He Shut Down Time’s Moscow Bureau. Then He Built His Own Magazine

Co-founder Nathan Thornburgh explained how the magazine Roads & Kingdoms rebuilt itself after Anthony Bourdain's death.

In 2011, as the golden era of glossy newsweeklies was collapsing under the weight of digital disruption, former Time correspondent Nathan Thornburgh made a bet that serious journalism didn’t have to look the way it always had. Alongside food writer Matt Goulding, he launched Roads & Kingdoms as a scrappy Tumblr experiment, using food as a gateway into geopolitics, history, and culture.

Over the next decade, the company would evolve into something far bigger — becoming a creative hub for Anthony Bourdain, winning an Emmy for a brand-funded series, nearly collapsing after Bourdain’s death, and ultimately reinventing itself around high-end culinary travel. This year, Roads & Kingdoms is relaunching the media arm with a membership-driven model and an annual print magazine.

In a recent interview, Thornburgh reflected on the collapse of legacy media, the perils and possibilities of brand-funded journalism, and why he believes independent, reader-supported publishing offers a more durable path forward.

Let’s jump into it…

From Shutting Down Bureaus to Starting Over

Thornburgh came up in the final years of corporate newsweeklies. He spent a decade at Time, eventually becoming an editor and foreign correspondent. But the writing was on the wall.

“I had designs to one day lead the Moscow bureau,” he said. “By the time I had enough in-house juice at Time Magazine to be sent to Moscow, they sent me there to shut the bureau down.”