Top Editor at The Atlantic Will Moderate ‘Washington Week’

“PBS NewsHour” introduced Wednesday that Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, can be the subsequent moderator of “Washington Week,” the Friday night public affairs present that may be a staple amongst policymakers within the nation’s capital.

The Atlantic will co-produce the present, which can be renamed “Washington Week With The Atlantic.” The journal will cowl among the prices and assist to promote sponsorships.

Mr. Goldberg, who has been at The Atlantic for greater than a decade — its former proprietor, David Bradley, recruited him in 2007 with a crew of ponies — stated he believed there have been nonetheless sufficient viewers who cared about in-depth evaluation of consequential points to make the present successful.

“The good thing is, there’s an awful lot of Americans, and I don’t need all of them to come here,” Mr. Goldberg stated. “We just need five or 10 million.”

Ratings for “Washington Week” have slumped in recent times, as conventional TV viewership has fallen industrywide, and its income has adopted. The present averaged 845,000 viewers in April, in line with Nielsen, a 22 % decline from the identical interval in 2015, when it was moderated by the journalist Gwen Ifill. The firm’s company sponsorship has declined roughly 10 % since 2019, a spokesman for PBS NewsHour stated.

Ms. Ifill, a groundbreaking Black journalist in a subject dominated by white males, was synonymous with “Washington Week” for greater than a decade. She died from issues of uterine most cancers in 2016, days after the presidential election. Mr. Goldberg stated that the prospect of moderating the identical program as Ms. Ifill, an in depth good friend, was a weighty duty and a significant component in his choice to hitch this system.

“I’ve always had respect for this show because I associated it in my mind so much with Gwen,” Mr. Goldberg stated. “So the thought of being associated with something that Gwen did was very attractive to me.”

After Ms. Ifill’s loss of life, “Washington Week” was moderated by the CBS News journalist Robert Costa, who was adopted by Yamiche Alcindor, a Washington correspondent at NBC News who left this system earlier this 12 months. Sara Just, senior govt producer of “PBS NewsHour” and “Washington Week,” stated that each exhibits would have “a diverse group of journalists around our round table every week.”

“We believe we have a responsibility to reflect the true diversity in America as broadcast journalists in a wide variety of ways, in who tells our stories on camera, who works behind the scenes, the voices we include in those stories and the topics of stories that we select to tell,” Ms. Just stated.

In 2017, Mr. Bradley offered a majority stake in The Atlantic to Emerson Collective — the umbrella firm based by the philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs — and the corporate has centered on increasing its digital subscription enterprise within the years since. The Atlantic now has greater than 900,000 mixed print and digital subscribers, up from roughly 700,000 in 2020.

The conventional public affairs present will not be the surest path to getting cash with TV news, stated Jesse J. Holland, the affiliate director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University. But he added that truthful and cogent evaluation was very important for democracy, and the problem dealing with “Washington Week” can be discovering the viewers who have been thinking about it.

“If your goal is to make money, this is not the path you would take,” Mr. Holland stated. “You would go with opinionated, partisan analysis. That doesn’t mean it’s the best form of journalism for the American public, but it’s what the American public is buying right now, especially as we get closer to the 2024 presidential election.”

Semafor earlier reported Mr. Goldberg was in talks to average “Washington Week.”