Going Deep   

Can a magazine featuring serious, long-form writing not only survive but make money in an era of celebrity and sound bite? The owner of The Atlantic is betting heavily that it can.

THE OFFICES OF The Atlantic Monthly are quiet on a sunny weekday afternoon, but for the creaking of the tongue-and-groove hardwood floor under Cullen Murphy's feet.
Murphy has offered a tour of the fifth floor at 77 N. Washington Street, a rehabbed factory with scalloped terra-cotta ceilings and a burnished copper fire door. The grimy waist-to-ceiling windows look out over the wildly over-budget Charles River bridge and transit project, the Big Dig as it is known here in Boston. In another five years, if construction is completed on schedule, 77 N. Washington St. will become very fashionable and expensive, and The Atlantic will probably have to move.
Murphy enjoys showing people around. In addition to serving as managing editor of the magazine and as a felicitous contributor, Murphy is its unofficial historian and archivist. He is responsible for having retrieved much of what is displayed on the walls.
In the corner of one room, on rough paper browned with age, is a framed galley proof of a poem, "A-Wishing Well," signed "OK, Robert Frost" at the bottom. In a hallway is a photograph of Edward Weeks, one of the longest-serving Atlantic editors of the past century, standing behind a seated President John Kennedy at the famed White House performance by cellist Pablo Casals.
There is framed correspondence from Henry James, Margaret Mead and Admiral Robert Peary. Murphy stops at a letter from Madame Chiang Kai-shek, who developed The Atlantic habit while a student at Wellesley College. He points to the date, 12/10/37. In the midst of being chased all over China by the Imperial Army of Japan, she wrote to make sure her subscription would follow her.
David G. Bradley, the owner of The Atlantic, and Michael Kelly, his editor, would like to recapture among readers the urgency of Madame Chiang. They have established a mission audacious in its simplicity, its fidelity to the magazine's history and its rejection of modern magazine trends. The Atlantic has been and ought to be a magazine of the utmost editorial and literary excellence, they say.
To this end, Bradley and Kelly have fitted the 144-year-old magazine with a new design beginning with the February issue. They have undertaken a vigorous drive for advertising. Their editorial ambitions are expansive. Should they succeed, The Atlantic would become profitable for the first time in many years, circulation would increase and the photographs and correspondence of contemporary admirers would take their places among the museum pieces on the walls.
The design change made news, most of it favorable. The New York Times, the Boston Globe and others liked the new look. But the stories were of the kind usually written about The Atlantic; deference to the storied reputation of the magazine is paid up high as if to cushion the staggering skepticism that follows.
The Atlantic Monthly, the common wisdom in some of the coverage ran, is a fusty artifact of an era when folks had little better to do in their spare time than to curl up for a few hours to ruminate upon treatises of arcana, oblique essays and poetry. The American magazine buyer has fled the classic American general-interest magazine, leaving the ones left--The Atlantic, The New Yorker and Harper's--struggling. Putting millions of dollars behind the conviction that more subscribers will spend more time with your magazine if only it were better is damned admirable, these critics have always concluded, in a hopeless and pathetic sort of way.
"Atlantic is a niche publication for people who like to read," says Peter Carlson, who covers magazines for the Washington Post and who passed on writing about the new design. "How much more are you going to be able to do to enhance the reading? Will more beautiful covers and fancier paper draw people in? I'm not so sure."
This uncertainty is engaged in at no cost to Carlson. Bradley put up $11 million to buy The Atlantic from Mortimer Zuckerman in September 1999. He has since spent more than $3 million to hire new editorial and advertising staff and to make over the magazine. He is prepared to endure several years of multimillion-dollar losses. All spent in the unshakable certainty that Carlson and the other doubters are wrong.
"I am going to lead with product and see if commerce follows it," Bradley says in a telephone interview from the Caribbean island of St. Barthelemy. Bradley is hosting one of the several all-expenses-paid retreats he has organized to bring together his business and editorial staff and potential advertisers. "I don't need 5 million subscribers. Just half a million subscribers who are earnest and who love to read. I am utterly convinced that it will work. I love the magazine."

