Clay Christensen: Hi, this is Clay Christensen and I want to welcome you to a podcast series we call The Disruptive Voice. In this podcast, we explore the theories that are featured in our course here at HBS, "Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise". In each episode, we'll talk to alumni of our course and others who are trying to put these theories to use in their lives and in their organizations. It's great fun to hear from them, and I hope that you find these conversations inspiring and useful. If you have an idea about a topic or a speaker that you'd like to hear more about, or if you'd like to comment on our work, please reach out to us here at the school.

Derek van Bever: Hi, I'm Derek van Bever, and you're listening to The Disruptive Voice. A great thing about being at Harvard is that we're treated to a steady stream of old friends and alumni who come back through town to teach or lecture or just to visit campus again. Bob Cohn is one such friend. Bob might not be familiar to regular listeners of the podcast, but he's very familiar to observers of the media industry, which he's participated in and led across his career. Bob began his career as a reporter at Newsweek where he covered the White House in the Supreme Court. He was a top editor at The Industry Standard and Wired Magazine before landing at the Atlantic in 2009 as the editor of Atlantic Digital. He was named President of The Atlantic in 2014. He served in that role for five years during which time the organization moved from success to success, growing revenue by 20% per year, profits by 30%, and digital audience by 30%. During Bob's tenure as President, The Atlantic was named magazine of the year by the American Society of Magazine Editors, and in 2018 Adweek named him Publishing Executive of the year.

Derek van Bever: Bob left the Atlantic earlier this year and we got to reconnect with him this past term because he's been a fellow at the Kennedy School's Institute of Politics where he just wrapped up a semester long seminar series entitled appropriately enough, Journalism and Politics At a Time of Disruption. As his time here with us comes to an end, he's considering his next career move, which we might even ask him about at the very end. But in any event, Bob, welcome to the podcast and to Harvard Business School.

Bob Cohn: Thanks for having me Derek.

Derek van Bever: Of course. We wanted to sit down with Bob before term ended, to reflect on his experiences in the media industry, including, I suppose it's inevitable, his observations on the disruption that has roiled the industry across his entire career, the turnaround that he and the management team of The Atlantic pulled off in recent years, and his observations about the future of this industry that he loves so much and about which he is kind of hopeful. So settle in and let's get into it. Bob, first of all, can't be avoided, we studied disruption in our class, but you've lived disruption. Can you tell our listeners what it's been like to go through that across these stages of your career?

Bob Cohn: Yeah. This industry, the media industry has changed so much, just the course of my professional career. When I started in the mid 1980s, basically three television networks, a couple of national newspapers, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, some big city papers and Time and Newsweek. And that was the national stage. Since then, this eruption, cable television, the internet, social and mobile platforms, podcasting and video, and the effects are across the board. In terms of the internet, especially, lots of positive effects of this disruption in terms of reader choice, ease of distribution, having all the world's information in your pocket at any given moment.

Bob Cohn: But in terms of disruption, I want to at least point to some of the word city effects. For one, it's just the collapse of the traditional business model, right? Two things happened when the internet came along. We gave away our content for free, with the exception of The Wall Street Journal, basically back in the 90s, everyone who was charging for their content in print began making it free on the internet. And that's still the case for many publications and brands. Others have managed to try to put the genie back in the bottle and find a way to set up a consumer digital revenue stream. But 20 years were lost in that process for some brands, and it's had a real negative impact on the business model.

Bob Cohn: And the second, of course, is really that advertising is in free fall in most traditional media. It starts with the fact if you look at newspapers, back in the 90s, fully, and probably dating back to the 70s and 80s, but into the '90s, fully 40% of advertising revenue at a local newspapers was classified ads. Those ads in the back for cars and apartments and furniture and whatnot. Almost overnight, the Craig's Lists and other internet bulletin boards of the world just erased that. That money was just gone. At the same time, print advertising has been just in decline as print readership declines. And for a while, digital advertising was growing fast enough to offset a decline in print. In fact in 2019, digital advertising, it was bigger than traditional media, which is print, radio and television. Digital advertising bigger than those three combined, for the first time. A trend that we saw coming but didn't happen until 2019.

