Noah Shachtman

Noah Shachtman is an American journalist. From 2021 to 2024, he was 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]

Noah Shachtman
Shachtman in 2022
Education	Georgetown University (BA) Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Occupation	Journalist
Title	Editor-in-chief of Rolling Stone
Relatives	Lee Guber (grandfather)
Awards	Online Journalism Awards for Beat Reporting (2007) and National Magazine Award for Reporting, Digital Media (2012) and Best Digital Design (2023)

Early life and education

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]

Career

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] Noted journalism school and research organization, the Poynter Institute, would later say Shachtman helped turned the Daily Beast into "a journalistic scoop factory."^[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]

Rolling Stone

Shachtman was named editor-in-chief of Rolling Stone in July 2021.^[28]

In October 2022, Rolling Stone broke the news that the FBI had raided the home of ABC News producer James Gordon Meek, but left out the detail that the raid was carried out because of child pornography, instead suggesting that "Meek appears to be on the wrong side of the national-security apparatus" and that the raid had been instigated by the government because of Meek's reporting on national security issues. It was later revealed that the article was originally to include the child pornography details, but Shachtman, who personally knows the accused Meek and is considered friendly with him, had personally intervened to remove the charges and rewrote the article to give it a different spin.^[29]

In February 2024, Shachtman announced he would be leaving Rolling Stone.^[30]