Azeem Azhar's Exponential View
AI & the future of media with The Atlantic CEO, Nicholas Thompson
24 Jul 2025
Nick Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, led one of the first major content licensing deals with OpenAI in 2024. In this conversation, he joins Azeem to unpack how AI is transforming media – and what that means for every business navigating the shifting economics of attention, trust, and discovery. We cover: (01:49) Journalism’s four horsemen (5:33) The collapse of search (9:07) Cloudflare’s counterattack (13:56) Is this the search-traffic fix? (17:42) Rise of the sovereign creator (22:57) Do great writers need editors? (26:22) Why conservatives win new media (27:17) How Substack drives discovery (31:08) East Coast vs. West Coast ethics (35:11) How Nick uses AI in writing (42:13) Is AI friend or foe to journalism? (45:32) The Atlantic’s survival plan Nick's links: The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholasxthompson/ Twitter/X: https://x.com/nxthompson Substack: https://nxthompson.substack.com Azeem's links: Substack: https://www.exponentialview.co/ Website: https://www.azeemazhar.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/azhar Twitter/X: https://x.com/azeem ----Produced by supermix.io and EPIIPLUS1 Ltd Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Full Episode
I see four horsemen challenging the business of journalism right now.
There's the challenge of the sovereign creator. Power has moved from the center and from the brand to the individual. It's a really interesting trade-off. Most writers, they're way better when edited. They may not think that's the case, but it is true. The second horseman is the collapse of search traffic. About 40% of our traffic comes from search.
You know, we're seeing a significant decline, maybe a 20% decline. I would like a system that helps everybody in perpetuity the way the old Google system worked. So if you want to crawl our site, you have to give us something. The third is weakening of trust and authority that media houses have had. This is something where AI can be really useful.
Please read this story and identify like the six embedded assumptions that I don't even notice because I'm in some kind of a filter bubble that are going to trigger readers on the other side. The fourth horseman is AI. That's my favorite. It's the most fun to talk about. It's less, I lose less sleep on that one. Is it a competitor? Is it a collaborator? Fact checking is hopeless.
The copy editing stuff is pretty useless. They're amazing for certain kinds of editing suggestions.
Hello, everyone. I'm Azim Azhar, founder of Exponential View. And today, we're going to look at the future of media, the future of journalism with my friend, the CEO of Atlantic Media, Nick Thompson. Now, the last time Nick and I did anything on video, he put me in a weird exoskeleton and had me walk up some stairs in Geneva. I've been much kinder to you this time, Nick. Welcome to the show.
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.
That was a year ago, and a lot has happened in the year. I see four horsemen challenging the business of journalism right now. I've put them into four buckets for historical reasons. There's the challenge of the sovereign creator. Substack just raised $100 million at a billion-dollar valuation.
They have 5 million paid subscriptions, and many journalists are leaving the traditional world to go out on their own. The second horseman is the collapse of search traffic and the rise of AI and chat GPT as a source of traffic. It's now our third largest source of traffic.
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