Atlantic Bloggers Ask, Why Did The Atlantic Ruin Everything?

In the past few years, ancient American abolitionist pamphletThe Atlantichas 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 favoriteblogsand 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 tokeephis 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]