Atlantic Covering Business World With Quartz Site

The following is an excerpt from an article in:


The New York Times
Monday, September 24, 2012

Atlantic Covering Business World With Quartz Site

By DAVID CARR

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 makes its debut on Monday at qz.com. 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.”

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