Mr. Bradley, an exceedingly polite man who carries himself with a gentility that can make it seem as if he comes from a different era, ruefully recalled in an interview that buying the magazine quickly began to look like a mistake.
“Immediately it was turmoil for me,” he said, the panorama of Georgetown and the Potomac River providing the backdrop to his eighth floor corner office.
The Atlantic lost $4.5 million in its first year under Mr. Bradley’s ownership, and that figure grew worse. Grappling for a solution, Mr. Bradley went through what he called his Inspector Clouseau phase, likening himself to the hapless Pink Panther detective.
He tried going out on sales calls with his advertising staff, only to find that his presence in meetings was a distraction. He sank money into printing the magazine on higher quality paper, only to find that it was a waste. He raised the price of a subscription. He lowered the price of a subscription.
Then, in 2003, the magazine’s celebrated editor, Michael Kelly, was killed while on assignment in Iraq. Two years later, with losses approaching $7 million a year, Mr. Bradley decided to move the magazine to Washington from Boston, its ancestral home.
Mr. Bradley, ever self-effacing and independently wealthy from the public offering of a corporate research firm he founded at age 26, said he finally realized he had run out of ideas.
“Atlantic had so serially failed,” he said, “that it was overwhelmingly likely the next thing we would do was fail, and the next thing we would do was fail.”
He credited two moves as seminal in turning the magazine around: hiring the editor James Bennet from The New York Times in 2006 and Mr. Smith from The Week in 2007.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 12, 2010
A previous version of this article said Andrew Sullivan was lured away from The New Republic. It should have said Time.com.
Δεν υπάρχουν σχόλια:
Δημοσίευση σχολίου