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Atlantic Names Jeffrey Goldberg Its Editor in Chief

Jeffrey Goldberg in 2014.Credit...Lynn Goldsmith

The Atlantic said on Tuesday that it had named Jeffrey Goldberg, a correspondent for the company since 2007, its next editor in chief, drawing an extensive search to a close.

The role had been vacant since the end of April, when James Bennet left the magazine to rejoin The New York Times as its editorial page editor. David G. Bradley, the chairman of Atlantic Media, received nearly 500 recommendations for the position, and he and Bob Cohn, president of The Atlantic, considered several dozen candidates.

“It is fair to say that, together, we met a great deal of the nation’s top editorial talent,” Mr. Bradley wrote in a memo to employees. “But, at least for us, Jeff is something set apart.”

Since joining The Atlantic nine years ago, Mr. Goldberg has written 11 cover stories, won numerous awards, and has become known for his coverage of foreign affairs. He shaped The Atlantic’s recent editorial endorsing Hillary Clinton for president, only the third presidential endorsement in the magazine’s nearly 160-year history. The endorsement, which was published last week, called Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, “the most ostentatiously unqualified major-party candidate in the 227-year history of the American presidency.”

Still, Mr. Goldberg, 51, who was last an editor when he was in college at the University of Pennsylvania in the mid-1980s, said he had not expected to become The Atlantic’s top editor.

“It’s certainly true that this was not in my plan for 2016,” he said in a telephone interview on Monday. But, he added, “It started coming up in conversation a couple of months after James left, and I had to take it seriously.”

Mr. Goldberg takes the reins of The Atlantic’s editorial operations as the magazine publisher continues to transform into a multimedia company. The company’s online audience has been on an upward trajectory — in August, the company drew 19 million unique online visitors in the United States, a roughly 50 percent increase from August 2015, according to the measurement firm comScore. Magazine sales have also remained strong, with a total circulation of roughly 500,000 over the last several years, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. The company said it expected its total revenue to increase 20 percent this year.

Mr. Goldberg, who has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and New York magazine, is The Atlantic’s 14th top editor since its founding in 1857. He said he hoped to eventually write in his new position, but he did not think he would have time for “the first year or two at least.”

For now, he said, the goal — and the challenge — was “to continue growing quickly on all platforms while maintaining Atlantic-level standards and quality.”

“The miracle of The Atlantic,” he said, “is this is literally a 19th-century brand that is firing on all pistons in a really ruthless 21st-century media environment.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: The Atlantic Selects New Top Editor From Within. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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