During the Trump administration, The Way of Improvement Leads Home blog was getting about 10,000 readers a day. That number has declined since the 2020 presidential election. The blog lost some readers when it became part of Current, but the drop also reflects the decline in readership that many news and politically-oriented publications are experiencing right now.
For example, subscriptions are dropping at The Atlantic. Here is a taste of Dylan Byers’s piece at NBC News:
Nicholas Thompson, the chief executive of The Atlantic, gave a presentation to employees last month in which he disclosed some uncomfortable truths about the state of the magazine.Â
Subscription growth, which had skyrocketed in 2020 thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic and the presidential election, had come back down to earth. For the first time, the number of subscribers had plateaued and started to slightly decline. And even with last year’s substantial surge, the magazine had lost more than $20 million and was on track to lose another $10 million this year, according to slides of the presentation shared with NBC News.
But Thompson was optimistic, according to four employees who saw the presentation and spoke on the condition of anonymity. The company would lose just a few million dollars in 2022, Thompson projected, and turn a small profit in 2023. When that happened, he said, every staff member would be given $10,000 or a 10 percent salary bonus — whichever was bigger.
“We are on a path to profitability, or sustainability,” Thompson said in an interview. “Our losses have narrowed every year. We’re vastly ahead of where we thought we would be.”
The Atlantic needs to make $50 million in annual subscription revenue in order to break even, according to Thompson. Hitting that target has become more complicated since Trump left the White House and the pandemic let up. New subscribers are coming in at about a quarter of the rate they did last year (10,000 a month, on average), and the magazine faces challenges keeping some of its existing audience, which may have less of a need for The Atlantic’s journalism in a post-Trump, post-Covid world. Â
“We did four years of business last year,” Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, said in an interview. “One of the core challenges is, how do we keep all those new subscribers?”
That is a challenge being felt throughout the news industry. For the last six years, Trump’s chaotic candidacy and presidency provided a life raft for this industry, as did the pandemic. Cable news networks saw a surge in viewership while publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post enjoyed strong subscriber growth. But with Trump out of office and the pandemic in retreat, both television news viewership and digital and print readership are in decline — resuming a multidecade slide for the news business.Â
Read the rest here.
