Turmoil at The Atlantic

The Atlantic’s* blog section, my single favorite part of the Internet and a frequent source of posts and links here, is in turmoil this morning owing to a redesign that has stripped its superb habitues of the graphical personality and color that made their individual pages so compelling. It didn’t help that a series of glitches accompanied the changeover, including the (apparently temporary) loss of RSS feeds and the (hopefully temporary) disappearance of daily email updates.

The esteemed James Fallows, though characteristically uber-polite, is unable to conceal his unhappiness:

[T]he new layout scheme — in which you see only a few-line intro to each post but no pictures, block quotes, or other amplifying material — unavoidably changes the sensibility and tone of personal blogs. It drains them of variety and individuality, not to mention making them much less convenient to read. Only now that it is gone do I realize how important the placing of photos has been to my own sense of what I wanted to convey, along with the ability to alternate between longer and shorter posts on a “landing” page, or to deliberately save some material for “after the jump” placement.

Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish emerges relatively unscathed, but only because, as fellow blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates points out, in traffic terms, “Andrew is a monster.” The Dish generates over half the traffic on the whole Atlantic site. That didn’t stop the acerbic Sullivan from cataloging his dislikes:

[T]he abrupt removal of the Dish’s search engine. The unnecessary new fonts, the loss of framing for the photos, the exploitation of the Dish as a relentlessly throbbing promotional tool for the Wire (a Dish duplicate with more staffers) has interrupted its flow and made it less easy to read.

Sullivan also listed changes he would have preferred:

My requests over three years, often suggested by readers – for a continued-reading feature that does not require a new page (the new one sends you into a mass of prose where it’s very hard to find where you left off), for a much more user-friendly search function, for one-click running summaries of long threads (torture, gay rights, Obama, health reform, Window views) etc, have all been turned down, even as just three people produce 300 posts a week to the point of exhaustion and generate between 55 and 60 percent of the Atlantic.com’s entire traffic.

I’m reluctant to include the usual links here, because the new site is so uninviting, I fear I will discourage Contrarian readers from ever returning to The Atlantic‘s excellent bloggers, all of whom seem to think that many of the changes will be rolled back over the ensuing days and weeks.

Newspaper readers are inherently conservative. I have (almost) never seen a newspaper redesign I liked out of the box. Perhaps blog readers are no different.

For his part, the mild-mannered Fallows is so upset, he has apparently gone on strike:

I am optimistic that this will change, but find the new approach such a straitjacket that I won’t even try to work within its constraints until it is fixed.

* Out of habit forged in childhood, I persist in calling Atlantic Monthly.