Tag: The Dish Model

A reader writes:

I have been noticing fewer page jumps to read full posts recently. As a multi-daily reader I must give a hearty "Thank You" for that.

Another writes:

This is over a year old, but still: are y'all hip to Slow Blogging? I'm noticing a general slowing down, or conscious pausing, across multiple blogs recently. Interesting.

I'm trying to find a way to keep this blog alive without burning out completely.

It's hard to explain the experience of blogging every day (more or less) for ten years straight. And blogging like you mean it. I can't phone in this blog; it's just not in my nature. So cutting myself off on weekends has been a way to avoid crashing and burning (for Chris and Patrick too), and regaining some semblance of a life outside the web. But we've still failed to do "slow-blogging". In our first week of weekends-off, we racked up 260 posts, which is really no different than our previous pace. We've just concentrated them into five days rather than seven.

We have decided to cut down on the truncated posts, to please our most dedicated readers. More scrolling, less clicking. Fewer pageviews, but it's the reader experience that matters most. We realize at the Dish that our most precious resource is you.

A reader writes:

I thought you might be interested to know that as of today, Tennessee State computers are now blocking your site. The reason given by the blocking software?

Marijuana!

Totally harshing on this.

by Andrew Sullivan

I know I’m on vacation, but since this debate has started with some sparks (see Fallows here and here, TNC here, Goldberg here and here, Ambers here), just a few words. I never saw the whole redesign before it was launched and I was not included in the process at all. It has all sorts of bells and whistles which people tell me are great – including a new “content management system” and something called Disqus which is a way cool commenting device with avatars and such.

I don’t like what was done to my own page much, as I have said, but I signed off in advance (except for the 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. The biggest loss is the absence of the boxes of the most recent posts for the other bloggers. Now, you cannot use the Dish as a hub for the other bloggers (which was probably part of the point) but I fear it will reduce their traffic – and will certainly make me miss good stuff I otherwise would have clicked on.

Certainly at no point was I ever asked what I would like to see improved on this page. 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.

But in this redesign, we should be grateful for the usual neglect. Our page is by far the least messed up – and priority for undoing the blog-messes rightly goes to those poor souls like TNC whose blog has been all but, in the words of one of his readers, “spiked“. Maybe it takes actually seeing a design live and online that brings this into focus (because TNC approved the changes beforehand). But that’s because a blog is inherently a live process and conversation and anyone who actually understands blogging’s intimate relationship to its readership – and the critical importance of conversation to the endeavor – would never have dreamed of turning it into a series of headlines. That’s what worries me deeply. Not the inevitable transitional glitches but the philosophy behind it.

I know the designers meant well and worked very hard. Like everyone else, I deeply appreciate their hard work. Maybe some agree with Goldberg that this HuffPo/DailyBeast/Gawker type melange is, in fact, “a thorough reimagining of what a magazine’s website could be: Current, topical, intellectual, earnest (and ironic), but rooted in the culture and history of one of America’s most indispensably important magazines.”

I understand that advertisers like “verticals” to pitch certain kinds of products, and are allegedly leery of individual bloggers with style. I also know in this media climate how vital advertising is, and how our survival online is critical to our endurance in print. I am not a businessman. And I deeply believe in the Atlantic, as readers well know. If this keeps us afloat, that sure is better than going under. If there is business genius here, congrats to all involved.

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.

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!

This whole idea of actually having a vacation before Christmas hell turned out to be a wondrous one. It’s been one of the best breaks I can remember, possibly because I was so wiped out beforehand. I want to thank my trusty under-bloggers, Chris and Patrick, for holding down the fort and proving yet again how this blog is now far more than my lone efforts. But a special thanks to Andrew Sprung and Conor Friedersdorf. Conor, a Dish alum, has swiftly become one of the more lucid, calm and persuasive right of center voices out there. Andrew’s blog is one of my secret Internet pleasures, another oasis of reason and insight in a blogosphere with plenty of emotion and propaganda. Keep up with Andrew here.