Bob Cohn: But even as digital advertising grows, 60% of that market is owned by Facebook and Google. And 86% of the new growth in any given year is captured by Facebook and Google. So that's a kind of a snapshot of what happens in this disruption. But I want to focus on other thing here because, it's important, which is, the effect of this has been really the collapse of local journalism. There were 1,800 dailies and weeklies in America shutdown over a 15 year period between 2004 and 2019. That's more than 20% of the total newspapers of dailies and weeklies serving America.

Bob Cohn: Half of US counties don't have a newspaper. I'm sorry, half of US counties have one paper serving them, and 200 counties, which is like 7% have no newspapers serving them. And then, even where there's still a newspaper, about half of the jobs in America's newsrooms have evaporated, even within existing papers that have not shut down. The journalism jobs, the editors and the writer jobs. So this I think is where we see the disruption and the most negative effect, which is what's happened to local journalism.

Derek van Bever: Yeah. I want to talk about... You had talked with me about some of the interesting and hopeful models that you're seeing for rebuilding that journalism at the base. But before we do, so Clay published a piece in Neiman Reports up here in 2012 with a couple of coauthors where he was talking about how disruption has affected the media industry, the newspaper industry, I suppose most approximately. And I guess one of the things that he observed was that what you just said, the mistake that traditional media organizations made in seeing digital come into view, and just imagining that they were going to do the same thing they'd always done, but just do it digitally. Did you feel that in the newsrooms and the business side organizations you were in? Did you feel the desire simply to transition a print model to a digital platform? Is that-

Bob Cohn: Absolutely. Really from the first publications I was at that began the transition. I left Newsweek before they really transitioned to the internet in the mid '90s but I was at a magazine called The Industry Standard, which was about digital technology. The subtitle of that was the news weekly of the internet economy. It was really about a web 1.0, Amazon, Yahoo, web band, pets.com and this and this kind of a eCommerce business ecosystem that was erupting at the turn of the century. Even there where we are writing about this topic, the web was an afterthought, and it was a place to literally create templates and pour the print content into those templates.

Bob Cohn: And that was true not just there, but it was even true when I went onto Wired, but to a somewhat lesser extent. But if you looked around throughout the first decade of the 2000s and even beyond at some places, legacy brands in particular, viewed the internet as a place to put their print content. And I can talk about how I viewed that differently at The Atlantic if you want to, later. But I think Clay is exactly right, that people did not understand that it was a separate platform onto itself. Just like audio, just like podcasts, and just like video are separate platforms, and instead we're just barely reinterpreting their print content.

Derek van Bever: So generations of students in our classroom have used this industry, situated their final papers over this industry, and have studied so many examples of just outright carnage. And as you were talking about the kind of wholesale destruction of jobs, local coverage, certainly, advertising categories. Let's do talk about the Atlantic. You and the team architected a very different trajectory, a very different story at the Atlantic. How did this all present to you as you joined the Atlantic, as you all work through the transition? What did you spot or do that others didn't?

Bob Cohn: Right, right. Today The Atlantic is considered to have made a pretty good transition into the digital world, and in some cases is kind of the poster child for this transformation. But when I arrived at the end of 2008, we had a very small digital presence. And largely, it was a handful of bloggers. Andrew Sullivan, Tom Hosey, Coach, Jeff Goldberg, Megan McArdle, Jim Fallows, largely blogging on the 2008 election, the Barack Obama, John McCain election, and the Hillary Clinton Obama primary. And having so much success that summer and fall at the Huffington Post, referred to them as the New York Yankees of bloggers. I prefer to think of it as the Washington National of bloggers, but hometown favorite.

Derek van Bever: Congratulations.

Bob Cohn: Thank you. I'll keep taking it. But I arrived later that year, literally right after election day, and the mission was, how do we take this incipient success we've had digitally, which is in this kind of blogging ecosystem, and create a digital infrastructure, a digital editorial strategy, and really make a transition and not let the momentum we got during the 2008 campaign slip away? So there was intent and ambition about it. And so that's kind of the situation that I arrived in. And per Clay's, the observation we just made about what Clay said, one thing I knew we couldn't do was simply put the print content onto the web, and call it theatlantic.com. For both a practical and a more... Well, two practical reasons really.

