Andrew Sullivan Chafes At Atlantic Redesign
Hugely prolific and popular blogger Andrew Sullivan, the man behind The Atlantic’s Daily Dish blog, has a few complaints about The Atlantic’s redesign.
An initial post on Friday focused primarily on formatting issues. The new site, Sullivan and his readers said, had too many fonts and was too hard on the eyes.
Today, Sullivan takes aim at the overall structure of the site, making pointed arguments that the new format reflects a lack of understanding of how blogs work and an insensitivity to the bloggers who have helped make The Atlantic‘s Web site a tremendous success. The change involves a shuffling of many of the bloggers into a series of topic headings. Before the redesign, each blog had essentially existed on its own, with emphasis placed on the writer behind the blog, not the topic of a given post.
Sullivan does not care for this change:
[T]reating 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 notion that the most effective blogs create conversations among readers and writers is clearly very near and dear to Sullivan’s heart, but as he points out, blogs as businesses are increasingly gravitating toward a vertical-centric presentation, to make it easier for advertisers to target audiences.
Sullivan ends with a somewhat ominous proclamation about The Daily Dish’s continued role at The Atlantic.
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.
Still the Dish will survive, however estranged from the rest of the Atlantic.com’s content; and relatively benign neglect is probably better than the alternatives. We may even get some more help soon – even our own unpaid interns – that will lighten the crushing workload.
But give us back our search engine!
Sullivan articulates an important tension within the blogging business model. An active and engaged readership clearly grows out of careful attention by a blogger to furthering discussion of the day’s events. But the effective measurement of an audience’s interests from an advertising perspective often disrupts this line of communication, subverting the writer’s significance within the structure of the site. We’ll see how the give and take pans out.
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