The Daily isn’t the only media entity celebrating its first birthday this month: Atlantic Wire editor Gabriel Snyder is also commemorating his first year at the online news aggregator, which brought in a record-breaking 3.6 million unique visitors in January. With a newly expanded staff, the site is now setting its sights beyond aggregation and toward a 24/7 publishing schedule with more original reporting.
The Atlantic Wire is one of The Atlantic‘s three digital properties, alongside TheAtlantic.com (audience: 10.1 million) and the newly launched TheAtlanticCities.com (audience: 650,000). The Atlantic Wire was established in September 2009 specifically as a tracker of “the biggest opinions and debates as they happen,” allowing The Atlantic to participate in the real-time news conversation of the web for the first time.
“The web is a news medium, and you can’t compete ambitiously on the web if you’re not in the news flow,” says Justin Smith, president of The Atlantic Media Company. “[Before The Wire], TheAtlantic.com’s strategy had been to do next-day analysis. Now we are set up to do that analysis instantly.”
The Wire has expanded its role since Snyder came on board in early 2011, moving beyond opinion aggregation to tackle mainstream news and increase its roster of original content as well. The Wire is also close to becoming a 24-hour operation, something Snyder says he hopes to achieve in the first quarter.
We caught up with Snyder earlier this week to discuss The Wire‘s history and next steps.
QA With Gabriel Snyder, Editor, The Atlantic Wire
You were in print for a long time — first at the Observer, and later at W, Variety and the digital arm of Newsweek. What inspired the move to digital?
Before I came here, I swore I would never work for the web arm of a print publication ever again because it’s such a tricky cultural balance. We had a lot of really talented people [at Newsweek], but there was a bit of a separation of goals within organization. We had trouble getting writers to write for the web; we had to compete [with print] for writers’ time. The Atlantic, on the other hand, has enunciated a digital-first strategy since 2008 and is actually doing it. I can’t think of anyone in the newsroom that isn’t working on the web every day.
And before Newsweek you edited Gawker. How would you compare your experience there to the Wire?
The difficulty of talking about Gawker is that it’s a moving target. What Gawker is today is completely different than it was when I edited it. It’s also completely different from The Atlantic Wire in respect to editorial choices, strategy, size and just about every other metric you can imagine.
So I take it there isn’t a leaderboard?
There is no leaderboard.
Is there pressure to achieve a certain number of pageviews, to use galleries in stories?
There is a lot of pressure, but we’re more focused on uniques than pageviews. We do have a real incentive to grow our audience. The bigger our audience gets, the bigger the site becomes, and the more our parent company is willing to invest in us.
The Wire calls itself an aggregator. Aggregators haven’t been so popular with traditional media.
It’s a false dichotomy. There is no publication nor outlet in operation that doesn’t have some blend of aggregation and original content. There are certainly plenty of opportunities for original reporting, and when we see those opportunities we try to take them. But at the end of the day, it’s about best serving the reader. It doesn’t matter to me if we find a piece of information on another website and we point to it, or we report on it directly. There is no value in us trying to rewrite an AP story. We’re going to do whatever works best, whatever lets us get that information out as fast as possible. I hope that what readers can tell is that there’s something unique about our stories, that we bring some analysis to it. And it’s often about deciding what stories not to publish. We don’t want to add to information clutter people are already experiencing. We want to be a place where you can glance throughout the day and catch up on the news in a few minutes.
How many stories are writers expected to produce each day?
We don’t have quotas in terms of post count, but we do keep an eye on how much they write. Periodically if someone’s post count goes very, very low, that will be a case for discussion. Sometimes there is a compelling reason to spend a full day on one thing.
How do you get your stories? Do you assign or are writers expected to generate their own ideas?
It’s both. I assign, they pitch. The goal is to cover everything that our audience wants to know, or is going to want to know in a couple of hours. Basically each writer has areas that they kind of specialize in, areas we want to focus on that are driven by personal interest. Writers are expected to keep up with their areas. The early morning is definitely the busiest session, and I’m looking to them to identify what’s most important, what matters most in their area right now. To that degree there is some self-assigning. But I’m also going to give them lots of assignments.
TheAtlantic.com is publishing on the web but under different editors. Do you ever risk writing the same story?