Bob Cohn: The first, we'd simply weren't creating enough print content. In any given month, there's maybe 30 stories in the Atlantic, of varying links. You need a daily avalanche of content to be successful on the web. And it wasn't an avalanche at first, it was more of a trickle, but you need to get there. And 30 stories a month was not going to be that. So we needed to be creating separate content just for the web. And it also needed to be organic to the web. We needed to be creating content for the digital platform. And none of this was apparent to me on day one, because my entire career had been in print, before I took this job, even though I'd worked at places like Wired and The Industry Standard. I was a print magazine editor and before that a writer. But what had became clear to me that we did while we were doing it, or even in hindsight, was to reverse engineer the values of the Atlantic, the brand values, the editorial values of the Atlantic, which were print values because it was the magazine founded in 1857. And for 150 years, it was simply a print magazine.

Bob Cohn: And so what are the values of the Atlantic? I sat there and imagined a series of adjectives. It's creative, resourceful, authoritative, intelligent, witty, literary. Now, let's go over here and create a website that is creative, intelligent, authoritative, witty, literary, provocative. And it's going to be theatlantic.com. It's going to have the DNA of the Atlantic, but it's going to be organic to digital. We're not just going to port over the content, we're going to build it from the ground up under the same editorial values and the same brand values. And had to do that for practical reasons because there wasn't enough content, but what it gave us was a platform that was truly digital and organic to digital. And then we could start growing from there, which is what we started doing.

Derek van Bever: As you know, you and I have taken a magnifying glass to The Atlantic and tried to understand some of the specific challenges and accomplishments that you all achieved. And as you're describing, the mission of the Atlantic, I'm just sitting here thinking. I guess at one point, I guess it was called The Atlantic Monthly.

Bob Cohn: Yeah.

Derek van Bever: And how you all pulled off that change in operating cadence, or RPPs and the lingo of our course, to go from being an organ that cleared on a monthly basis, to an organ that cleared on a daily, hourly, moment-by-moment basis. How did you do that? That's quite a trick.

Bob Cohn: Well we had a couple of advantages. One, a lot of publishing brands were trying to retool the newsroom. All you folks who've worked on print, you're now digital journalists. And it wasn't quite that crude, but that was kind of the effect of it. We're going to repurpose people. At The Atlantic, we grew our way out of the problem. We had a relatively small print staff because as a monthly magazine, most of your writing comes from freelance writers, or contract writers who are not on staff. So the actual number of editorial employees working in print, which was working, which was the whole shebang at that point is relatively small. So we didn't have to retool the personnel. We slowly, because resources were always scarce, we slowly grew our way out of the problem by hiring digital journalists.

Bob Cohn: And I think that's a big advantage over large legacy brands that waited too long, started seeing revenue declines, and were quickly repurposing existing employees to go into different areas. We had none of the culture clash that you would get. The only culture class we had was, "What are those guys over there doing with our brand?" Right? These longtime print editors and some writers who had a real understandable and visceral protection of the brand. And we're all a little worried about what we were doing. And I came in and I began joking, it's going to take years to ruin the Atlantic brand, and I'm going to try every single day.

Derek van Bever: That's wonderful.

Bob Cohn: As just a reminder that we have to be constantly pushing it and pressing it. But the resistance was not great at all. In part, I think because they chose as the Head of Digital, a guy who was extremely steeped in print, and had a 25 year history working in print at pretty good publications. So I wasn't like the digital magician from Yahoo who came in and was going to sprinkle some fairy dust over The Atlantic and make it into a digital operation. It was from the roots of the journalism. And I think that kept us, it allowed us to increase those RPPs, as you put it, without really having a cultural identity crisis.

Derek van Bever: So inside note to our alumni, Bob was kind of the Chet Huber at OnStar of the Atlantic. So he was somebody, in other words, that when he left the room, the longtime print editors couldn't look at him now that the door's closed and say, "He just doesn't get us." And that inside-outsider thing is so important over time. You know, Bob, maybe this is something that impresses me naively, but one of the things that I observed in talking to your journalists was, one of the things they loved about the job, this is not the digital beat folks. Maybe that's everybody now, but one of the things they loved about the job was the independence they got. They weren't facing a gauntlet of editors in between them and publication. That's a pretty big, I would imagine, the traditional print editors kind of sitting back and going, "Oh, this isn't going to end well." How did-

Bob Cohn: Well, that was a little bit by necessity in two ways. The first, you can't have that many layers. The Atlantic in print has multiple layers of editors and copy editors and you send stories to the lawyers when necessary. And it's a what allows you to create this Faberge egg every month, which should be as close to perfect as possible when you're running a monthly magazine that has enough resources to do it right. It's impractical, for two reasons, to do that digitally. The first is just the velocity of publishing. One of the virtues of digital journalism is you can be out in the same news cycle. And during the impeachment inquiry, when four people are testifying, you can be out later that day with a thoughtful analysis of what happened. No layers of editors, no sending to the printing press, no truck delivery, none of that stuff. So practically, you have to move a little faster.