BRADELY, 47, CAME TO magazines as a way of satisfying part of a schoolboy ambition. He graduated from Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C., where Chelsea Clinton went to school, then went on to earn degrees at Swarthmore College and Harvard Business School. He enrolled at Georgetown University Law School.
"I was far too educated with no sense of my own proportionality," Bradley says. "I had an idea I would become the youngest U.S. senator ever in the state of Maryland."
His sense that he would have been a lousy lawyer swamped his political aspirations. He left Georgetown at the end of his first year and returned home to Washington in the late 1970s, where his father had begun a nonprofit think tank. (He eventually graduated from law school.) Bradley liked the research model but thought he could make money with it. He began cold-calling companies from his parents' apartment at the Watergate, offering to do research for a fee. Bradley reasoned that companies would pay to have a firm wade through the federal bureaucracy and retrieve information valuable to them.
"My idea was to build the business quickly, flip it to make some money and finance a run for office," Bradley says. "It is the great disappointment of my life that it didn't happen. And it isn't going to happen."
What happened instead was that Bradley's Advisory Board Co. grew to 1,400 employees over the next 15 years. He and partner Jeff Zients formed a research division called the Corporate Executive Board Co. When they took the company public in 1999 Bradley earned more than $300 million. Within the next two years Bradley hopes to take public or sell the Advisory Board to develop his media company.
With plenty of time to think on a flight to Vietnam in 1994, Bradley came to realize that even if he were never to become the youngest senator of any state, he could use his business acumen to participate in the policy world. He had always been a reader of the American magazines that dealt seriously with policy matters, like The Atlantic. He had taken note of the energy brought to The New Republic in 1996 when another Washingtonian, fast-rising reporter and columnist Michael Kelly, became editor. "I found the idea of owning a magazine intoxicating," Bradley says.
Prominent magazine broker and consultant Richard LePere helped Bradley find National Journal. The fit seemed perfect. National Journal mirrored his own company, producing serious journalism for a specific readership at a premium subscription. Bradley paid $11 million to Times Mirror in 1997 for the magazine and its sister publications, including Government Executive magazine, The Almanac of American Politics, The Hotline and Congress Daily.
While the negotiations for National Journal went on, Michael Kelly was writing himself out of a job as editor of The New Republic. In his 10 months at the magazine, Kelly had used the TRB column he wrote to sharply criticize President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore. Kelly, who is notorious for his antipathy toward Clinton, says that his Gore columns did him in with magazine owner Martin Peretz, who is close to the former vice president.
"As it started to get closer and closer to the bone with Gore, it made Marty more and more unhappy," Kelly says. "I think it made his wife even more unhappy. I can imagine their discussions at the dinner table. At any rate, I was fired."
Bradley invited Kelly to his offices at the Watergate. Bradley had determined that National Journal needed nothing so much as an infusion of excitement in the writing. To the solid reporting, he intended to add columnists for the first time: Kelly on politics, Stuart Taylor on legal affairs and Bill Powers on the media.
Kelly wasn't keen on writing for just 7,000 subscribers. Bradley encouraged Kelly to continue writing his other column, which the Washington Post Writers' Group delivers to about 50 newspapers around the country. What he offered to Kelly wasn't simply another writing job. Within months, Kelly was editor of National Journal.
"He got me up to his offices for five or six hours on the first day and another three or four hours on Sunday," Kelly says. "He told me he was going to build a media company and that it was going to be great. He told me not to even consider the offer unless I planned to be at the table with him, to devote my full energy and passion to the larger enterprise. In other words, to sign up for a great adventure. The man has a great sincerity. He really believes what he's saying."

WHEN KELLY SIGNED ON for his great adventure, he had no idea that Bradley's next purchase would be The Atlantic. In the spring of 1998, when LePere first suggested the idea to Bradley, he wasn't sure Zuckerman, who also owns New York's Daily News and U.S. News & World Report, was prepared to sell. Zuckerman told Bradley after the sale that he wanted to simplify his life, to focus on his two major publications. However, it took 18 months for the two men to agree on the $11 million price in August 1999.
