‘If We are rich and deep blogging stars, so be it’
llustrated Maps of New York Through the Ages By The Paris Review via Pague Deep Bloggers
BEASTLY JUSTICE: Lions eat rhino poachers in a South African game preserve.
Rangers discovered the remains of two, possibly three, people in a lion enclosure in the Sibuya reserve, near the south-east town of Kenton-on-Sea.A high-powered rifle and an axe were also found.There has been an rise in poaching in Africa in recent years, to feed growing demand for rhino horn in parts of Asia.In China, Vietnam and elsewhere, rhino horn is erroneously believed to have aphrodisiac qualities.
The Atavist Magazine finds a home in the WordPress universe
What's it like to go from a staff of four to a company of 800?
For The Atavist Magazine, a 9-year-old digital
monthly and a National Magazine Award feature winner, it means more Zoom video
meetings and Slack channels for communication with new colleagues.
The magazine's acquisition last month by the
Automattic/WordPress.com family — a small part of a package deal that includes
the Atavist's content-management system and subscription system, highly
regarded by other creators — won't change the magazine's commitment to
top-flight narrative journalism, says Seyward Darby, the magazine's
editor-in-chief.
“For our subscribers and writers, nothing is changing,” says the
Brooklyn-based Darby, a former editor at Foreign Policy and The New
Republic. The magazine is simply one huge, well-designed propulsive
story at the end of each month, such as June's take on a contrarian pioneer of America's gay rights
movement, Dale Jennings, who told a California court in 1952 that he
was homosexual. That was 17 years before the Stonewall Riots in New York's
Greenwich Village.
The magazine relies upon subscriptions and also —
intriguing to Automattic as it expands its original content offerings — has
experience in getting its work optioned by Hollywood. Darby says she's always looking
for tips at pitching long-form articles for TV or movies by looking at
documentaries and films like a favorite, "Manchester by the Sea."
"Can you imagine," she asks, "if that were
nonfiction?"
The Zoom and Slack channels may help the magazine on one front:
It may identify fact-checkers or other resources from another narrative
unit, Longreads, which was acquired by Automattic in
2014. Darby says there's plenty to learn as well: She's fascinated with
Longreads' podcasts, such as this series produced with Oregon Public Broadcasting.
The heart of her job, Darby says, using a cooking
metaphor, is keeping several stories on various burners, close to
publication, cooking along, or on pause on some back burner.
“We’re not trying to hit breaking news, make a peg,'' she says.
"We’re looking for a story that is timeless. We want a story to be as
strong as it could be.”