Bob Cohn: A second practical argument was we simply weren't resourced to create the levels of editors or the level of oversight. And I would think when you and I were working together seven or eight years ago, doing that microscopic examination of what was working and not working at The Atlantic, we were, I would say in hindsight, dangerously under-resourced, and allowing young journalists a little too much independence. And the web in those days was more of the wild West, and there was more, I think, it was an act-quickly-and-seek-forgiveness kind of environment. And I think largely for good, the web journalism is professionalized such that the gap between reader expectations between print and digital have closed pretty dramatically. And they have equal expectations about the quality of the digital journalism.

Derek van Bever: You know, another example of that on-the-edge-bridging that you're talking about, or risk-taking, you, maybe your team, but I think you, would describe the ambition of a lot of your stories as the second day story today.

Bob Cohn: Right.

Derek van Bever: That's a nice trick. If you can do it it. How do you do that?

Bob Cohn: Yeah. So the phrase was, "the second day story in the first news cycle", or "the second day story instantly", if you want to really create heartburn in your writers. And the idea was, and this is my formulation that grows out of being in the business long enough. When I started, the second day story was the province of the newsweeklies. So if something happened on a Thursday or Friday, and Newsweek and Time weigh in on Monday with a thoughtful chin-stroking analysis with incremental reporting, but mostly the thoughtful analysis, and piecing it all together. The newspapers quickly began turning to that for their Sunday pieces. The New York Times, The Washington Post, The LA Times on Sunday would do those kinds of second-day stories, where you take all larger measure of the moment.

Bob Cohn: Then the web comes along and cable TV comes along and everything's being chewed over in real-time. So having worked at Newsweek for 10 years and being trained to think about what is the second-day story, to think about it in the moment-

Derek van Bever: How do you do that? That's hard to do.

Bob Cohn: Okay, so let's say there's a presidential debate and you're watching the debate. If you're covering it for a newspaper, or a website in that moment, here's what someone said, here's so someone reacted, here's what the next question was. It's very kind of literal. If I was watching that in the pre-internet pre-cable TV, CNN was around, but we didn't have all this mushrooming of analysis shows. And I was trying to imagine what I would do for Newsweek in three or four or five days from there, you're sitting there in real-time and you're imagining, "What are people going to know on Monday?" It's Thursday now. It's Wednesday now. What do they want to know on Monday that won't have been answered between now and then?

Bob Cohn: And when you're running a monthly magazine and you're signing stories in April, you're saying to yourself, what do people going to want to know in August? Because that's really what the lead time is. And so you have to just project yourself into the future, and the existence of the internet, and if cable TV means a lot more gets eaten up in that interim, especially on the weekly cycle. The monthly cycle, it would be eaten up by the weeklies between now and then. So you have to just project yourself forward. And I think because I came of age as a journalist working for a weekly magazine, I was always thinking what's going to be fresh for five days? What's still going to have shelf life? What's going to be interesting to a reader who might get the magazine on Monday, might not open it till Wednesday, might not finish it till Friday? That's nine days from now, so I have to be thinking in those terms.

Derek van Bever: Fascinating. So The Atlantic has been, as you suggested, a little bit ago, one of the organizations people look to and say, "Boy, you really crossed the chasm. You're a success story." Who else out there do you see that you imagine that you would hold up or look to as a somebody else to learn from about how to migrate this transition?

