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Fur flyin over The Atlantic’s redesign

1 March 2010 in ixd, lit | No comments

There’s a lot of animated chatter among some of my favorite journalists over the redesign of their publication’s site. Last week, the Atlantic Monthly rolled out what appears to the casual reader as a slight update of the IA, along with some major changes to the way that blogs are integrated. Reader reaction was anything but casual; anger and suspicion seemed to be the most common reader emotions, shared, at least in part, by the writers. The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein nails the goal of the 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.” Which seems smart, actually.

This clustercuss is the redesign. (I can’t find a picture of the “before,” but it wasn’t really too different, to the casual observer).

The real problem: The redesign isn’t radical enough.

It simply shifted content around — a sure-fire bet to piss off regular readers. The redesign doesn’t address bigger problems around findability, readability, navigability, whatever you want to call a lingering sense of not being able to get around easily. It also breaks from a common blog convention: homepages that includes lengthy content for each post (UPDATE: they’ve changed this). The biggest change is that they’ve moved away from individual blogs as linear, ever-expanding solo narratives, which I think is interesting. What they’re moving toward is less clear.

According to spirited commentary by the Atlantic writers, the redesign was driven by the arcane calculus of advertising. I won’t pretend to know how online ad placement works in a place like The Atlantic, but what I do know is that someone told them to spread their fresh content around, and it’s kinda half-spread.

I am a big Atlantic reader. I subscribe to the print edition, and I regularly read three of its bloggers — Ta-Nehisi Coates, James Fallows and Andrew Sullivan. I subscribe to their feeds, so I don’t go to theatlantic.com unless I want to comment on Coates’ blog, or read comments, which means I’ll head there a couple of times a week, but when I get there I’ll be deeply immersed in a thread.

To me, the true opportunity was to leverage the sprawling, smart conversations that these writers continually create — to create a sort of salon among the readers and writers. To Klein’s point above, you’d think a virtual salon would be exactly the kind of thing that would “re-center” the brand. Breaking out of the conventional blog model is a reasonable first step. Blogs are long threads, and maintaining individual threads needlessly inhibits wider-scale conversation. So they’ve taken that half-step away from threads (which are a helpful organizing principle for readers), but the salon is nowhere in sight. And this is a problem.

My heart wanted to stab things but didn’t have arms

6 January 2009 in lit, politics | No comments

(The title is from a poet named Tao Lin in a collection called this emotion was a little e-book).

The Internet is like a small town, especially when there’s something to disagree about. Recently, some of my favorite Internet citizens got into it over Obama’s decision to have poetry at his inauguration.

I’ve always liked George Packer, the New Yorker’s man on the ground in the early days of Iraq. I devoured his book about the first year of the occupation, The Assassins’ Gate. It tells the stories of a few Iraqis who put their necks on the line to support us when we arrived in 2003, and it comes to mind whenever a conversation turns to the need to find a way out of Iraq. I also read his blog, Interesting Times. He’s the kind of journalist who always does his homework, which made it all the more puzzling when he somewhat flippantly criticized Barack Obama’s decision to ask Elizabeth Alexander to read a poem at his inauguration:

For many decades American poetry has been a private activity, written by few people and read by few people, lacking the language, rhythm, emotion, and thought that could move large numbers of people in large public settings ... [Ed.: Ouch.] ... Obama’s Inauguration needs no heightening. It’ll be its own history, its own poetry.

Ouch. A blanket dismissal? The activity of “a few people?” I started writing a response to this, but Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic beat me to it. His blog rules. He called out Packer for being prematurely judgmental, and suggested that perhaps hip-hop lyrics were suitably rhythmic and emotive for the occasion. Yes.

Lo and behold, Packer just posted what amounts to an apology, and he does so in the best way, comparing the current poetry scene to the NBA in the 1970s:

Contemporary American poetry has too many mansions to be summed up under a throwaway phrase like “private activity.” Its multitude of schools and forms is like the N.B.A. in the nineteen-seventies, when there was no dominant team but a confused contest of warring tribes. And I should have read more of Alexander’s work than appears on her Web site, and more carefully, before expressing skepticism that she’ll be equal to the occasion on January 20th.

So, the real question is: Who will be the David Stern of 21st century American poetry? Chris Fischbach, I’m looking at you.