A small word about the increasingly collaborative nature of the Dish, since some strangers to the blog seem to have misunderstood its structure. This is understandable since the Dish has, since its beginning, been a consciously and continuously evolving site. Some blogs are basically now what they were when they started, and that’s a fine thing. But since this blog started when Bill Clinton was president, and since I’m a restless and curious spirit, that hasn’t happened here. The original 2000 concept – one writer sending his wisdom to the world – almost immediately succumbed to the medium. The minute I started blogging, the readers insisted on being an integral part of the project. Their contributions, emails, tips, links, harangues, praise, and criticism became a form of lodestar for the Dish. From the dissents to the window views to the email threads (“The View from Your Recession,” “It’s So Personal” on late term abortions, etc) the Dish is as much your blog as mine at this point. And it’s much stronger for it. (I recount some of this in my 2007 essay, Why I Blog.)

In the last three years at the Atlantic, I also experimented by marshaling interns to filter the web. They began by writing me memos of links I might have missed or new bloggers I couldn’t keep up with. The best and most attuned to Dishness eventually became staffers – all two of ’em – and went from memos to draft posts, which I then edited, tweaked and posted. That’s still the basic structure. But as time has gone on, and Chris and Patrick have become so skilled – the Iran coverage of last June was a genuine three-man-effort round the clock – I’ve been able to delegate some more. This coming year, I hope to evolve this concept even more to include a couple more under-bloggers.

I’m doing all this experimentally and provisionally, figuring out what works, what doesn’t, and trying to learn all the time. We’re pioneers here at the Dish and that means knowing what you don’t know. But my sense of the current intimations is that the Dish has organically evolved into an edited viewspaper, which has at its core my own take on the world, but which hopes to incorporate as many alternative views as possible in a coherent and entertaining conversation.

Is this an evolution in the idea of a “magazine” online? Who knows? What I do know is that the collaborative nature of the Dish is something I regard as a strength and something unique to the web and therefore worth exploring further in this open source medium.

If new readers are deluded at first blush in thinking that all this is the result of one man alone typing into a laptop, then they’ll soon figure out what’s going on. Should there by bylines at all times? My sense right now is not. Since almost everything goes through my frontal cortex, and very very little (and nothing substantive) appears without my clicking publish, I function as the editor and chief writer. Any editorial views published as such on this blog are therefore mine and mine alone. But the content and counter-argument are generated by the collective mind of the readers, under-bloggers and the rest of the blogosphere. I think it’s cleaner and simpler not to clutter the blog up with bylines, and to retain its identity as one single narrative conversation. As long as you’re transparent about that, and we have been, I see no problem.

In fact, this is what magazines used to be in the good old ancient days. Think of the Economist, one of the few old magazines to have retained its by-line-free content. No one believes that everything is written by one person; but it is all part of collective effort ultimately overseen by one editor. It was like that when it started and it retains a simplicity and coherence that other magazines do not have. Its point is the content not the authorship, like our emails, which have always been anonymous. An online blogazine will never be quite like that, since it’s far more open-source, but I like the idea of importing a classic magazine form into a new medium (remember when the New Yorker’s Talk of the Town was also non-by-lined and when TNR was largely one unsigned editorial after another?). No one else is doing the web quite like this – evolving a one-person blog into a collaborative but edited news and views stream – and it may all end in tears; but the reason I jumped into this medium a decade ago was to experiment in ways I couldn’t elsewhere. Ten years in, the Dish is still experimenting, and I’d get bored and move on if it weren’t. As we add new under-bloggers and mature as an organization, we’ll be as transparent as feasible without somewhat solipsistic posts like this one appearing too often.

Plans are still fluid and provisional, but the next year could take the Dish to a new level and in a new direction; and if I can find a way to do that without driving myself to exhaustion, I will. In fact, finding a way to share this burden is the only way a single human being can continue to do this at this pace for this long. The principle will be as it always has: a pursuit of the intimations within the medium, executed very gradually and transparently. It’s an adventure. And I hope you’ll stay with us for the ride ahead.