Bob Cohn: Yeah, you have to look at The New York times as the prime example of a legacy media that has reinvented itself while staying true to its mission, and kind of built, created the resilience and the entrepreneurial-ism to survive. Nine years ago, the New York times had 900,000 subscribers all in print. And they had a digital operation nine years ago, but they weren't charging for it. They put up their pay wall, and now they have 4.9 million subscribers. That's probably a 4.2 million digital subscribers and they've probably lost 200,000 print subscribers. But the net gain is 4 million subscribers. I did some back of the envelope on that, because I don't really know the exact discounting here and there, but it's probably an incremental $300 million that they didn't have before.

Bob Cohn: And they went from being at risk financially to... I don't know. They spend a lot of money to create that excellent digital journalism and to create the operation that can sign up four million subscribers, because you've got churn and you've got all the marketing required for that. But even so, that has a stabilized them, and they're just operating at a scale much bigger than The Atlantic, or really anyone else. And so I think that that is a huge success story in global media.

Derek van Bever: Is this a global question, a global challenge? When you were sitting in your office at The Atlantic, would you get calls from people in Europe or Asia or Africa, elsewhere saying, "Run the movie for me again." Tell me how you did what you did pretty often.

Bob Cohn: Pretty often. We were a stop on the listening tour that people would make, "We're coming over from Germany, we're coming over from Asia, and we want to know what you guys have learned. What have you done?" Our story, because it was unlikely because we were founded in 1857 and we were kind of a revered but somewhat sleepy publication for a big chunk of that time, our transformation caught some attention, and everybody wanted to talk about it. And I don't think we're the only ones, but we were definitely one of the stations of the cross to hit.

Derek van Bever: I'm curious, has the talent pool that is attracted to journalism changed across your career? Are young people still vying in their droves to get into journalism, to work at The Atlantic, to build a career in this industry?

Bob Cohn: Yeah. You'd think it probably should have dried up, but it hasn't. It should have because... Well first, let me tell you why it hasn't. You've got just some empirical, just some data. We run a fellowship program for students who have just graduated from college, or maybe they're one year out, but graduates. It's a one year fellowship, and we typically have between maybe 18 and 30 fellows a year, depending on what the needs are on the editorial side. And we have about 2,000 applicants for that fellowship. So it's a 1%. It's a 1% admission into... It's a paid fellowship but it's not paid very well. You can live on it in DC, and we have a couple of slots in New York, but it's hard. So they're not doing it because it's cushy. I'm over, as you mentioned, I'm over at Harvard, at the Institute of Politics and this semester spending a lot of time with undergraduates, and teaching this class on disruption in both media and in politics. And part of my gig is office hours and just being available to students.

Bob Cohn: And people come in to see me for a couple of different things, including, "I want to talk about what's happening in Washington", because I was a Washington reporter for years. "I want to talk about digital disruption." But a lot of them want careers in journalism. They want to hear my path or know frankly how they can get an internship at The Atlantic or somewhere else. And so I am, if not, I guess I wouldn't say I'm surprised, but it's noteworthy that in the difficult straights that journalism faces as a business, the interest in not just Harvard students where I'm exposed now, but just broadly, the interest in journalism as a career remains high. I think it's, in part... I think it's difficult. If you want to maintain, say, an upper middle class standard of living, you might bail on journalism in your mid 20s because it's going to be hard to get to a certain level. And if you're the type of person who might just evolve going to law school or business school, you might say, "This was a really interesting five years, but I'm now looking ahead into my 20s and 40s and I don't see this working.

Bob Cohn: Even if that ends up being the off ramp, there's almost zero opportunity costs and spending a few years as a journalist if you're otherwise interested in good at it, because it's going to teach you synthesis and analysis and communication skills, and satisfy curiosity. And what next job or next grad school isn't going to look at that experience and say, "Yeah, we're interested in that kind of person." So I usually tell people, "Yeah, it's a great first job. It might not be your second or your third job, but might be a good place to start."

Derek van Bever: We've talked a lot about the sort of the supply side of the industry, and the changes that have taken place. As you kind of step back and look at the span of your career, and the changes that have taken place. How has the reader, the consumer of journalism, benefited, been inconvenienced? What's the impact? What's the net impact been on consumers of journalism?

