Nicholas Thompson

The copy editing stuff is pretty useless.

They're amazing for certain kinds of editing suggestions.

I had forgotten that.

It's true.

Anybody fact-checking, fact-check accurate.

I made it seem we're an exoskeleton and I filmed it for the most interesting thing in tech.

They're all important.

The most pressing is probably the collapse of search.

It's happening very quickly.

It's something we've known would happen for a long time, right?

We did our first study on how much cert traffic would decline because of AI back in March of 24.

So right after the release of ChatGPT, I guess, no, March of 23, sorry.

So we've been trying to make our business more resilient and prepare it for a world where

are top of the funnel traffic, meaning people are just coming in for stories, drops dramatically.

And there's a lot we do to try to prevent that.

So that's existential for many publications, less so for a publication like The Atlantic, but it's really important for us and we're deep in that.

The first challenge, which is the rise of the individual creator and substack,

I don't think that as much as an AI driven challenge, though, actually that collapses search, I think probably helps the rise of Substack in some ways.

That was when I started, it was the biggest concern we had.

So I started my job as CEO of The Atlantic in 2021, and we were subsection to hire every Atlantic writer.