(Darwin poster by Mikero.)

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

If Newbusters is going to be give The Dish a hard time for openly using underbloggers, they’d better also go after most every op-ed columnist at this country’s major papers. For example, the Times illustrious Nick Kristof almost always uses an assistant or two for help with research, editing, and idea formulation. I’ve only ever seen this acknowledged on his blog; he has perhaps mentioned it in a column, but it is neither acknowledged regularly within or permanently along-side his columns, which is a notable difference in comparison to Andrew, Chris, and you. I say this not to pick on Kristof, but merely to point out a high-profile and Pulitzer Prize-winning example. Andrew is far and away more open about the assistance he receives than are most, if not all, opinion leaders.

Althouse twists my word:

You know, I have had my run-ins with Sullivan. He mocked my engagement announcement. He’s given me Sarah-Palin-related assignments. I have paid a lot of attention to these things on my blog. (Here and here, for example.) I seriously believed I was interacting with Sullivan, a writer I have respected for maybe 20 years. I wouldn’t have bothered with Patrick (or Chris). I really don’t care what they think. If they insult me, they are to me like any number of bloggers who insult me and whose bait I don’t take. I would always take Sullivan’s bait, because Sullivan is important. Not to know whether it’s Sullivan or one of them makes a mush out of the whole blog. I’m not wading through all of this ghost-generated verbiage and guessing about what might be the real thing.

That was all Andrew. As I’ve said from the start, all substantive posts that take positions are written by him. If you don’t understand that by now you are seriously misreading what I have written or acting in bad faith. Althouse later takes issue with the “basically” when I wrote that ” basically everything I write under Andrew’s name is a naked link or excerpt.” I wrote “basically” because there have been occasions, like the announcement of last year’s awards contest or the introduction of guest bloggers, where Andrew has asked me to draft a post with relevant information for him to edit. This reader explains things better than me:

All due respect, but you’re making the “Life As Part Of Sully’s Brain” debate way too complicated. Engaging this and over-explaining it simply gives the impression that you have something to explain or hide. Stop it, already, because it’s painful to read. The reality is simple:

1. Posts that engage in opinion (or even sly comments such as the daily wraps), where the credibility of the poster is of valid interest, are designated in some manner to the appropriate party, whether through initials or “signatures” beneath the headline. All other posts default credit to Andrew, as it’s his name on the masthead. 2. Posts that provide merely fact-based information or links to news or entertainment where the credibility of the poster is of no consequence, could be from anyone in your hive who felt it was worth noting.

Or, for those who lack attention span:

Opinion Posts = Attribution

Facts / Informative links = No attribution

Even elementary school children should be able to understand that facts do not require attribution for third parties merely passing the information along. The only people who could possibly feel betrayed by this common process are people who’ve never undertaken a collaborative writing project in a responsible, professional environment and do not understand the demands of journalistic-level fact-finding and screening. Feeling “betrayed” because ethical people work together seamlessly to contribute to the major works of a high profile individual is like feeling betrayed over the idea that the guy who baked your donuts didn’t also harvest and process his own flour.

Further, you have had attribution for “Dish Prep” staff on the blog for some time now, and Andrew has made frequent mention of how much help he gets to make the blog possible. Stop engaging these people. You’ve all been reasonable and provided more than appropriate transparency — this “debate” only exists for people looking for something to be upset over.

Anyone that believes Andrew (or anyone who works as a colleague of his) would allow his voice to be usurped or allow someone else to take the fall for his point of view is either not regular reader of the dish or needs a nap and a cookie. Andrew has many faults, and I’m sure any number of us could name the things we like and dislike about his views and the Dish itself, but no one can accuse Andrew of not standing by (and being held accountable for) his own opinions, or taking credit for things not his own. He (and the Dish) have taken way too many hits for having the courage of convictions of all flavors.

