He joined The Atlantic in 2007 as a national correspondent and in 2016 was named the magazine’s 15th editor in chief. During his editorship, The Atlantic has set new audience and subscription records, and won its first-ever Pulitzer Prizes. In 2022, The Atlantic received the National Magazine Award for General Excellence from the American Society of Magazine Editors, the top award in the industry. In 2020, Goldberg was named editor of the year by Adweek, which also named The Atlantic magazine of the year.

Before joining The Atlantic, Goldberg served as the Middle East correspondent, and then the Washington correspondent, for The New Yorker. Earlier in his career, he was a writer for The New York Times Magazine, where he wrote 15 cover stories. He began his career as a police reporter for The Washington Post. Goldberg is the author of Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror. A former fellow of the American Academy in Berlin, he also served as a public-policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and as the distinguished visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Goldberg is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Magazine Award for reporting, the Daniel Pearl Award for reporting, the Overseas Press Club Award for human-rights reporting, and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists Prize for best investigative reporting.