The staff of The Atlantic didn't know about the negotiations. Not until Editor William Whitworth learned the Wall Street Journal was prepared to run a story about the sale were the rumors he had heard confirmed. And only then did Zuckerman tell Whitworth. "I didn't know Michael Kelly, and I didn't know David Bradley," Whitworth says.
The Atlantic had for several years been Zuckerman's third consideration, well after the Daily News and U.S. News. Advertising had languished, circulation stagnated and the magazine lost money. As his worry over the fortunes of the magazine grew, Whitworth says he began to feel perpetually weary. Still, he wasn't quite prepared to have a job for which he was respected and beloved wrested away from him.
"Bill Whitworth is one of the great magazine editors of our time," Murphy says. "He means a great deal, personally and professionally, to anyone who has ever worked for him. There was concern for what would become of him and what would become of the magazine."
It is through Murphy, conservator of The Atlantic tradition, that you begin to understand the depth of the concern. The history on the office walls tells some of it. It is there in the hundreds of forest-green bound volumes of the magazine. There is a privilege and a responsibility to be The Atlantic Monthly, not quite, but almost separate from the business of being The Atlantic Monthly.
"The image of the magazine is not what the reality of the magazine is," Murphy says, the two obelisk-shaped concrete spans of the new bridge rising up in the distance from his office window. "We are going to change. The magazine has always changed. But that part of the magazine, what we think we're all about, a place that takes ideas that haven't been given their due and give them that, that hasn't changed."
Murphy's modesty is in keeping with the historical tone of The Atlantic. Its first issue, in November 1857, came wrapped in a brown cover decorated only with a small engraving of John Winthrop, founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In addition to its title, the cover read, "Devoted to Literature, Art and Politics."
The Atlantic, in fact, had the intellectual backing of towering literary and philosophical figures of the time. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and The Atlantic's first editor, James Russell Lowell, all lived in and around Boston. In his first volume on the history of The Atlantic, Ellery Sedgwick, grandson of one of the magazine's editors, wrote that these men were part of a movement to create a vehicle for a distinctly American literature. At the same time, they believed American intellectuals were responsible for playing a leading part in discussing the great issues of American democracy, particularly the question of slavery.
"The founding of The Atlantic Monthly in 1857 marked the high tide of the Boston mind," Van Wyck Brooks has written.
To Murphy, a high point came during the Progressive era, from 1890 to about 1920, when The Atlantic wrote earnestly about immigration, suffrage and the emergence of the United States as a strapping, young world power. The names on the cover of its 100th anniversary issue in 1957--Ernest Hemingway, James Thurber, Carl Jung, Robert Frost, Isak Dinesen and Thornton Wilder--suggest the reach of The Atlantic throughout the 20th century.
The Atlantic has earned 13 National Magazine Awards, including one for general excellence in 1993, three each for reporting and public interest, and two each for fiction and essays and criticism. The magazine won most recently in 1999 for "Hymn," a lyrical and closely observed essay in which poet Emily Hiestand recalls a year she spent worshiping with an all-black congregation. As for the two other prominent general interest magazines, The New Yorker has collected 25 National Magazine Awards, Harper's 11.
On one of the Atlantic's walls is a series of framed covers that seem as vivid today as they were in the early 1980s: William Greider's "The Education of David Stockman," a 1981 revelation of the doubts of a chief economic adviser about Ronald Reagan, the president for whom he toiled; "The Years of Lyndon Johnson," a 1982 excerpt of the Pulitzer Prize-winning first volume of Robert Caro's biography; and "Lake Wobegon Days," which introduced the country to the regional humorist Garrison Keillor.