I could have let this drop awhile ago or not began the conversation in the first place, but I enjoy describing our process and we owe it to the readership to explain the mechanics of the Dish. Andrew’s blogging adversaries will use anything and everything against him, a fact proven once again by this tempest in a teapot. A final reader:

I know you’ve voiced differing opinions on this issue, but I need to offer my support. The criticism of the Daily Dish’s blog structure is, to me, insane. So you post a number of blurbs from other bloggers and links to various items each day. How in any way is this “ghostblogging?” It’s aggregating, if anything. Anyone who reads a post like this, or this, or this, and sees it as a somehow dishonest account of Andrew’s opinion needs to learn to read properly. Even if Andrew had written those posts (I presume you did), there’s virtually no opinion whatsoever within them — only the words of the people and articles you’re referencing. This is what it looks like when Andrew is offering his own opinion.

Perhaps someone like Markay sees the choice of news content as opinion in and of itself. This would be valid if the blog only linked to articles supporting Andrew’s key opinions. But it doesn’t. The beauty of the Daily Dish is in the open airing of dissent, the consideration of all opinions and facts along his and our journey to our own opinions. We see this in the “dissent of the day” section, in the various letters from readers. Consider “The View From Your Sick Bed,” or the reader responses to George Tiller’s murder and the issue of late term abortion. None of those expressed Andrew’s opinion – they were merely the airing of opinions he was willing to consider. How is it dishonest for you to have authored and posted them, under his supervision?

A number of the posts this reader attributes to me were written by Andrew, but they look much like my posts. Here is a representative sample of the posts I was referring to in my initial post: The Left Goes To War, Citing The Gospels, Fake Cuts, The View From Uganda, Against The Clash, and Chart Of The Day.

by Patrick Appel

News Busters has a field day with my last post. Lachlan Markay pretends that my doing research for Andrew is the same as Lynn Vincent writing Sarah Palin's book. I wish I'd the talent to ghostblog for Andrew. As I've written numerous times, basically everything I write under Andrew's name is a naked link or excerpt.

What I am very good at is finding and organizing information online in real time. I'm not nearly as talented a writer as Andrew is, a fact readers ceaseless remind me of whenever I guest-blog for the Dish. Andrew has an inhuman ability to write a well-reasoned and beautifully-crafted 700-word blog post in about fifteen minutes. If Lachlan looks at the Dish this week and doesn't notice a difference, then his reading comprehension is pitiful.

by Chris Bodenner

Patrick and I are pretty much on the same page regarding this debate, so I’ll bring in another voice – Andrew’s. Here is what he wrote on the subject just last month:

Since coming to the Atlantic, I’ve had the chance to get the input of interns to bring their generation’s perspective to the Dish. Two of them have gone on to become under-bloggers who, with the active insistence of readers, have helped expand dramatically the number of posts and the variety of subjects. The Dish, I think, is now very different than the one-man blog it started out as.

It’s a clearing house for views and ideas and videos and art and argument and anecdote and reporting that create a community of discourse. It’s as much your blog now as mine.

The posts from readers are just as informative and often more enlightening than my own. Yes, I’m still writing or editing or approving almost every post, but the flow of conversation increasingly leads me, rather than my directing it. As I’ve noted before, I’m more of a DJ now than a traditional writer. The Dish is always sampling, re-mixing and generating its own music in the interaction with others.

I don’t think about this much as I do it because I just follow my nose and pursue the intimations of this medium. But every now and again, one looks up and realizes how different the landscape is and how evolved the Dish has become. I am now just one voice among many here – a voice around which others can gather and contribute, but no more than that.

And that’s much more exciting than anything one blogger can pontificate about in a vacuum.

One quick note, which Patrick didn’t mention but is pretty obvious to regular readers of the Dish: the longest non-Andrew bit of writing – the Daily Wrap – is signed with a “C.B.” or “P.A.”, thus providing full transparency for who wrote and published it.

