Atlantic Wire relaunches in newsier format

Today Atlantic readers are waking up to a drastically revamped version of the magazine's online aggregation site, the Atlantic Wire--and Gabriel Snyder, the site's recently installed editor, is probably sleeping in a bit.

Snyder was working late last night, putting the finishing touches on the major overhaul of the year-and-a-half-old aggregation website when The Cutline caught up with him. Speaking from the Atlantic's Washington, D.C., offices, Snyder said the site's new mission is simple: "It's really about adding news to the mix," Snyder said of "the Wire," which had served as a catch-all of punditry and opinion prior to relaunching Tuesday shortly before midnight.

"That concept applied an artificial constraint," he continued, "because it meant that rather than being able to react to the news of the day, or the conversation of the moment, you kind of had to wait for everyone else to weigh in. I thought it was a natural expansion to go in more of a news digest direction. The ultimate mission is to be the one place where you can go and get a snapshot of what matters now in the world."

Of course, the appeal of this mission hasn't escaped the Atlantic's online competitors, nearly all of whom have their own fast-moving news digests: Slate's "Slatest," the Daily Beast's "Cheat Sheet," the homepages of The Week, Business Insider, the Huffington Post, and any number of similar such aggregators. Why, then, should a reader pick Atlantic Wire, the digital progeny of a 153-year-old monthly magazine, over any of the others?

"I ask myself that question everyday," said Snyder. And so far, he doesn't seem to have discovered a straight answer. "It's very important that any item on the Wire be more than just the regurgitation of a single story from elsewhere, and I think that's the model of most news aggregators," he said. "The biggest service any site can provide would be to offer a digestible but complete set of daily output that would make me feel reliably informed, but not like I was drowning. That's really the strategy."

If he meets this latest challenge, Snyder--a veteran of previous tours at the New York Observer, W and Variety--will claim his second major victory on the web. The first was transforming Gawker, where he was managing editor from the fall of 2008 through February of 2010, from an insidery Manhattan media blog into a national news and gossip destination that surged past 4 million unique monthly visitors under his watch. He's still a long way from those kinds of traffic numbers in his new gig, which he landed after a brief and ill-timed stint last year as executive editor of Newsweek Digital. The recently launched Atlantic Wire (a companion site to TheAtlantic.com) finished February with roughly 875,000 uniques, Snyder said. "I think it can grow dramatically," he added.

This week's relaunch is a first step. Already, it presents a different visual and reading experience, boasting many more graphic images than it displayed in its prior incarnation. That version of The Wire was "a little text heavy," said Snyder. "I'm a big believer in visuals." The featured posts on the site also come garlanded in more entry points--i.e., display text and linkouts that are designed to keep easily distracted Web readers clicking on Atlantic-branded content. The homepage for the Wire also has upped the sheer number of stories it displays--covering a wide breadth of subject areas, from national politics and business to entertainment and technology.

Content on the Wire is now being programmed to mesh more seamlessly with the material featured on the Atlantic's home site. "As the Wire expands its mission, its posts will play an ever-bigger role on TheAtlantic.com," which logged 5.1 million unique visitors in January, said Bob Cohn, editorial director of Atlantic Digital, in an email to The Cutline. "We see the Wire as being not only a destination site of its own, but as serving as the news engine for TheAtlantic.com, with Wire stories getting even bigger play on the TheAtlantic.com homepage and channel landing pages."

The Atlantic Media Company, which also owns the National Journal Group, is no doubt keen for a new stream of digital traffic, since the company recently lost the person who accounts for 20 percent of the Atlantic's web traffic -- Andrew Sullivan, who announced Sunday he will bring his pioneering politics blog, the Daily Dish, over to Tina Brown's Newsweek-Daily Beast hybrid next month.

The Atlantic's new tech channel, helmed by Wired alum Alexis Madrigal, will also make up some of the hits the home site will lose in the wake of Sullivan's departure, said Cohn. According to Cohn, Madrigal's site has been logging uniques at a solid clip of 1 million a month since launching last September. "We are confident our traffic will grow substantially even with the loss of the Dish," he said. The magazine itself is likewise in a growth period, having posted a profit last year for the first time in decades.

Meanwhile, Snyder says his next big project is recruiting new talent to the new-look Atlantic Wire--he plans to expand his present roster of full-time writers from seven to 15. He'll be conducting interviews in the coming weeks and months out of the Atlantic's Manhattan offices. "I hope to staff up quickly," he said.