Introduction

The Atlantic may be a 160-year-old institution, but it isn’t shy about experimenting with new things. It was one of the first traditional publications to go all-in on digital media in the late-aughts and managed to achieve profitability from the move pretty quickly. It experimented with brand new verticals like The Atlantic Wire and Quartz. Recently, it was acquired by Laurene Powell Jobs’s Emerson Collective, which has been investing in forward-thinking media sites.

And since 2012, it’s been running an in-house creative agency called Atlantic 57. The idea is simple: let’s take the editorial insights we’ve gleaned from running a magazine for 160 years and use that to launch online publications for major brands and non-profits.

I recently interview Margaret Myers, a longtime journalist who works on one of these editorial projects for insurance company Allstate. I asked her about her past life as a traditional journalist and how she leverages that expertise in developing content for The Renewal Project, the online publication she manages for Allstate.