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

The reader who got disheartened to know that so many of Andrew’s posts are actually written by Patrick or others should remind himself that this isn’t so very different from political speech-writers, historians’ researchers, or other assistant roles. The point is that, at the end of the day, Andrew Sullivan remains solely responsible for all of the content posted under his name on his blog–he is the brand, the editor-in-chief, and whether or not he’s the first author, at the end of the day it reflects his opinions and beliefs.

Another reader adds:

I would have to disagree with the other reader and say that I enjoy and agree with the approach that the Daily Dish generally takes with regards to by-lines. In some respect it akin to that of The Economist or to politicians who both have a bevy of ‘anonymous’ writers making contributions to their daily workings. And in many respects the Dish is an institution rather than the more typical blog format. Thanks to your and Mr. Bodenner’s work it is far more than just a soapbox but is also a sort of internet aggregator that makes actual value decisions, unlike Google. That Mr. Sullivan doesn’t type out every single letter is no more detrimental than the fact that Mr. Obama doesn’t write out every word in his speeches. If anything it’s a major benefit since it allows the pace of interesting updates to be far faster than any one person could hope to maintain for a long period of time.

Another reader:

I think I slowly became aware, over the last few years, that Sully-on-the-web was the product of more than just Andrew Sullivan proper. But of course from day to day it does seem like it’s basically just him talking. Very successful enterprise, really, this blog – maybe that’s obvious to say, but so what. I enjoy reading it (and sometimes writing in) very much, and clearly so do many others. I think you all have have reason to be proud. And I don’t think Andrew or you or Chris has tried to mask the process at all.

For the opposition:

I would like to be sure whose thoughts are being expressed in a given post.  What you are sure Andrew would write if he wrote it, is not good enough for me.

A second dissent:

So, forced to choose between honesty and a unitary voice, you/Andrew/whomever the hell I’ve just emailed chose…dishonesty.

As I said: nearly everything I write is a naked link or excerpt. If excerpting without comment seems inappropriate, because I believe Andrew will want to respond to a linked post or because I’m unsure about his position, I make sure that Sullivan sees and edits it before posting. I never pretend to be Andrew (for instance, neither Chris nor I ever use the term “I” or “me” when writing under Andrew’s name). The reader who complains about posts where I write what “Andrew would write if he wrote it” misunderstands the nature of our work relationship. Any post more than a sentence or two long is Andrew’s handiwork. Another reader asks:

If the intent is a solitary voice and you don’t use your own bylines – why bother to do it when he’s out of town? I mean either it’s important or it isn’t, the voice is solitary or it isn’t. I’m going to guess that the reason is that he absolutely isn’t participating for a week and you’re being very upfront about that. (Which is good). But ….well if you can be trusted to express for him when he’s there, why can’t you express for him in that solitary voice when he isn’t?

I think of the system we employ as an intellectual labor line with Chris and me doing the bulk of the research and Andrew doing nearly all of the writing. Chris and I package information for easy consumption by Andrew. He is the irreplaceable ingredient in the Dish, and he does a tremendous amount of the work, more than either Chris or I. My and Chris’s work is highly circumscribed. Our hands are less tied when writing under our own names during Andrew’s vacations, which is why we use bylines at such times.

The various responses to my and Chris’s role on the Dish demonstrates something I notice each time Andrew takes a break: for some readers this blog is primarily a more intelligent version of Google News and for others it is mostly a chance to connect to Andrew Sullivan the person. We try our best to serve both types of reader.

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

To learn that nearly half the posts on Andrew's blog are not his posts proper (but admittedly prepared under his aegis) is somewhat disheartening. I think the blog owes it to the readers and its own high standards to start putting bylines on all posts.

We tried bylines once and it made the blog read funny. Almost all the posts I write are naked links or excerpts, which makes Andrew a weather-vane in the gale of the larger debate.

I've marinated in Sullivan's cerebral juices for a few years now and know intuitively what he interested in and what to bring to his attention. If Chris and I were forced to byline the posts we write under Andrew's supervision, we would have to own those opinions and draw contrasts with Andrew, as we do when he takes vacations. Bylines would fracture the solitary voice of the blog.