THE ATLANTIC’S EDITOR-IN-CHIEF JEFFREY GOLDBERG WARNS NEWSROOM DECAY IS HOW ‘DEMOCRACY DECOMPOSES:’

We work very hard to produce only highest-quality journalism. Sometimes, we don’t hit the mark, but not for lack of trying. Our operating theory is so simple. The only way to get people to pay for your product is to make a great product, something they can’t find elsewhere. To do this, we have to have the best journalists. Readers become our subscribers when they realize that they will find illuminating and delightful stories, written by journalists at the very top of their game, on a regular basis.

How worried are you about the decline we are seeing transpire in many legacy newsrooms? And what effect will that have on society?

It’s awful. To look at cities that used to be served by newsrooms of 300, or 500 journalists, now reduced to virtually nothing, is terrible. This is the way democracy decomposes. We’re sleepwalking into an absolute disaster. Jefferson had it right almost 250 years ago when he said he’d rather have newspapers without a government than a government without newspapers.

I wasn’t expecting Jeffrey Goldberg of all people to be advocating for a massive reduction in the size of government, but I’m happy to see him advocating for America to return to its libertarian roots. However, “newsroom decay” (a phrase written by CNN alum Oliver Darcy in his headline, not Goldberg) happens in a variety of ways, not just in shrinking the quantity of the manpower inside of the newsroom.

Another leading cause are weak editors who let their young uber-woke, and very emotionally brittle staffers wag the dog, and that’s something that Goldberg knows quite a bit about. Two years before the New York Times and other publications began their Marxist struggle sessions (leading to last week’s freakout at CBS News over Tony Dokoupil performing journalism), Goldberg hired and then almost immediately fired Kevin Williamson when his female employees dived for the fainting couches over the never-Trumper’s views on abortion. As Kurt Schlichter tweeted at the time:

And while the Atlantic appeared to have survived 2020 without a struggle session on par with it collective 2018 meltdown, that year saw the magazine infected with a massive case of Covid-driven paranoia (in addition to its already dangerous levels of TDS), as Christine Rosen wrote in Commentary two years ago: The Atlantic’s Nervous Breakdown.

The Atlantic launched the COVID Tracking Project to count the number of cases and deaths when they were not readily available, and published innumerable stories, articles, items, and memoirs on the subject. Ed Yong won a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting for his COVID stories.

But with Trump out of the White House and pandemic fatigue becoming more fully entrenched among the public, subscription growth has slowed significantly. According to Byers, “even with last year’s substantial surge, the magazine had lost more than $20 million and was on track to lose another $10 million [in 2021].” The magazine laid off 68 employees in the spring of 2020, though they were mostly in the public-events area—understandable, given that there were no public events to be staged in a country in lockdown.

Twenty million is a drop in the bucket for Laurene Jobs, but nobody likes to lose that kind of money. Chris Hughes, the Facebook billionaire whose purchase of the New Republic was the original model for the Laurene Jobs play, found that magazine’s annual losses a quarter of that size intolerable and sold it off after only a couple of years.

Those numbers might help explain why the overwhelming experience of reading the Atlantic in 2021 and the first weeks of 2022 is like being a therapist whose severely anxious patient flops on the couch and delivers a monologue about the tortures of his daily life.

Or perhaps we should view the Atlantic community of editors, writers, and readers as a kind of daily group-therapy session. Consider that the “Most Popular” articles on the magazine’s website on a late-December day featured one potentially heartening story about COVID—“Omicron is the beginning of the end”—followed by several more that promised only horror: “How Long Does Omicron Take to Make you Sick?” “Is Omicron Milder?” A week earlier the magazine had warned, ominously, “America Is Not Ready for Omicron.”

And lest one think this tone infects only reporting on COVID, another popular recent piece promised to explain how “We’re Heading Toward a Very American Climate Tragedy.” An earlier one highlighted the looming menace of . . . rocks: “The Terrifying Warning Lurking in the Earth’s Ancient Rock Record.” Even our cars are threatening: “Big Cars Are Killing Americans” was another headline of late. The print magazine strikes a similar tone: A 2021 cover story about foreign autocrats warned that “The Bad Guys Are Winning.”

Fortunately for Goldberg, he’ll know in about a month if his subscription numbers will see a significant upturn next year.