Bob Cohn: I think it's largely... Well, I think readers are both the winners and the losers in this digital transformation. On the one hand there's just so much more content available, and the access to it is easy. It's in your pocket at all times. And there's just an embarrassment of riches out there. The things to be careful about are a couple. One, it's a kind of a buyer beware ecosystem in that, there are mediocre sources of information, and excellent sources of information, and even awful sources of information. And on the one hand it was ever thus, and I can explain that. But in this environment, it all looks the same in your Facebook feed. And when I say it was ever thus, there was a time when I was a kid, you can go to the news stand, you can get the New York Times with The National Enquirer right there. Right next to each other on the news stand, or they were, and they symbolically next to, maybe one rack away from each other.

Bob Cohn: So you had to know what you were buying and it was buyer beware then too, but it was a much more conscious act. In your Facebook feed, in your Twitter feed, and wherever you might be traveling on the internet, this stuff starts looking more indistinguishable. I started noticing this 15 years ago, when I worked at Wired and I'd say to someone, "Oh, where'd you read that?" And someone said, "I'd read this good article. I read it on my phone." No, you didn't read it on your phone. That's like saying, I read it on a piece of paper. It came from a brand, from a source. But once people start saying, I read it on my phone, then The National Enquirer and the New York Times are the same thing. It's all in your phone. And I think that's where there's a high demand on the reader to be careful about new sources, and to be aware of what they're reading.

Bob Cohn: And then of course, the other way the reader loses here, it goes back to that earlier question which is, there's been a just a marketplace-driven decline in local journalism. And I think to the extent that State Houses and City Halls and municipal government in general, are not being held to account in a way that they might've been a generation or two ago, I think is bad for the reader and bad for everybody.

Derek van Bever: So super interesting. How do you become a more discerning consumer of news? Like how do you decide when you're looking at your phone, looking at things that pop up on your phone other than whether it's from The Atlantic or The Times or not, how do you decide if something is worth paying credence to?

Bob Cohn: I think you just hand waved away at the major way you do it, which is you pay attention to the brand that's delivering it. In your Facebook feed, in your Twitter feed, wherever you are, in Instagram, on Snapchat, you can be aware. "Is this the story from the New York Times or is this a story from a publication I've never heard of that might've actually been created, merely to look like it was the Washington Sentinel." Which is really just a... I made that up. But it's just a delivery system for invented news. I won't use fake news, but invented. Inventions. So you have to be brand conscious. The same way that those Nike's you get off the back of the truck but not really be Nike's. And so I think it's incumbent on readers to be aware of who's delivering them the news, and it's not their phone.

Derek van Bever: Yep. So Bob, you had an interesting career. You've had an interesting career in that you've kind of been on both sides of the church-state divide in your business as a journalist and as a business side person. A lot of our listeners will be going through this traumatic process, maybe in different industries, but facing the same kinds of challenges. What lessons have you taken away from your experience? What would you suggest to people who find themselves under assault by competitors that are new to them? They're being attacked at the kind of foundation of their model. How do you maintain sanity? What do you do to put one foot in front of the other?

Bob Cohn: Yeah, let me start by saying a word about that, about the transition. So I did spend 20 plus years, 25 years as an editorial person before I went into the business side. And I don't think I'd be good at my job running a media company if I hadn't been a journalist all those years. There are other paths to it. There are, in fact, this is the least likely path to it. People come in through sales and marketing or through finance or through other industries all together. Sales, marketing, finance of a media company, or outside completely. But coming to the business side of media after having been on the editorial side for so long, felt like I was running an automaker after having worked on the factory floor. That I know all the parts of the product, of the things we build every day.

Bob Cohn: And I think that created... For one thing, it gave me a little bit of, if not leverage, then special relationship with the editorial side, having come from there, which I think is always a tricky thing in media, for business and edit to work well together. In terms of what I learned that might be broadly applicable, you have to think beyond what the company has always been. And let me make that more practical. The New York Times was a newspaper. NPR was a radio station. The Atlantic was a magazine, right? And in the last 10 years, they've all become media companies that have to operate on multiple platforms. And the Atlantic in many ways, the magazine part of The Atlantic is in many ways the least important part.

Bob Cohn: It's not where we derive much of the revenue. It's not where the staff works. It's not where our audience reach is. It's still where our DNA is. And the monthly magazine is really important to the brand value and sensibility, but we're really not a magazine anymore. And I would say this in, and the New York Times is on multiple platforms. NPR, any strong brand. PBS was once a television network and now broader than that. And so I think the important thing was to be true to our brand history and our values, but to unmoor ourselves from the past beyond that, and to think about what does a media brand with the values of the Atlantic, do today?

