Azeem Azhar's Exponential View
Jul 24, 2025 · 52 min · 13 segments
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…
Nick ThompsonGuest
Azeem AzharHost
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.
The third is a big secular shift, the weakening of trust and authority that media houses have had, chronicled very well by Martin Goury a decade ago.
And the question is, what do people want from those commentators? And the fourth horseman is AI.
Is it a competitor? Is it a collaborator? You were early to do a deal with OpenAI, but many laggards could be left behind.
Which of these four are the biggest, most interesting challenges for the CEO of a media business today?
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 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.
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.
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.
The third is a big secular shift, the weakening of trust and authority that media houses have had, chronicled very well by Martin Goury a decade ago.
And the question is, what do people want from those commentators? And the fourth horseman is AI.
Is it a competitor? Is it a collaborator? You were early to do a deal with OpenAI, but many laggards could be left behind.
Which of these four are the biggest, most interesting challenges for the CEO of a media business today?
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 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.
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.
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