Griff Witte Joining The Atlantic as a Managing Editor
The Atlantic has hired Griff Witte as a managing editor to lead its growing politics and accountability team. Editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg writes in an announcement, shared below, that Witte’s “experience on the democracy beat, in particular, will help us in our coverage of the various challenges to the American way of governance.”
Witte is currently the senior politics and democracy editor for The Washington Post, and in his 23 years at the paper has reported from across the United States and in more than 30 countries, including as bureau chief in Kabul, Islamabad, Jerusalem, London, and Berlin.
The Atlantic announced a number of new writers at the start of the year: Caity Weaver as a staff writer, who will begin with The Atlantic next month and comes from The New York Times Magazine; staff writers Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer, both recently of The Post (see their first report, “The Tech Oligarchy Arrives,” from Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday); and contributing writers Jonathan Lemire and Alex Reisner.
Below is the announcement from Jeffrey Goldberg:
Dear everyone,
We’re very happy to let you know that Griff Witte is joining The Atlantic as a managing editor. Griff, who is currently the senior editor at The Washington Post in charge of political and democracy coverage, will be leading our growing politics and accountability team. As many of you know already, Griff is a journalistic force, who has led his 50-person team at The Post with energy, creativity, smarts and ambition. His experience on the democracy beat, in particular, will help us in our coverage of the various challenges to the American way of governance.
Griff comes to us after a storied, 23-year run at The Post, where he spent much of his time as a foreign correspondent. As a stalwart of the foreign desk, he covered insurgencies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, wars in Gaza, the Arab Spring uprising in Egypt, the return of autocracy in central Europe, and the dawn of the Brexit era in Britain. His reports on refugees crossing into Europe, and on hate-preachers radicalizing followers in Britain, were recognized, respectively, by the National Press Foundation and the Overseas Press Club. In between international postings, Griff served as the newspaper's deputy foreign editor and guided prize-winning coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In his new role for us, Griff will help build and lead our coverage of politics and democracy, with a special focus on government accountability and investigations. In addition to his own impressive track record of reporting stories on these broad beats, Griff has earned the admiration of his reporters for his ability to edit the sort of complicated, scoop-driven, and otherwise revelatory stories that will be critical to our mission as we try to cover and explain the actions of the Trump Administration. Griff is highly collaborative and fearless, qualities that will serve The Atlantic well in the months and years ahead.
Griff’s decision to join The Atlantic represents an intergenerational homecoming, of sorts. His father, the legendary artist Michael Witte, illustrated covers and made other art for The Atlantic in the 1980s (and if we’re lucky, we'll get him drawing for us again).
Witte will report to deputy executive editor Yoni Appelbaum and work closely with deputy editor Juliet Lapidos and other editorial leaders.
Press Contact: Anna Bross, The Atlantic | press@theatlantic.com