicians make an appearance.

This week's podcast:

This special episode includes the audio of our launch presentation for the Media Moments 2020 report. We examine one key stat of each section within the report, from diversity and advertising to platforms, trust and more. In the second half, the team is joined by a panel featuring The Atlantic's Jemima Villanueva, Permutive's Aly Nurmohamed and The Week Junior's Andrea Barbalich.

We've been busy recently. Beyond the daily newsletter and the weekly podcast, we published and launched our annual Media Moments report and have started shortlisting for the Publisher Podcast Awards. Keep us going with a Ko-fi contribution... a tier-two beer with a scotch egg on the side would be amazing 💛