The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 11 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Thompson: OpenAI deal includes SearchGPT planning sessions and content licensing
“And with OpenAI, we said, hey, here we are, let's talk. And they said, great, let's make a deal. We will pay you for the right to license your content and the right to have RAG. We will include you in sort of planning sessions as we figure out the future of se…”
Thompson: Paywalls must dynamically guess subscription propensity across traffic sources
“The goal when you have a paywall is if someone's not going to subscribe, you want them to read the article, right? And if someone is going to subscribe, you want them to pay to read the article. And the problem is you can't know. You can't like interview every…”
Thompson: Media CEOs should only comment on industry issues, not politics
“My view is that as the leader of a media organization, if I'm gonna make a public statement on an issue, there's like a pretty limited range. I should make public statements about AI and scraping. Copyright, freedom of speech, right? Freedom of the press, righ…”
Thompson: Daily LinkedIn videos drive advertising deals for The Atlantic
“And then I actually realized it's good for a business. Cause you know, who's watching these videos? CMOs, right? And they're really important people to reach, and so you go into a meeting with the CMO, and you're like, hey, you know, I think you should adverti…”
Thompson: The Atlantic now has 1.46 million subscribers and strong profits
“And now we're at 1.46, right, and we're making, I can't say exactly how much we're making, but we're making good money.”
Thompson: The Atlantic reinvests almost all profits above breakeven into growth
“The way we run it is, the way I think of it, not everybody in the organization agrees, is you have to be profitable and you'll do everything to be profitable. And if you're not going to be profitable, then you make hard choices and all that. If you are going t…”
Thompson: Writers can make more money on Substack than at The Atlantic
“And you can make a lot of money on Substack, right? And you can make more money there than you can at the Atlantic, right? Where we have bans and what people can be paid.”
Thompson: Publishers must rely on tech platform incentives, not goodwill
“None of these partners can be trusted, right? Not because they're bad people. They're good people. They're friends of mine, right? They, but they're capitalists, and they're self-interested, and they would rather they make money than you make money, and if you…”
Thompson: The Atlantic's book affiliate model generated just $7,000 annually
“I was like, we'll do that through books at the Atlantic. We'll figure out, we build that. It generates like 7000 dollars a year, right? It doesn't matter.”
Thompson: The Atlantic ran 230 paywall tests in one year
“I think we ran 230 tests last year on different variables involving essentially the paywall.”
Thompson: The Atlantic lost $20M–$30M annually and laid off 20% in 2020
“The economics of the Atlantic were terrible, right? And they'd been reported that they were losing 20, thirty million dollars a year. They laid off 20% of their staff. They shut down the whole live team. They fired the whole video team, right?”