Bob Cohn: Well, we need to operate in podcasting. We need to have video channels. We might want to have television shows for Amazon and Hulu. We want to be obviously still be a magazine and run a digital operation. We want to operate in social channels and not just re-purposing our content for Facebook, but original content for Instagram and Snapchat and things like that. We want to have newsletters that are beyond just the regular content you might get from the core platforms. So to me, if anything is applicable, it's stay true to the brand, but don't be imprisoned by it.

Derek van Bever: And inside that, I'm just imagining you had mentioned at one point the sort of notional, if not competition, at least a suspicion, distrust between the long-time print editors and then the digital gang coming up. How do you manage it as a leader, when the print editors are fighting for the investment that's going into digital and saying, "Wait a minute, you don't get it. The print magazine is the enterprise and all this other stuff is going to melt away. All that money that you're investing there, we need to plow back into the mothership." How do you respond to somebody who's kind of missing the need for change?

Bob Cohn: I think the best way is transparency, is to show them show the budget, show them the P&L, show them where we spend money and how we make money that dis-aggregate what the actual cost of the newsroom on the print side are versus digital versus this versus that. We had a lot of transparencies. The Atlantic is privately held, so our financials were really not available to the public. I would do town halls twice a year and be very transparent, as my predecessors were when they were President. And nothing ever leaked. And most important people understood what the business is. It helped in our case, that the overall industry was in a wild convulsion. So it wasn't news to somebody that print isn't the engine of the business the way it wants was. And I was also very careful to say, because I believed at 100%, print still matters deeply. And we're not getting out of print. But we need to understand that that incremental revenues need to be poured back into other platforms, and that even as the Atlantic grows, probably the print investment will not grow as quickly as other investments will.

Derek van Bever: We could go into some other aspects of the disruptions, the classic disruption story is like the difference in operating metrics. So how do you measure success in the print business versus the digital business? And you've already indicated how different those two things are. So maybe just to round out our conversation where we started, I guess, if you think of journalism as a ladder going from local up to international or global, you said that effectively, the bottom couple rungs of this ladder have been wiped out in this transition, and that we have a remarkable gap, literally a remarkable gap in the coverage of local events that we've historically had that is now gone. How is that? Is that important to try to restore? And who's leading a shoulder against that work?

Bob Cohn: Yeah, I think it is important to restore because I haven't spent much of my career in local journalism, but I've been a consumer of local journalism, whether I lived in Chicago or in the Bay Area or in Washington DC. And I just understand implicitly, the important role that those newsrooms play, and Times, 1,000 other newsrooms and 1,000 other communities, and it does matter deeply. Accountability journalism in town halls, and water systems, and municipal government in general, that really matters. There are a couple of methods, people going at this, none of them perfectly successful yet. One is just purely on the commercial side, by trying to bring the success of digital subscriptions that have happened at the national level, The New York times, The Washington Post, hopefully The Atlantic, which is now in this space of charging for a digital subscription, and bringing that down to regional newspapers and smaller papers.

Bob Cohn: Some like the Boston Globe are showing modest success. The Globe has about 150,000 digital subscribers, I think, if I remember correctly, at $7 a month. Is that right? I think that might be it. So that's almost a $100 bucks a year, $85 a year. And I might have that number wrong. So there's the effort to take what's worked nationally and bring it down to one rung, to large regional papers like The Globe, and then keep on going from there. And a lot of that depends on the general public willingness to pay for digital services that have historically been free.

Bob Cohn: And one reason I had some hope going into The Atlantic's foray here is basically Netflix, HULU, Sirius, Spotify. The number of things that my family now pays for that we didn't pay for 10 years ago. And obviously we're hardly unique. So there's a lot of that going on. People are willing to pay for digital services and digital entertainment, and to the extent that bleeds over into digital news. That could flow down in a virtuous tic way, and help local journalism there.

Bob Cohn: A second path has really been, there's been a rash of billionaires investing in journalism.

