It was on a 14-hour flight from Washington to Tokyo back in 1993 that David Bradley had his midlife crisis. Although he had dreamed of becoming a Republican senator, Bradley spent those sleepless hours concluding he didn’t have the right stuff to be a politician. By the time the plane landed he decided to do the next best thing: run a media company that covered politics.

It took a number of years for the owner of two successful research companies to accomplish his new goal. But in 1997 he bought National Journal, a weekly on government and politics that caters to Washington insiders, and two years later he acquired The Atlantic, an old and proud title that had fallen on hard times.