The Media Equation: Atlantic Covering Business World With Quartz Site

Business titans are generally not prone to self-appraisal, and when they do take stock, it usually begins and ends with a list of their conquests.

David G. Bradley, the owner of Atlantic Media, has never been like that. He built and then sold the Advisory Board and the Corporate Executive Board, two research advisory firms, but he never trumpeted that or his fancy education — he was a Fulbright scholar with a law degree from Georgetown and an M.B.A. from Harvard — as a significant credential.

When I worked for him — briefly — and then covered him, he made an impression because underneath his waspy, patrician manner he had a very practical understanding of his own limitations, and as a result, Mr. Bradley, 59, is a bit of a brain collector, seeking out intellectual talent and listening closely at every turn.

At lunch a few weeks ago, we talked about Quartz, Atlantic’s new, strictly digital play in global media, a site for business news that was to make its debut on Monday at qz.com (the site was not loading yet Monday morning). He was clearly excited about the new enterprise, but Mr. Bradley spoke candidly about his costly education in the economics of publishing.

“It was expensive and painful,” he said. “I clearly didn’t know what I was getting into.”

After selling his shares in his companies for a reported after-tax gain of $300 million in 1997 and realizing he didn’t have the people’s touch when it came to politics — his first love — he had hoped to buy Newsweek. But that did not work out. So in 1998 he bought The Atlantic Monthly instead, along with National Journal and Government Executive, in part because he wanted to be a Beltway player and in part because he loved the physical aspects of print.

He hoped to turn The Atlantic into a weekly, a glossy artifact that he could proudly display in his office at the Watergate complex, overlooking the Potomac River. But even as a monthly, the economics were baffling.

I called him back after our lunch and he repeated something he had said.

“In a sense, I was born 50 years too late,” he said. “I love the romance of print, but after I took over The Atlantic, I quickly began losing $8 to $10 million a year. It was not a sustainable business, no matter how much I loved being part of it.”

After spending 10 years and $100 million on the Atlantic brand, he realized that making baubles for the coffee table would soon leave him bereft. He hired Justin Smith, the publisher of The Week who had also worked at The Economist, in 2007. Mr. Smith has Mr. Bradley’s polish, but is more ruthless in business matters and less sentimental about print. The pair set about building a ladder out of the hole that the company — and most of print publishing, for that matter — found itself in.

What is the way forward for a 155-year old-magazine that once published Emerson and Longfellow? Digital first and last, with ancillary revenue from conferences. The magazine, edited by James Bennet, is still very much in the middle of the conversation, but these days it is prized mostly for bringing luster to digital assets like TheAtlantic.com, Atlantic Wire, Atlantic Cities, and beginning Monday, Quartz.

Mr. Bradley shared the financials that suggested that revenue at the various Atlantic properties had doubled in the last four years, from $20 million to $40 million, and that the company was profitable for the third year in a row. Digital revenue, he said, now makes up 65 percent of all advertising revenue. (Even though Atlantic Media is a private company, I believe Mr. Bradley; he was always honest when he was losing gobs of money, so I have no reason to doubt him now that he says they are in the black).

“It’s become very, very clear to me that digital trumps print, and that pure digital, without any legacy costs, massively trumps print,” Mr. Bradley said.

At a time when other media properties are leaning hard on subscriptions and paywalls, Mr. Smith believes that a free product, with revenue from sponsorships and events, can avoid the dependency on commodity ads and play in more rarefied, lucrative terrain.

“We don’t want to be the Royal Navy,” he said. “We want to be the pirate ship attacking the Royal Navy. I’m bearish on print, including our own. It is an inexorable trend that has to be met with some very radical changes.”