Derek van Bever: Imagine that. From like a private equity perspective, or a philanthropic charity perspective, how do you frame this? A PE move, or is this a-

Bob Cohn: I don't think it's PE move. I think it's typically driven by their philanthropic interest in media, but they're also typically run as businesses. This is Jeff Bezos at The Washington Post, this is Mark Benioff who just the CEO and founder of Salesforce who bought Time Magazine from Meredith. This is Patrick Soon-Shiong, I think a biotechnologist or I think an MD, and an entrepreneur who bought The LA Times from, if not directly from the Chandler family, then indirectly, once removed from the Chandler family. This is Laurene Powell Jobs who bought The Atlantic-

Derek van Bever: It's two Jobs ago.

Bob Cohn: Steve Jobs' widow. And it started to trickle a little bit into more local. Those are all national examples, and some of it's strictly non into local as well or at least the top rung of local. Here in Boston, John Henry who owns the Red Sox, bought the Boston Globe five years ago. There's a billionaire family that bought The Philadelphia Inquirer. And so you're seeing some examples of this. I'm not saying that this is... People ask me, "Is this good for journalism? Is this good for democracy?" And I think, "Well it's good for the places they buy because those brands now have, those publications now have the resources to do their jobs better." And so that's good for readers too because those publications are serving millions and millions of readers, or at least millions of readers.

Bob Cohn: So I don't know how far that goes, but it's making a dent so far. And probably the most promising of the new developments when it comes to resurrecting local journalism or these nonprofit models. And there's a couple that are out there. There's something called the American Journalism Project, which has raised $50 million. And this was started by a businessman named John Thornton in Texas, who started the Texas Tribune, which is a kind of a prototypical example of a nonprofit-created newsroom. And they do excellent work covering Austin and the rest of Texas.

Bob Cohn: But what American Journalism Project is doing is building capacity on the business side. So they're taking this $50 million they're raising and giving it in relatively large chunks, to eight or 10 publications, newspapers, or nonprofit organizations rather, and teaching them business model capacity building. And that's from one direction, because there's another model called Report for America, and full disclosure, I'm on their board of advisors, which is raising money and going at the journalism side, not the business side. They've raised a lot of money and they have 250 reporting slots that they fund half of, and they invite you, a publication, to fund the other half of. And so you, the San Francisco Chronicle say, "We're ready to put up our half. Here's a stock we have. Here's a person who would do it." And Report for America does the matchmaking and delivers the reporter to cover that, and pays the other half for a one year or a two year gig there. And so that is on the editorial side trying to replace some of the journalists that have been lost. Obviously 250 is not going to do a lot. But they grew from 50 to 250 in the first year. So it could get quite big.

Derek van Bever: Fascinating. I imagine that a number of our listeners have a soft spot in their hearts for this industry, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if you got calls after this podcast to talk about some of these things. I asked you if I could ask you this question on the way over here. So you have rounded out your time at The Atlantic. You've now been here for a term, working with our students at the Kennedy School. What is next for you? What are you thinking about doing? Same industry, different kind of perch? What's intriguing to you as you look at your next move?

Bob Cohn: Well, I've got a couple of weeks left at the Kennedy School, so don't push me out quite that fast. I'm milking it as much as possible, and it's been a great semester. And I've been spending part of my time here. When I accepted the fellowship and decided to use that as a kind of off ramp to leave the Atlantic after 11 years, I knew I would devote some of this time to thinking through, in more methodical and less opportunistic way, what I might want to do next. So I've been doing that. And I think I'm likely to stay in media. I'm considering some opportunities or some ideas outside of media. But it feels like after 30 plus years of spadework in this industry, this is what I'm good at. This is what I know how to do. I'm still, I'm interested in, potentially, if not right now then in the next go round, in a foundation or nonprofit or academia. But I think I'll probably end up staying in media. And I'm having a bunch of really interesting conversations.

Derek van Bever: That's great. Well, Bob, knowing you, and knowing the impact that you've had in your industry experience to-date, I have no doubt that you're going to land in a place that is values-led, and that needs someone like Bob Cohn to help make change. And can't wait to see where you land and where you land after that. So for your time today and for sharing with us the experiences that you've had in an industry that has gone through a lot of changes across your career, I thank you very much.

Bob Cohn: Thank you, Derek. I was happy to be here.

Clay Christensen: Thank you for listening to us at Disruptive Voice. If you like our show and want to learn more, please visit us at our website or leave us a review on iTunes. Until next time, good luck everybody.