Career
After college, Thompson briefly worked at CBS as an associate producer before being fired on his first day, as someone believed he was too inexperienced. [13] Without other plans, he traveled to Africa, where he was kidnapped in Morocco by drug dealers “immediately upon landing.” [13] The daylong experience led Thompson to publish his first professional story, a piece in The Washington Post titled "Continental Drift." [14] [13]
When he came back to the U.S., Thompson worked as a freelance journalist and as a street musician in New York City, frequently performing on the 14th Street L train platform at Sixth Avenue. [15] He was then hired at Penguin Computing, a Linux hardware company in San Francisco, but he made the transition back to journalism when he was hired as an editor of the Washington Monthly in 1999. [16] [17] During two years Thompson worked at Washington Monthly under Charles Peters and Paul Glastris, [18] his most prominent story was a piece that exposed fraud in the U.S. News & World Report college rankings. [19] Following another stint as a freelance reporter in Africa, he was hired as a senior editor at Legal Affairs. [20]
In 2005, he was about to start law school at NYU when he instead joined Wired as a senior editor. [21] During that time, he assigned and edited the feature story, "The Great Escape," which was the basis for the Oscar-winning film Argo . [22] He also edited "Vanish" by writer Evan Ratliff, an interactive digital manhunt in which Ratliff tried to disappear with no digital record and challenged readers to track him down, all in an attempt to figure out how difficult it would be to "vanish in the digital age." [23] The winner would walk away with $5000 and a photo in Wired, and Thompson's job was to slowly parcel out information on Ratliff. [24] [23] Afterwards, Thompson and Ratliff, along with Jefferson Rabb, co-founded Atavist, a multimedia magazine and software company. [25] In 2018, Thompson, Rabb, and Ratliff sold Atavist to Automattic, the parent company of WordPress. [26]
In 2010, Thompson was hired as a senior editor at The New Yorker. [27] From 2012 to 2017, Thompson served as the editor of Newyorker.com, where he oversaw and managed the magazine's website. [28] In that time, the number of monthly readers increased seven-fold. [29] He also led the redesign and re-platforming of the site, the launch of The New Yorker Today app, and the introduction of a metered paywall. [30] [31] "What we're trying to do is make a website that is to the Internet what the magazine is to all other magazines," Thompson told Politico at the time of the website's relaunch in 2014. [32] By the time the metered paywall was introduced months later, new subscription sign-ups were 85 percent higher than they had been the previous January. [33] Thompson also wrote for the magazine, most notably a piece on his long friendship with Joseph Stalin's daughter. [34]
In 2017, Thompson returned to Wired as its fifth editor-in-chief. [27] “Nick’s return to Wired, combined with his impeccable journalistic skills, will give the Wired team a tremendous advantage in covering the world of technology,” Condé Nast's Anna Wintour said at the time of the announcement. [27] Under his leadership, Wired launched a successful paywall, won the National Magazine Award for design and photography [35] and was nominated for general excellence. [36] Thompson took an evolved approach to the magazine's editorial mission, [37] as Wired was once an optimistic advocate for the tech industry. [38] “The job isn’t to champion, the job is to be as smart as you can be about [tech companies] and praise them when they do things that are right and hold them to account when they do things that are wrong,” he said. “The role of Wired has shifted, and it’s shifted in a way that’s a little complicated for our audience.” [39]
In October 2018, Wired celebrated its 25th anniversary with a four-day festival and summit in San Francisco, as well as a VIP dinner hosted by Thompson and Anna Wintour. [40]
As editor-in-chief, Thompson continued writing and reporting. [41] In February 2018, he co-wrote Wired's cover story "Inside the Two Years that Shook Facebook—and the World," an 11,000-word investigation based on reporting with more than fifty current and former Facebook employees. [42] Fortune described the piece as "a stellar example of the sort of long-form journalism that no summaries or clickbait teases or listicles can replace, the kind of substantive analysis and storytelling that make democracy and capitalism function.” [43] He has also authored features about Instagram's machine learning, the rising tensions between the US and China over artificial intelligence, [44] how technology helped him run a faster marathon at age 43, [45] and his personal relationship to running. [7] In 2020, Thompson authored a viral story about an unidentified, deceased hiker known to others as "Mostly Harmless." [5] Mostly Harmless was identified in January 2021, [46] and Thompson penned a follow-up piece in the aftermath. [6]
Thompson became CEO of The Atlantic in 2021. Under his leadership, the company grew at its fastest rate and has reached the highest number of subscribers in its 167-year history. In March, the company announced it was profitable, marking “a successful turnaround that offers a glimmer of hope for the rest of the industry,” wrote The Wall Street Journal. [47] During Thompson’s time, the publication has won three National Magazine Awards for General Excellence, three Pulitzer Prizes, and been named Digiday's Publisher of the Year.
In addition to his work at The Atlantic, Thompson is a speaker and moderator who often conducts staged interviews about technology, digital innovation, media, and politics. He has interviewed AI experts, academics, politicians, and entrepreneurs including Geoffrey Hinton, Sam Altman, Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron, Fei-Fei Li, and Mark Zuckerberg. Thompson is also the author of a book, The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War , which was published in 2009. [48] It tells the story of the Cold War through the relationship and rivalry of Kennan, the author of the Long Telegram, and Nitze, one of America's top arms negotiators, who was also Thompson's grandfather. [1] The Washington Post called the book “brilliant” and The New York Times described it as “brimming with fascinating revelations.” [16]
In 2018, he was named one of LinkedIn's top voices alongside Richard Branson, Melinda Gates, and Justin Trudeau. [49] He films a daily video on tech policy for LinkedIn and has roughly two million followers across social media platforms.
