Noah Shachtman | |
|---|---|
 Shachtman in 2022 | |
| Education | Georgetown University (BA) Hebrew University of Jerusalem |
| Occupation | Journalist |
| Title | Editor-in-chief of Rolling Stone |
| Awards | Online Journalism Awards for Beat Reporting (2007) and National Magazine Award for Reporting, Digital Media (2012) and Best Digital Design (2023) |
Noah Shachtman is an American journalist, and musician. He is the editor-in-chief of Rolling Stone.[1] From 2018 to 2021, he served as the editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast.[2] He previously was the executive editor of the site.[3] A former non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution, he also worked as executive editor for News at Foreign Policy and as a contributing editor at Wired.[4][5]
Born to a Jewish family, Shachtman graduated from Georgetown University and attended the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.[6] His grandfather was theater impresario Lee Guber, and his father and stepmother worked at CBS News.[7]
In 2003, Shachtman founded Defensetech.org. The site was acquired by Military.com the following year.[8] In 2006, he became a contributing editor at Wired. He co-founded the Danger Room blog, which won the 2007 Online Journalism Award for Beat Reporting[9] and the 2012 National Magazine Award for reporting in digital media.
Shachtman left Wired to join Foreign Policy in 2013. He joined The Daily Beast as its new executive editor in 2014.[10] He helped turned the site into "a journalistic scoop factory", in the words of the Poynter Institute.[11]
When John Avlon left The Daily Beast in May 2018, Shachtman was promoted to editor-in-chief.[12] The Hollywood Reporter named Shachtman one of the 35 most powerful people in New York media in 2019.[13]
Shachtman has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Slate, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.[14][15] He has also appeared as a guest on CNN,[16] NPR,[17] MSNBC, and Frontline.[18][19] Shachtman has spoken before audiences at West Point, the Army Command and General Staff College,[20] the Aspen Security Forum,[21] the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference,[22] Harvard Law School,[23] Yale Law School,[24] National Defense University and the Center for a New American Security Conference.[25]
Shachtman has reported from Afghanistan, Israel, Iraq, Qatar, Kuwait, Russia, the Pentagon, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.[26] Prior to his career in journalism, Shachtman was a campaign staffer in the Bill Clinton 1992 presidential campaign, a book editor, and plays bass guitar.[27]
Shachtman was named editor-in-chief of Rolling Stone in July 2021.[28]
After a year under Shachtman as editor-in-chief, Rolling Stone's web traffic was up 18%, its social following up 50%, and its audience had grown considerably younger, with 63% under the age of 44.[14]
In April 2022, Rolling Stone unveiled previously-unseen footage of DaBaby shooting of a teenager to death, undercutting the rapper's claims of self-defense in the killing. The following month, the magazine revealed that Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins had told multiple friends before he died that he could no longer physically keep up with the band's intense touring schedule. In October 2022, the magazine reported on NBA all-star Kyrie Irving's sharing of anti-semitic content on his social media accounts; Irving was suspended for doing so.
In October 2022, Rolling Stone broke the news that the FBI had raided the home of ABC News producer James Gordon Meek. but could not confirm the reason why.[29] Rolling Stone subsequently broke the news that the FBI was preparing to indict Meek for matters "unrelated to his work as a journalist."[30] On February 1, 2023, Rolling Stone reported that Meek had been charged with the transportation of child pornography.[31] The magazine came under fire for not initially reporting the child pornography investigation, while the magazine insisted it didn't have enough evidence to verify such an explosive allegation. "Rolling Stone stuck to a simple principle: publish in the moment as much information as it could confidently substantiate," the magazine's parent company said in a statement.[32]
In July 2023, Rolling Stone was nominated for its first-ever Emmy award in the "Outstanding Interactive Media" category[33] for its investigation into "The DJ and the War Crimes."[34] The piece also won a National Magazine Award for digital design[35] and an Overseas Press Club Award.[36] In December, 2023 Rolling Stone collected five National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards,[37] four Front Page Awards,[38] and a Deadline Cub award.[39]
In February 2024, Shachtman announced he would be leaving Rolling Stone.[40]
On February 27, 2020, journalist Carson Griffith announced she was suing Shachtman, The Daily Beast, and writer Maxwell Tani, over a "defamatory and untruthful" article that contains allegations of offensive workplace comments from her former co-workers and former Gawker writers Maya Kosoff and Anna Breslaw.[41] The lawsuit was dismissed on May 17, 2023.[42]
