• by Frank Saxe , February 23, 2003

A lot has been said in months since September 11 about how America has changed. Much of it has been said in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly, but beyond the writing that fills its pages, The Atlantic itself has changed – grown in fact – as readers’ tastes have changed, and advertisers have followed.

“There’s much more interest n serious magazines now than there was two years ago,” says John Fox Sullivan, president and group publisher for The Atlantic Monthly, from his office in Washington, DC’s Watergate Building. “September 11, and now Iraq, has made the public much more interested in serious publications. You can see it in the newsstand figures. The kind of cover stories that we do, there is now a general interest in that.”

The numbers back him up. From first half 2001 to second half 2002, average newsstand sales have increased 110%, from an average 29,900 copies sold to an average of 63,700. MRI says its readership has increased 38.5% to 1.4 million, the single largest among any measured magazine. “That’s a function of a greatly improved editorial product, we’ve been doing a lot of blockbuster cover stories that have gotten a lot of attention in the press, which has helped drive newsstand sales,” explains Sullivan, who sees the real turning point for The Atlantic as being Langewiesche’s Ground Zero series. “We had been improving significantly, but that was a high velocity lift-up.” At the same time circulation has been exploding, The Atlantic Monthly’s newsstand price jumped from $3.50 to $4.95 and the average subscriber rate rose 32%. Says Sullivan, “We’re believers that we ought to give them a terrific product and they ought to pay for it. It’s an old fashioned notion: make the product better and the market responds.”

The advertising marketplace has responded as well. “A few years ago, those that new The Atlantic thought of it as old and tired and they weren’t frankly overly interested in talking to us even though it had been around for 145 years. Now the whole mindset has changed. Two years ago they were indifferent about seeing our salespeople, now they want to advertise.” In fact, the January/February issue was the largest single issue for the title in eight years, with 84 pages, up 145% over the same issue last year. If business keeps up, the first quarter is pacing ahead 31% in pages. In 2002 advertising pages grew 14.2%, according to the Publishers Information Bureau.

“There’s a lot of momentum in terms of increased ad pages,” says Sullivan. Key advertising categories are corporate imaging, financial services, and high-end automotive, but a look at the list of the two dozen new advertisers Sullivan has added in the past year, and it is clear there is a wider appeal. In just over a year, The Atlantic Monthly signed on The Four Seasons Hotels, Crystal Cruises, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, Intel, Neuberger Berman, Vanguard, Citigroup, ADM, The Hartford, Chubb, GE Corporate, Luftanasa, Lockheed Martin, American Century, and British Airways, among others. With a rate base of 440,000, its not quantity, but rather quality, that buyers are after. Sullivan says The Atlantic delivers the “leadership class” akin to The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Smithsonian, and The Economist. It is those titles that he sees as competitors for ad dollars, not the newsweeklies or ideological titles like the New Republic or The Weekly Standard.

One way <>The Atlantic Monthly has differentiated itself to planners and buyers is by offering free market research to advertisers. Owner David Bradley, who bought the title from US News & World Report owner Mort Zuckerman in 1999, formerly ran a research company – so it was an easy path for his new magazine to take. “In a day and age where there are so many cutbacks, people are anxious for anything that will help them do their work. Instead of giving away a bunch of free coffee cups or taking people to tennis matches, we’re providing them with research and information that is actually valuable to them,” says Sullivan. For large-scale advertisers, the magazine will also conduct custom research project, and by offering generic market profiles and activity habits of the affluent class to all advertisers, the data can certainly work to also sell the magazine itself. “It has gotten people to advertise with us that weren’t doing so before hand, and it has gotten people to increase their budgets with us,” says Sullivan.

Sullivan says they are “keenly interested” in extending The Atlantic Monthly’s brand to TV or to other print publications, but says they need to “get Atlantic done first.” While the numbers look good, he is not ready to say that the two-year turnaround is complete, even though it has a solid editorial staff, a completed redesign, and a growing client list. “It takes a while to turn a magazine around,” says Sullivan. “We haven’t completed that, but all the trends are in the right direction.”