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Comment by sachinag | Hacker News Reader

There are precious few people who can both blog and write long-form well. The Atlantic employs three: Andrew Sullivan, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and James Fallows.

I don't understand the Wire, and they've done some crazy redesign things that they've had to roll back (writer blogs didn't have permalinks for about a week earlier), so I'm quite skeptical that this was just about finding a new business model. In my opinion, they made exceptionally smart editorial decisions that allowed them to pull this off.

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James Fallows is a beast. He's featured on the cover of the magazine with an in-depth article every other month, contributes short articles each issue and updates his blog regularly. The long-form articles must each take years of research; his recent clean-coal piece hinted at at least four. A bit of estimation suggests that Mr. Fallows is running ~10 non-trivial article-length projects at a go, in addition to his PBS pieces and books.

Fallows is the closest thing the U.S. has to a public intellectual.

for those who ain't seen it, an obligatory link to Fallows on "Living With a Computer" from July 1982: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/07/living-w... (what fun he was having!)

I'd never seen that, but wow, what a fascinating article.

they've done some crazy redesign things that they've had to roll back (writer blogs didn't have permalinks for about a week earlier)

Wild speculation, of course, but perhaps they're doing incremental design and playing with A/B/multivariate testing to see what works? They have the traffic to pull it off.

No, all hell broke loose: http://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2010/02/for-the-...

In short, none of this was intentional. It was all intuitive.

It's a shame, but it's easy to see why they're starting to succeed merely through how open, honest, and downright charming this apology is.

Megan McArdle is a fourth.

Crap, I downvoted your comment in error - I meant to upvote it.

Any time HN wants to remove the 'feature' that prevents users from changing votes, that would be great.

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