All of these issues were created during the heady first years of William Whitworth, who had brought a painstakingly rigorous, collaborative editing method with him from The New Yorker. With the blessing of Zuckerman, Whitworth hired noted magazine designer Walter Bernard to overhaul the look of the magazine. Graphics, from arresting covers to color throughout the book, would be placed in the service of the finest writing. Whitworth was responding to the complaint lodged with every editor since Lowell, that for all of its noble intention, The Atlantic was a bit, you know, dull. Circulation grew to 450,000 from 325,000 in the early 1980s. But over the past several years it became clear to Whitworth that he wasn't going to get the public relations and advertising support he had at the beginning. When the potential new owner and editor came to analyze issues of The Atlantic over the past couple of years, they were brought up short by long centerpiece stories written in a form that Kelly came to call homework.
"We weren't always able to compete and pay top dollar for the best work," Whitworth says. "Not all smart people who know these things can write about them, and not all great writers know a lot. The combination is rare and expensive. I plead guilty to running stories that might have been too long by modern lights."

IN A SWIFT STROKE both symbolic and practical, Bradley and Kelly allayed fears for the future of The Atlantic by naming Whitworth editor emeritus. For the first four or five months, Whitworth stayed on, helping to guide the transition. Kelly still consults with Whitworth and has him edit an occasional piece. (Whitworth says Zuckerman offered him the post of editorial director of his remaining publications, but the editor turned it down before becoming The Atlantic's editor emeritus.)
In the first days after the purchase, both Bradley and Kelly scheduled group and individual meetings with each of the staff members. They kept the entire office staff. And they bid Murphy to contact the vast stable of writers upon which the magazine depends and to assure them their best work would be welcome. "They took pains to get to know everyone. They learned how everything worked. It became clear there was a good relationship between old and new," Murphy says. "And in every speech Mike repeated the same points. To create a magazine open to almost any subject, almost calling out to writers to write on a grand scale, with reasonableness, sensibility and taste, where there is a love of language and beauty in technique."
To proceed in much the way The Atlantic has always proceeded is oddly reassuring to Kelly. Any other strategy--shortening stories, adding lists, chasing trends--would doom the magazine. And why do it when people love to read? Look at book sales; look particularly at nonfiction book sales, he says. Look at the drive at the top newspapers in the country to showcase long, narrative writing. Readers, real readers, love stories, Kelly says.
"To believe anything else is to assume the world has changed in some fundamental way, and then you can look at The Atlantic as some sort of anachronism," Kelly says. "Not only is it a myth that people don't want to read, but it is a silly and unthinking myth."
Kelly spent the last half of 2000 planning for a new design to accommodate a 50 percent increase in the editorial budget promised by Bradley. Kelly hired Mary Parsons, who had been with a Washington design firm, to shape the new look.
"I was a good candidate for The Atlantic," she says, smiling. "I never picked it up. It wasn't on my list of must-read magazines, not that I get a chance to read many magazines."
Oddly enough, for a magazine thought to be stodgy, Parsons says, she discovered one revered by illustrators as a last bastion. It was also a magazine in which graphics had run amok, with the look varying wildly from issue to issue. In the past each editorial department governed its own design. With Parsons as art director, The Atlantic will have a single, unifying graphic philosophy. "This is a magazine for reading. The design and the illustration should address the serious reader and seduce them in," Parsons says. "We aren't moving the magazine very far from where it has been in the past."
The first newly designed issue, in February, featured a cover illustration by Bill Nelson of President Clinton in a tux doffing a top hat. The cover introduced 13 short essays as well as a full-page illustration by political cartoonist Pat Oliphant on Clinton and his legacy. The magazine opens with essays drawn together under a single heading, Notes & Dispatches, and closes with Books & Critics, the most substantial book section the magazine has carried since the 1950s. The nameplate features fattened letters that spell out Atlantic, subordinating the tiny word Monthly beneath it. The magazine no longer lists all of its main features on the cover, but teases to the centerpiece. The rest of the design follows suit, creating a magazine that appears simpler, cleaner and easier to read.
