The Atlantic reaches record audience of 42.3 million in May

This achievement comes in a month when TheAtlantic.com rolled out a redesigned homepage.

“During my time at The Atlantic, audience to our flagship site has grown from 2 million monthly uniques to more than 40 million,” said The Atlantic’s president Bob Cohn. “That’s exhilarating. What was especially noteworthy in May is that, in the midst of a punishing news cycle that fueled our journalists to do powerful and impressive coverage of the Washington story, the Atlantic piece that captivated the Internet doesn’t contain the words Trump, Russia,or covfefe.”

That article was the magazine’s much-discussed June cover story, “My Family’s Slave” by the late journalist Alex Tizon, published May 16, which defied a news cycle absorbed by political news to quickly become The Atlantic’s second most-read story of all time. The piece helped lead TheAtlantic.com to two consecutive record days of audience on May 16 and May 17, netting 4.4 million and 4.8 million uniques respectively. News reports, reactions, commentaries, critiques, and broadcast segments about the cover and the questions it raises spanned the world. The Atlantic also published a series of reports on contemporary slavery and reader response to the cover.

“What I admire most in our writers is their unusual ability to cut through noise and nonsense and cut through with real speed,” said Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief. “We see that when we apply extreme intelligence, analytical rigor, and careful, fact-driven writing to the great controversies of the day, we fulfil our collective purpose.”

May also saw the launch of You Are Here, an original series for YouTube which draws upon the expertise of The Atlantic’s science writers to help us understand humans and everything we touch. The series marks the start of a new partnership between The Atlantic and YouTube, and represents a shift to a YouTube-first editorial strategy for Atlantic Video.

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