In the past few years, ancient American abolitionist pamphlet The Atlantic has grown all sorts of successful blogs on its website as part of its goal to one day, impossibly enough, compete with the Wonkette poop joke blog. And then, just last week, The Suits came in with a plan to Grow Traffic (*shudder*) even more: get rid of everyone’s favorite blogs and replace them with boring archive/tag pages for each “voice”‘s impossible-to-find articles.
See up top? That’s what the delightful community that was Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog has become.
HEY THIS IS AN “INSIDE BASEBALL” POST, you’re saying, and maybe, but it is still enjoyable to read everyone at the Atlantic rip their higher-ups publicly for its most recent changes, just like old/current times at Gawker Media.
Passionate British neoconservative communist Andrew Sullivan, for example — who actually got to keep his blog format, because he employs millions of unpaid slaves to write all of his posts between shifts of hard labor at the Sugar Caves — wrote 10,000 million words about how much he hates Capitalism and its meddling with internets:
But treating blogs as a series of headlines, designed to maximize pageviews, is a deep misunderstanding of blogs, their reader communities and their integrity. I hope they get restored to their previous coherence, and these amorphous “channels” gain some editorial identity. I hope writers like Fallows and Goldberg aren’t treated as random fodder – anchors! – for “channels”. I believe in the Atlantic as a place for writing. The redesign seems to me to ooze casual indifference to that and to the respect that individual writers deserve.
The redesign also makes the Dish’s role at the Atlantic even more anomalous than it has recently become. The Dish once fit into a bevy of bloggers as a kind of unifying hub for all of them. In the new design, it’s clear the Dish fits in nowhere. It has always been an experiment fitting a blogazine like the Dish into an online magazine like the Atlantic. But the experiment is clearly failing.
Thanks for clicking the jump on this post, btw.
The Redesign, Ctd [Andrew Sullivan/Daily Dish]
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{ 37 comments }
So, when does the Atlantic hire Jim Newell to anchor their “making fun of Trig Palin” channel?
The least I could do.
Don’t worry Andrew, I will continue not reading your blogazine-whatsis.
There’s another blog?
By the end of 2011, the only online media will be NYtimes.com, TMZ, lolcats and loldogs. Really.
[re=522023]jagorev[/re]: Hey, we’re talking about the place where Andrew Sullivan writes. He’s not even sure if Trig Palin exists, since there’s no way he could be born on a plane. Or something like that.
[re=522035]bureaucrap[/re]: C’mon, you don’t think kids making funny noises on Youtube will still be around?
As a commenter on both this excellent poop blog and TNC’s excellent non-poop blog, it constantly amazes me that there is such a large overflow of readers between the two.
Never mind the redesign, Alyssa (whoever she is) is right, Krasinski is totally wrong for Steve Rogers; if they want someone from NBC, it should be the guy who plays Captain Awesome on Chuck.
Actually, I’m surprised Wonkette never mentioned the recent teabagger angry outrage over the latest Captain America issue making fun of them:
http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2010/02/09/captain-america-versus-the-teabaggers
You’d think Sully would appreciate the draining effect a marathon twelve-hour session of passionate coding can have on one’s Google Analytics skills.
[re=522035]bureaucrap[/re]: I wouldn’t be so sure about the NY Times.
I wish all professions were as cool with telling the general public how screwed up your management is as journalism seems to be. I mean, the way Newell made fun of Layne when Ken was on his little hike was just priceless.
Nobody understands poop better than Wonkette. And that includes RedState.
Thanks for clicking the jump on this post, btw.
HOW DID YOU KNOW?!???!!!
Thanks for clicking the jump on this post, btw.
Now I feel cheap and used.
and I normally have to pay people for that.
Thank you, Wonkette.
[re=522037]benj-thewrathofgod[/re]: “I have HAD IT with these MOTHERFUCKING TARDS on this MOTHERFUCKING PLANE!”
(Too late?..)
What’s Ta-Nehisi in English?
[re=522043]assistant/atlas[/re]: Agreed. My prediction is that one day their gleaming spire in the sky will one day house one tenant: the nation’s largest and most comprehensive Cold Stone Creamery.
@Mr Blifil: “Hakuna Matata”.
Sullivan is right. The Atlantic blogosphere is a place for great writing. Well, except for Goldberg (who writes like that fat bully who wanted to sit on the tender, emo kid in 4th grade), McArdle (who writes like someone furiously masturbating with a Williams-Sonoma baster and then confessing to Ayn Rand after), Crook (who writes like xanax), Ambinder (who writes like Fareed Zakaria, but even more afraid of offending anyone), and Sullivan (who writes like someone suddenly startled out of his sleep and gasping for air and vengeance).
I guess I’m saying Coates and Fallows can write.
[re=522048]Naked Bunny with a Whip[/re]: OH MY GOD! The blog is coming from inside your house!
RUUUNNNNN!!!
Well, you wouldn’t actually want people writing on the Intarwebs, would you?
[re=522052]Mr Blifil[/re]: [re=522058]Naked Bunny with a Whip[/re]: No, no, it’s “Wemoweh”.
This isn’t inside baseball, this is inside cricket or jai alai or something.
[re=522060]Nappied Hypotenuse[/re]: Seconded.
“The Dish once fit into a bevy of bloggers as a kind of unifying hub for all of them.”
Only in your darkest fantasies, Andrew.
Not to worry. The Atlantic rolls out redesigns with appalling frequency. The ADHD drones in design will soon get bored with this one too, and try some shiny new thing.
TBogg, are you listening? Your blog becomes new-Atlanticicized after the first 2 or 3 posts. Open them all up, por favor!
@TGY: You’re so racists against sleeping lions.
I confess:
I clickety click anytime Sully mentions “Palin, teh gay, and Hitch”
Is there an internet law to the effect that a blog’s useability is inversely proportional to page views/unique visitors?
Having spent the past 45 years getting paid for interfacing with words, I can see that Sullivan has forgotten the first rule of “publishing” — Designers Can’t Read Anyway (that’s why they’re designers).
[re=522242]torera[/re]: The abundance of expensively, self-consciously designed material with glaring misspellings and mispunctuation certainly adds weight to your argument. OTOH, isn’t that what you ‘content providers’ are paid to check?
The web designers capitulate, it’s morning in America again:
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/03/web-site-paradise-restored/36849/
Ta-Nehisi Coates is a dude? I had been assuming otherwise for a long time.
Coated should change his first name to Ray. He looks like a Ray. Ta-Nehisi is a hot girl name.
Ta-Nehisi Coates writes some of the most beautiful posts about black and whites in American I’ve ever read….he’s a wonderfully, intelligent human being…I’ve bookmarked his site and put it next to Sullys.
I agree with all the commenters here that the redesign of the “New” Atlantic stinks. Why do they always have to mess with something that is perfect?
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