Inside Look at Atlantic Unbound
by Claire E. White
On a sunny April day 141 years ago, several distinguished gentlemen of the era including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell and Oliver Wendell Holmes met at the Parker House Hotel in Boston to discuss a grand new project: a new magazine which was to become known as The Atlantic Monthly.
An immediate success, the magazine billed itself as a "journal of literature, politics, science and the arts." Today, almost 150 years later, The Atlantic Monthly is as popular as ever with an estimated readership
|
In addition to the continuing popularity of the offline publication,
The Atlantic Monthly, a Web version is also offered: Atlantic
Unbound. One of the first magazines to take to the
Web, Atlantic Unbound was honored in 1997
by being selected as a finalist for the
National Magazine Award for General Excellence in New
Media given by the American
Society of Magazine Editors. Atlantic Unbound has made
the finals again this
year, and is up against such heavyweights as Business
Week Online, Condé Nast's Epicurious, and The
Sporting News Online. At the helm of the
Atlantic Unbound is Wen Stephenson.
After graduating from Harvard
with a B.A. in History and Literature, Stephenson
proceeded to The University of Chicago where he received
his Masters in English. After stints at Business Week
and at Chicago Review, where he served as
associate editor, he
became the Editorial Director of New Media at The Atlantic Monthly.
We talked with Wen about his road to The Atlantic,
the trials and tribulations of running the website of a magazine
with a famous
history in the go-go 90s, and what freelancers can do to
increase their chances of having their work show up in The
Atlantic Monthly.
How did you come to be at Atlantic Unbound? What prompted The
Atlantic Monthly's move online?
Well, I was hired by The Atlantic Monthly in mid-1994 to be
the Special Projects Editor. I had just quit the graduate English
program at the University of Chicago, where for two years I'd been
subjecting myself to near-lethal doses of postmodernism, and the change
of atmosphere -- from academe to "mainstream" commercial publishing --
was invigorating, to say the least. Not long after I arrived at
The Atlantic I got involved in what was then The Atlantic
Monthly Online, which then appeared exclusively on AOL.
The Atlantic saw the online
medium as offering a new way to extend the magazine's editorial reach
and to open up new business opportunities, creating new sources of
revenue.
The digital
edition was a very small operation (it still is, in fact), and so there
was great opportunity to learn online publishing, hands on, in its
early stages. There was a real sense of novelty then that I think has
since been lost. (Listen to me wax nostalgic for 1994!) The
Atlantic was one of the first magazines to launch a digital,
interactive edition -- it appeared on AOL in November, 1993. When I got
involved there was still a feeling of it all being very new, very
strange and exciting. Of course, a lot of people had been online long
before 1993-94, but to find a magazine like The Atlantic on
AOL at that time was pretty remarkable. One has to give those who made
the decision to go online a lot of credit. It was visionary.
By early 1995 it was clear we had to be on the Web, and we started
drawing up plans for a site. There were five or six of us, all in our
twenties and all with other responsibilies at the magazine, who were
the original architects and editors of "The Atlantic Monthly
on the Web," as the site was called. We did it by working a lot of
nights, up to our elbows in HTML (and, of course, none of us really
knew what we were doing -- who did?). At the start, Atlantic Unbound
was simply the name of the Web-only section of the site, where we'd
feature anything that didn't appear in the current issue of the print
magazine. It has since become the name of the site itself, encompassing
not only the Web-only journal but the online edition of the magazine as
well. The month we launched on the Web, November 1995, I had Robert
Pinsky (now U.S. Poet Laureate) reading
excerpts from his translation of Dante's Inferno -- his
first experience bringing poetry to the Internet in a multimedia
format. That was the first Web-only feature we produced.
Then in June, 1996, I became Editorial Director of The
Atlantic's New Media department, which is the role in which I'm
currently serving.
How is Atlantic Unbound different from the offline publication
The Atlantic Monthly?
In many ways. The whole point of putting a magazine on the Web is to
use the medium in a way that adds value for your readers. If you're not
using the medium -- in other words, if you're simply "shoveling"
repurposed print content onto the Web -- you've got to ask yourself why
you're online at all. So, to begin with, each month the print edition
of the magazine is enhanced for the Web with links to related articles
and other resources, audio, exclusive interviews with authors, and
interactive discussions in the site's reader forum, Post & Riposte.
But there's a lot more to it than simply enhancing the print edition.
Atlantic Unbound has evolved into a truly separate online
publication -- think of it as a weekly, interactive supplement to the
magazine, covering much of the same territory (books and the arts,
politics, foreign affairs, travel, food) as well as venturing into
certain areas that the magazine, as a monthly, isn't as well positioned
to cover: primarily the Web and digital culture, pop culture, the
media.
What kind of staff does it take to keep Atlantic Unbound up and
running?
One of our best decisions has been to keep the Unbound staff
small and versatile. You'll see there are nine people listed on the
masthead under New Media. Of those, only three (myself included) work
full-time on the Web site. Everyone else works for various other parts
of the magazine in addition to the Web site, whether as print editors
and factcheckers, or in technical, business, and adminstrative roles.
There's a lot of improvisation, in terms of multitasking, and a lot of
overlap between the print magazine and the Web site.
What is the greatest challenge of being Editorial Director of
Atlantic Unbound?
That's a tough one. There are days when the 140 years of The
Atlantic's history seem to weigh on you, and you wonder what the
hell you're doing in this new medium. But most of the time it's just
like putting out any other publication. You do your best to keep it
lively and timely -- and, of course, to work with your contributors to
make the writing as good as it can be.
