A stray thought on being a media doomer optimist

Dear Reader,

Five years ago, when I looked at how the media landscape was changing, let me confess that I wondered if the prospects for an enterprise like The New Atlantis were grim.

280 characters was the coin of the realm. Articles had to be optimized for microattention and outrage in order to go viral on Twitter. Even then, you wondered if anyone ever read the article in that open tab.

Today you can call me a doomer optimist: these trends have gotten so bad that they’re breaking. Twenty years of overproduction of online junk has given way naturally to the age of AI slop. Twitter now buries links to outside articles, which is cratering traffic to online publications. In doing so, Twitter has made itself an irrelevance to what drives media readership — and many of the outlets that touted digital-first publication strategies in the 2010s are seeing their readerships tank.

Could it be that there is finally so much noise that pure content has become worthless, and real signal is regaining its value?

I felt vindicated in this thought when a friend of the magazine sent along a Business Insider article reporting that “the rise of slopaganda is fueling a surprising tech hiring boom”: human writers.

Among other points, “Microsoft began publishing a print magazine, Signal, last year, calling it an ‘antidote to the ephemeral nature of digital.’” Re which: !

This all converges with some notable trends in our own work:

1. Over the past year, our incoming traffic from social media has grown only slightly. But our overall number of online readers is up 30%, with the growth coming almost entirely from email, conventional links from other sites, and people coming directly to our site.
    
2. Among U.S. readers, the number who stayed on the site for a while, and the average amount of time spent on the site, are up substantially too.
    
3. Our paid print and digital subscription levels are 4x higher than just before the pandemic.

If you’re feeling the doomer optimism too, now is a great time to become a New Atlantis subscriber if you’re not already.

Subscribe today and you will get immediate online access to our paywalled Winter 2026 issue, including “The Bills That Destroyed Urban America,” “Doctor Death’s Messiah,” “Does MAGA Actually Want American Science to Win?,” and the eye-popping culture piece “American Diner Gothic.”

You’ll also be in the first group of readers to get access to our Spring 2026 issue, on which we are hard at work wrapping production. Sign up today to get the first mailing of the print edition and to read the articles on our website months before the world does:

Yours,
Ari Schulman
Editor