On The Atlantic ReDesign

So why not put my thoughts out there... everyone else has.

I'm an avid reader of Andrew Sullivan's blog The Daily Dish. Recently the entire Atlantic site underwent a drastic redesign that has riled up the readers and bloggers alike. Sullivan unloads here.

Ezra Klein, of the Washington Post, put in his two cents yesterday, and made some valid points:

The problem for the Atlantic is that they were a monthly institution entering a daily medium. Some magazines, like The American Prospect and The New Republic, solved that problem by accelerating their publication cycle to include daily Web articles and telling their staffs to blog. But some, like the Atlantic and the Washington Monthly, held back on changing the actual institution, and instead hired bloggers with existing audiences to come create daily content under the magazine's banner.

That worked out fine until the magazine wanted an online presence of its own only to realize that their acquisition strategy had left them an audience loyal to the individual "voices" rather than to the brand.

The Atlantic's redesign seems like a bet to re-center the Web site around the Atlantic as an institution rather than leaving it as a web hosting service for a couple of bloggers. What's causing the outcry is that in order to drive traffic to the new channels, they're integrating the blogs (save for the traffic-generating beast that is Sullivan's Daily Dish) into the channels. That way the readers of Ta-Nehisi's blog, to use one example, will become readers of the culture channel, which includes Ta-Nehisi's content.

If the Publisher's main concern is for the Magazine and its Web presence, then I can't help but hearken back to last year. Sullivan made an appeal to readers, that if they liked his blogging, they should support The Atlantic Monthly. I became a subscriber. My new found enthusiasm for the magazine has spread to friends of mine who are also now new subscribers to The Atlantic.

Not only this, but Sullivan has on several occasions linked internally to other pages/stories within the Atlantic. Beyond this any redesign could be minimized in an effort to drive traffic to their channels. To use a terrible metaphor, supported cross pollination seems like the better solution to laboratory hybridization.

Now if only someone could convince the fine folks over at Sandlapper to do a redesign and hire some bloggers, but finding bloggers in this state who, while they may be partisan, aren't beholden Party consultants and could drive traffic is damned impossible.