The Accidental Blockbuster

I don’t think you can talk about good feature articles in 2025 without talking about the amazing journalism being conducted day after day during the first three months of the year. The political climate seemed to be changing by the hour, and even nonpolitical news had an element of danger. Deadly wildfires on one side of the country, extreme disruption of the executive branch on the other.

Unfortunately, bad times lead to great stories.

This year was the year of the beat reporter—and the untethered creator. Folks that might have once found a home at a major newspaper, like Law Dork’s Chris Geidner or the independent journalist Marisa Kabas, shaped our understanding of the moment. Even in the more organized world of traditional journalism, publications that did not rely on access journalism for scoops, like Wired, became vital in the early days of the presidency.

The New York Times, with a nagging tendency to backburner or obfuscate big stories for seemingly impenetrable internal reasons, often took a backseat to the often exciting reporting coming from elsewhere in the news world. Its nearby rival, The Wall Street Journal, often had impactful stories that contrasted the tenor of its commentary pages.

Later in the year, a lot of things started to clarify themselves—profiles like Jason Leopold’s epic Businessweek deep dive into DOGE employee Luke Farritor filled in a lot of the gaps. (I even had one of those stories.)

If you were willing to put in the work, there were stories to be told. And in the middle of all that, a stalwart journalist for an establishment magazine got an invite to an utterly bizarre Signal chat.

Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, was not supposed to get invited to the “Houthi PC small group,” but Michael Waltz fat-fingered his Signal app and connected with Goldberg. That gave a journalist a front-row seat to how the new administration handled diplomacy—not behind closed doors, but behind encrypted text messages.

As he wrote in the resulting article, “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans,” he thought that he might be getting catfished:

After reading this chain, I recognized that this conversation possessed a high degree of verisimilitude. The texts, in their word choice and arguments, sounded as if they were written by the people who purportedly sent them, or by a particularly adept AI text generator. I was still concerned that this could be a disinformation operation, or a simulation of some sort. And I remained mystified that no one in the group seemed to have noticed my presence. But if it was a hoax, the quality of mimicry and the level of foreign-policy insight were impressive.

Nope: The surface level read was the correct one. An administration playing fast and loose with secure communications, using a modified version of a privacy-focused app that introduced underlying security issues, was letting one of the most prominent journalists in D.C. in on its secrets.

(A quick note: Yes, it’s paywalled. It’s a good story worth subscribing for, though! In case you want a summary of what he learned, Politico has one.)

Goldberg was in a conversation with the vice president, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and numerous other high-profile figures. And nobody seemed to notice he was there … well, until he published his results in The Atlantic. Then he followed it up with another piece, packed with screenshots.

While not the first black eye the new administration had seen, it was at the time the biggest. (Honestly, it may still be one of the biggest, though an expected Supreme Court ruling on tariffs could change that.)

Jeffrey Goldberg, discussing his gigantic scoop with Jen Psaki on the former MSNBC.

The result was one of the most important stories of the year, one that led Waltz to get a demotion from national security advisor to UN ambassador. The move came only with a slight delay—ensuring that while Waltz only served in the role for slightly more than three months, it was still two and a half months longer than Michael Flynn got.

And given that the motivation with many figures was to stay silent, it may have been the bravest bit of reporting in 2025. I mean, it’s not even close. This has to be the best feature story of the year, even if it is the result of farcical circumstance.

Maybe it didn’t quite shift the narrative on politics in 2025—we had yet to experience the brunt of tariffs, ICE’s infiltration of U.S. cities, or the shocking public death of Charlie Kirk. (I still think a lot about how shell-shocked I felt when I wrote this.) Those events have had a destabilizing effect on American culture. But it showed that journalism still had room to make an impact, even if the business picture was far hazier.

Jeffrey Goldberg didn’t know he was playing the lottery when he got that Signal notification, but he won in a big way, and got a heck of a story out of it.