Kelly made a point of telling advertisers that Bradley was spending about half a million dollars a year to print The Atlantic on a heavier paper of a more-brilliant white. Parsons says Kelly drove her crazy with typefaces before settling on an old-face Bodoni he describes as clean and accessible.
"For the first time I had the feeling that I could see it, this beautiful woman with a fine bone structure," Bradley says. "The design of the magazine had been so compromised to my eye."
Next month, in the May issue, The Atlantic intends to showcase an additional piece that will be packaged as an insert. The editors expect to offer the added work, stories of at least 15,000 words, quarterly under the direction of Senior Editor Robert Vare. Kelly hired Vare, who edited pieces Kelly wrote for The New Yorker, specifically to handle long-form narrative writing for the magazine.
The separate packaging is to illustrate to loyal readers that nothing is being taken away from the magazine, Vare says; something extra is being offered. "I want The Atlantic to be the home for narrative nonfiction," he says. "Not only the champion of narratives but of wonderful fiction as well. I fell in love with magazines in the '60s, Esquire and Rolling Stone. Writers like Gay Talese and Michael Herr. I'd like to sort of recapture the feeling I had when I was a reader then."
William Langewiesche will play a central role in the narrative renaissance at The Atlantic. Last August, the magazine featured on its cover Langewiesche's gritty and relentless account of shipbreaking in India. The story ran 19 magazine pages and at the urging of Kelly took Langewiesche around the world and through the toxic bowels of old ships torn apart for scrap. In December Langewiesche wrote for 22 pages about Robert Parker Jr., whose wine journal, The Wine Advocate, has utterly changed the international wine business.
At its very best, The Atlantic employs writers who are engaged in the world and who can express their engagement in prose that is lean and muscular, Langewiesche is certain. Those publishers who say people do not have time to read pay their own mediocrity an enormous compliment. Their argument is intellectually weak and self-fulfilling, he says.
"You don't know how lucky it is to be writing in English at this time in history in a powerful, rich country where an unprecedented number of people are educated," he says. "I deeply, deeply believe people will respond to work carried out at a very high level. This is the perfect moment for The Atlantic."
A subscriber might be the beneficiary of all of these changes at The Atlantic, but an advertiser is the real target. Peter Carlson might not care about whiter, heavier paper, but a company that wants its message to jump off a page does. While both Bradley and Kelly understand The Atlantic has never been or is ever likely to be a cash cow, both are convinced the magazine can make money. Hence the island advertising retreats. And a possible subscription rate increase sometime in the future.
"We have 450,000 subscribers. At 600,000 subscribers we'd be utterly transformed," Bradley says. "We're at 500 pages of advertising a year. At 650 pages, we are utterly transformed. We charge $12 a year for a subscription and break even or lose money on each and every subscriber. At $19 a year we'd be utterly transformed."
Samir Husni, a leading authority on the American magazine industry, finds Bradley's and Kelly's ambitions as breathtaking as they are unconvincing. The Atlantic is trying to convince advertisers it remains a vibrant general-interest magazine as it retools itself as a specialty publication, says Husni, who heads the magazine program at the University of Mississippi. The new owner shouldn't be panicked that its readers will abandon the magazine, he says. But Husni doubts that trumpeting more and longer reading will attract new subscribers or new advertising accounts.
"Don't get me wrong, I love the magazine. I read it. It's a fine magazine," Husni says. "Any experimentation that doesn't kill the patient is a good thing. It's not the magazine itself but the whole idea of playing both sides of the fence. General interest or specialty, at some point you must choose."
But Bradley has paid for the privilege not to choose. He intends to leave The Atlantic a vital enterprise when he is finished, vital in spirit as well as in health.
In 1857, the founders of The Atlantic set out to champion American letters in both journalism and literature, Bradley says. The magazine was to be the foremost progressive voice in New England, if not the country. Each issue was to be an expression of the very best of the American mind. "I keep thinking, what's the great analog to this in 2001, the great contribution we need to make? Have we found the worthy thing yet?" Bradley says. "If we hold our past out as a standard, I wonder if we haven't underserved the brand."