We work very independently, and we overlap in surprisingly few places. The Atlantic Wire was conceived as a news engine, and there was a clear difference between what we did and what [TheAtlantic.com] did. The Wire runs on a sort of ‘need to cover’ basis, whereas The Atlantic has a bit more of a ‘want to cover’ attitude. Some days there’s a quirkiness in sensibility that we don’t quite have.
How would you characterize The Wire‘s readership?
I always thought of our readership in three circles. You have the center of your circle, which is the vocal members of your community: your commenters, the people who email you about your typos and your mistakes, what they like and don’t. And then there’s the outermost ring, which is the people who plunk in from search and elsewhere. The trick is to convert those people into becoming regular readers. The middle ring is my favorite, it’s the people who come in through the front door every day, and we put a lot of thought into that experience. Our homepage traffic is at a steady climb and that’s the thing I am most proud of. While traffic is up a little more than 100% altogether, homepage traffic has gone up 250%.
Where does most external traffic come from?
The usuals. Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, TheAtlantic.com.
Last year you opened up your editing room to your readers by moving it to a public commenting thread, which was seen as a creative step toward editorial transparency. How’s that going?
We kept that up for about a month and I loved it. I think it was healthy for writers, a way to road test their ideas. We had huge success in terms of people who were interested, but the format wasn’t ideal. We just couldn’t host editorial logistical planning discussions [in comment threads]. We wish there was a way to give an audience look-in capabilities into [live chat client] Campfire, to put Campfire on the site. We’re working on it.
In what other ways do you leverage your community?
I don’t know. Everyone is supposed to have ways in which you’re doing that. We do the usual stuff, we have someone who manages Google+, etc. The way you grow a community has to be organic, and that engine takes a while to turn over it. It’s an amazing resource when you have it, but difficult to force it. People need to feel like they’re a part of something. One thing cool we did recently though was a live blog debate in the comments rather in the post. We did it because we wanted a couple of writers to do it. We saw other people take part, some readers chimed in, so we let them live blog with us essentially.
Last time we spoke you said you wanted to turn The Wire into a 24-hour operation. Are you any closer to that goal?
We’re almost there. The only sort of gap is that 8 p.m. to midnight shift. It’s important because we always be a source for news. If something major happens, we want to create the expectation that we’ll have the story, that readers can come to us.
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Today Apple released version 10.7.3 of Mac OS X, fixing a few minor compatibility and stability issues in the operating system. If you’ve been having address issues when using smart cards, authenticating with directory services, or running into Windows file sharing problems, this update is for you. Mac OS X Lion version 10.7.3 also adds language support for Catalan, Croatian, Greek, Hebrew, Romanian, Slovak, Thai, and Ukrainian. There’s nothing terribly exciting this time around, but you can update now by running Software Update on your Mac.
Nobody likes bad news, and delivering it is an uncomfortable job that comes with the very real possibility of ruining someone else’s day. Unfortunately, it’s often necessary. We have a tendency to be a little selfish and prolong the inevitable when offering up unfavorable tidings, but that’s the wrong way to do it. Here’s a better way. 
Bearers of bad news have a bad reputation. Nobody likes to hear what they have to say, so it’s unsurprising that the messenger approaches the situation with some level of anxiety. The phrase “
Of course, what “the point” is can vary in levels of extremity. An injured foot is, of course, far less of a problem than death. Saying, “Hi Jill, Brian broke his foot and is in the hospital but he’s fine now” works a lot better than “Hi Jill, Brian’s dead.” Sometimes the bad news you’re bearing will require your delivery to be a tiny bit more gradual. You definitely do not want to waste time and beat around the bush, but in extreme cases you may want to start with something as simple as “I have some bad news.” After that you can move right to the point. The primary reason this is useful is because you sometimes need to indicate that you’re serious. If you say “Hi Jill, I just saw your husband Fred kissing another woman in the supermarket,” this might lead Jill to confusion. (On the other hand, in our examples Jill just lost her brother to a deadly foot accident so she may already be primed for bad news.)
I posed this situation to those of you out there in the world of social media to find out how you handle being the bearers of bad news. For the most part, you agree that it’s best to be quick and to the point. Some of you also had a few helpful (and sometimes entertaining) suggestions.
