Ta-Nehisi Coates Under the Bus!

The Atlantic online has a new web design. And not surprisingly, the publishers decided to make Andrew Sullivan's blog a showcase attraction, and segregated relegated the less influential/popular blogs to the sidelines, literally. The stable of bloggers have their posts in a format some are called "archiving," so that they're posting updates to a blog that doesn't look at all like a blog. Ta-Nehisi Coates took it pretty hard. He didn't really want to fully express his frustration over the discrimination change, so he posted a forthright "comment" from a reader:

The Atlantic clearly recognized that Andrews' Daily Dish has a branded identity of its own that was well worth preserving. Click on his name, and you wind up on his page. It's constructed with the same design language, but bears his own clear imprint. And his posts display the same way they always have, requiring jumps only when they extend beyond a few paragraphs.

TNC's blog, on the other hand, has essentially been spiked. Or, more accurately, rolled into the amorphous category of 'culture.' I'm not even sure what 'culture' means, other than that it's an incredibly poor way to pigeonhole TNC's creative output. This blog has covered politics, policy, culture, art, and entertainment with verve and passion, and a huge element of what keeps me coming back to it is that eclecticism. It's the musings of a creative and fascinating individual, not the aggregated output of a group of staffers assigned to similar beats.

I like what TNC does enough that I'll probably give this a shot. But I'm disgusted with The Atlantic for taking away his blog, and leaving him with nothing more than what you get when - for example - you click the name of a journalist on a newspaper's website. It's just a list of his recent offerings, with single-sentence links. That's not a blog. It's an archive search function. It's online journalism with tagging.

If The Atlantic is too dumb to realize what an immensely valuable asset they have in TNC, then that's their problem. But it seems singularly self-defeating to me to take a distinctive individual voice who has built in remarkably short time a passionately devoted following, and subsume his work within a broader category. If they want to cross-post his entries within the 'culture' section of the webpage, great. But they should also cross-post selected entries within 'politics' or 'food' or other appropriate categories. And it should preserve a single page, in classic blog-like format, for the thousands and thousands of readers for whom TNC is the attractive brand that confers legitimacy upon The Atlantic, and not the other way 'round.

Good thing the dude's going with "TNC" 'cuz Ta-Nehisi gets riled if you misspell his ethno-separatist identity marker name.

And frankly, Ta-Nehisi should just bail if he's got complaints, or Atlantic should throw him under the bus.

And on that note, Jeffery Goldberg's not complaining, but of course, he's not an identity-grievance monger. (Andrew Sullivan is, but you'll have to go through National Review, "Andrew Sullivan vs. His Website's Redesign"; and see Goldberg's reply, "Responding to Andrew's Atlantic Anger-Blogging.")