But the greatest challenge? Probably trying to determine what direction
the site should take even as the technology and the whole new-media
industry are evolving so rapidly. You're constantly thinking in terms
of the next redesign, the next leap forward. But it's impossible to see
six months ahead on the Internet. You never know what the new
technologies are going to be, what they're going to make possible. And
so your plans are in a constant state of flux. This is undoubtedly one
reason so many online publishers have had trouble mapping out a clear
business plan. The temptation is to jump at every opportunity to do
something new -- to be at the cutting edge. The greatest challenge may
be just steering a steady course -- and knowing when to adjust, and by
how much.
How interactive is Atlantic Unbound? What has the response from
readers been like?
We've always made interactivity -- in the sense of inviting discussion
with our online readers -- a top priority. Post & Riposte attests
to that. And yet, to be honest, the
response is rarely what you'd hope it would be. To be sure, there are
moments of connection between readers -- and, occasionally, between
readers and authors -- that are truly memorable. Most of the time,
though, discussions started by readers or by our staff don't lead
anywhere, or at least not in any productive way. Sometimes, I hate to
say, it can be counter-productive. Perhaps that's the nature of the
beast. The same was true on AOL's message boards, and the same is true
of many forums on the Web. The main thing, I think, is to provide the
opportunity, to foster an environment in which those memorable moments
of interaction and connection, the kind that remind you just how
revolutionary the online medium is, can occur. The rest is the
unavoidable price you pay for maintaining an open, unrestricted forum
on the Internet.
One thing you'll notice about Atlantic Unbound's forums is that there
are very few short, frivolous posts. People are, for the most part,
interested in serious conversation. That's one thing that sets the site
apart.
Of course, the most gratifying experiences for an online editor are
those in which readers send you personal email to express their
appreciation for an article, or to offer constructive feedback on the
site. It shows they care. It shows how the Web really is a
collaborative medium, in which readers can play a role in shaping an
editorial product.
Does the future of poetry and short stories lie on the Internet? Is
there a real literary audience on the Web yet?
The answer to the first part of the question is simply, Who knows? I,
for one, would like to think that poetry and short fiction have as much
of a future in traditional print media (books, journals, magazines) as
online -- and I think there's good reason to believe this is the case.
The Web opens things up in a way that can be liberating for a lot of
people, and if that encourages more creative work and -- more
importantly -- if it gives people a channel for artistic expression and
interaction with others that never existed before, and if it helps them
in their lives, then that's wonderful. It is unequivocally a good
thing. But there's no reason to think that simply because the Web makes
each of us a potential publisher we're going to see a renaissance of
great poetry and fiction. Obviously, sheer freedom and abundance don't
translate into a literary culture (if anything, there may be a kind of
cultural glut, in which there's simply too much literary production to
deal with). That's where more traditional kinds of publications come
in, whether they exist in print or online or both. As much as some
people recoil or bristle at the idea, we need literary editors to make
selections based on high critical standards -- not that any single
aesthetic or outlook should be imposed. Of course not. But a commitment
to the highest standards needs to be upheld. The economics of print
publishing impose a very high level of selectivity on a publication,
because there are inevitable limitations of space and money. It's not
a perfect system -- there will always be disagreement over editorial
choices -- but overall, I think it's healthy.
As for the audience, well, there's clearly some kind of literary
audience out there on the Web at this point. The success of the many
online literary journals attests to that. The popularity of Atlantic
Unbound's own Poetry
Pages, the single most popular area of our site, gives you some
idea.
Perhaps the most promising aspect of the Web, as far as literary
publishing, is the ability to combine audio and text, to hear language
given breath and brought to life, as it's intended, for the ear. The
centerpiece of our poetry area is what we call "An
Audible Anthology," which features the poets in each month's issue
of the magazine reading their own poems. We've also started a new
series of special readings, called "Soundings,"
in which we invite three or four prominent contemporary poets to read
one classic poem, so that readers/listeners can compare different
approaches to the words. The first one, in February, featured Richard
Wilbur, Philip Levine, and Peter Davison reading W. B. Yeats's "Easter
1916." The next one, this spring, will feature a poem by Robert
Frost.
How has the Electronic Revolution affected the magazine publishing
industry?
Quite honestly, it's just far too early to tell. There are many things
affecting magazines these days, and the Web is just one of them --
probably not even the most important. If you include television as part
of the "Electronic Revolution" (as surely you must), then you'd have to
say that it has changed the audience for magazines considerably during
the past forty to fifty years. If anything, the newsstand today
reflects the influence of TV far more than that of the Internet. The
Web, though, is just too young as a medium to be able to say what its
influence is or to predict how things will play out.
On the website it states that The Atlantic Monthly receives over
75,000 poems, 12,000 short stories and 60,000 non-fiction manuscripts and queries
per year from writers. How does the staff sort through all those submissions?
One by one. There are several people on the editorial staff who read
submissions, and they make sure that every single poem and short story
is read and receives a response.
What is your advice to the freelancer hoping to get published in
Atlantic Unbound?
We don't publish many unsolicited articles (and we don't publish any
original poetry or fiction on the Web site, other than what's featured
in the print magazine), so the best bet is to send us an idea first, in
the form of a query. Most important is to be thoroughly familiar with
the kinds of articles we publish on the Web site. Beyond that, it all
depends on having a good idea that fits our needs, and of course being
able to write it well.
Does Atlantic Unbound have any plans to start charging subscribers
in the future?
Not at the moment, no.
What are the plans for the future of Atlantic Unbound?
We just hope to continue developing original content for the Web that
complements and extends the print magazine.
Is there anything else you'd like to tell our readers about your
site?
Sure. I hope you'll drop by, have a look at the site, read a few
articles or listen to a few poems, and join the discussion. That's what
it's all about.
Return to the April 1998 issue of The IWJ.