What is The Atlas?
A newspaper for an interconnected world. We report across borders because today’s biggest stories don’t stop at them. We’re currently in the pilot phase, publishing one issue per month — see our past issues. The next edition is planned for late August.
Why does the world need another newspaper?
The biggest challenges we face — from AI to climate change, migration, war and democracy — do not respect borders. Yet most media has become increasingly national, fragmented and driven by algorithms. The Atlas exists because we believe understanding the world requires looking beyond our own country, tribe and feed.
The Atlas is also responding to a specific need: the dramatic decline in the number of media organisations with either the remit or the resources to cover the world beyond their own borders. Local news is important; but in our inextricably interconnected world, international news and even planetary news is equally so.
Who is funding you?
During this pilot, The Atlas is funded by its parent newsrooms, Coda Story and The Continent. If readers decide this newspaper deserves a future, we’ll build that future together. You can support the pilot here:
Support The Atlas
Why did you choose this format and method of distribution?
Democracies depend on people sharing at least some of the same facts, stories and questions. Algorithms increasingly separate us into different realities. Newspapers once did the opposite. We’re trying to recover a little of that.
Publishing as a PDF — designed to be read easily on mobile devices — allows us to produce a beautifully-designed publication that looks and feels like a printed newspaper. Crucially, the format means that readers are exposed to a complete package of carefully curated journalism — including stories and images you may not have chosen to click on, or which may not have appeared in personalised feeds. This is important: news should be a collective experience, establishing a foundation of shared truths. And it means we get to learn about each other in an era where those with power would silo us with algorithms and hate.
As our tagline goes: we live in the same world, let’s read from the same page.
There’s another reason for this format. PDFs can be easily shared on encrypted messaging platforms, allowing the newspaper to bypass censorship and state-imposed internet restrictions. And if a state turns off the internet? A PDF can be shared via bluetooth or hidden on a flash drive.
We can deliver the newspaper via email, but our preference is for readers to sign up on Signal — a non-profit and one of the most secure messaging platforms in the world. Once you get the paper, you can easily distribute it among your own friends, family and colleagues, on whatever platforms you use to communicate — a new samizdat for the 21st century.
Who are the people making the newspaper?
The journalists making The Atlas are drawn from the award-winning teams at Coda Story and The Continent, as well as our extensive network of freelance journalists around the world. The Atlas is edited by Simon Allison, a South African journalist who is The Continent’s co-founder and former editor-in-chief. Get in touch with him if you have any more questions, at simon@codastory.com.