Jeffrey Goldberg will be the new moderator of Washington Week, WETA and NewsHour Productions announced Wednesday.
Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, starts his tenure Aug. 11. He will be the 10th moderator in Washington Week’s 56-year history.
Washington Week is produced by NewsHour Productions, a company overseen by WETA in Washington, D.C. As part of the arrangement, The Atlantic will join WETA and NewsHour Productions as an “editorial partner” for the program, which will be rebranded as Washington Week with The Atlantic.
“We are thrilled to embark on this next chapter,” said WETA CEO Sharon Percy Rockefeller in a news release. “As the longest-running news and public affairs program on primetime television, Washington Week is known for its incisive and thoughtful roundtable conversations featuring the sharpest minds in news — a reputation that will only be enhanced with Jeffrey and The Atlantic joining as partners.”
Goldberg joined The Atlantic in 2007 as a national correspondent and was named the magazine’s 15th editor-in-chief in 2016. During his editorship, the publication has faced financial challenges but has since grown subscriptions and won its first-ever Pulitzer Prizes in each of the past three years. The Atlantic also received the National Magazine Award for General Excellence from the American Society of Magazine Editors in 2022 and this year. In 2020, Goldberg was named editor of the year by Adweek, which also named The Atlantic magazine of the year.
Washington Week has gone through several host transitions in the past few years following the death of longtime moderator Gwen Ifill in 2016. Robert Costa moderated the program until 2021, when Yamiche Alcindor succeeded him.
In his statement, Goldberg said Washington Week “holds a special and rare place on television, to have a space for civil and extended conversation about the issues affecting the news and our world. Gwen built this show into an institution, continued by Robert and by Yamiche, and I’m honored to carry on this tradition as The Atlantic embarks on this partnership.”
NewsHour senior EP Sara Just, who oversees the program alongside Washington Week EP Stephanie Kotuby, said the organization is “delighted” to have Goldberg, “whose depth, intellect and, yes, wit, are such ideal fits for this program and its next chapter.”
In the release, WETA pointed to Goldberg’s appointment and the partnership with The Atlantic as a “pivotal moment ahead of the 2024 general election.” Goldberg told The New York Times that he thinks enough viewers want in-depth political analysis and he wants to help Washington Week grow its audience. “The good thing is, there’s an awful lot of Americans, and I don’t need all of them to come here,” Mr. Goldberg told the Times. “We just need five or 10 million.”
The newspaper reported that The Atlantic will co-produce the show, helping to cover costs and sell sponsorships. A NewsHour spokesperson told the Times that Washington Week’s corporate sponsorship has declined by about 10% since 2019. Viewers averaged just under 850,000 in April, according to the Times citing Nielsen data, about a 22% percent decline from 2015.
Goldberg is a regular guest on NBC, MSNBC, CBS, CNN and NPR. Before joining The Atlantic, Goldberg was Middle East correspondent and Washington correspondent for The New Yorker. Earlier in his career, he was a writer for The New York Times Magazine and New York magazine. He began his career as a police reporter for The Washington Post. Goldberg is also author of Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror.
A former fellow of the American Academy in Berlin, he served as a public-policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and as distinguished visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Goldberg has received numerous awards, including the National Magazine Award for reporting, the Daniel Pearl Award for reporting, the Overseas Press Club Award for human-rights reporting and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists Prize for best investigative reporting.