It’s Episode 15 of Press Publish, the Nieman Lab podcast!

publish-2-1400px.jpg" alt="press-publish-2-1400px" width="300" height="300" class="nakedrightimage">My guest today is Matt Thompson. Since earlier this year, Matt has been deputy editor of TheAtlantic.com, But you might know him from some of his previous career stops. He spent a few years at NPR, heading up some of its most interesting digital initiatives, like Project Argo. Maybe you know him from Snarkmarket, the influential group blog he led with fellow smart guys Robin Sloan and Tim Carmody. Or you may just know him as a provocative thinker on the shape of modern media.

Matt’s one of the key people behind Notes, a new section The Atlantic launched last month that promises to bring blogging back to The Atlantic. It’s an interesting attempt to recapture some of the looser, voicier, more conversational structures of the early 2000s — some of which has been lost in the rise of social media and commercialized online news.

We talked about how blogging seeped into the DNA of today’s news, whether Wikipedia-ing the news is still a thing, and how Slack is creating a new context for editorial voice. Here’s our conversation.

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Show notes

Matt Thompson (his site still has an old bio on it, alas) @mthomps The Atlantic The Atlantic’s Notes section Chris Bodenner, Atlantic senior editor “Welcome to Notes” (August 27, 2015) “The Atlantic is returning to blogging” (August 27, 2015) “The People Formerly Known as the Audience” (June 27, 2006) J.J. Gould, editor of TheAtlantic.com “For the Golden Horde” (December 22, 2010) “The Atlantic redesigns, trading clutter and density for refinement” (April 22, 2015) The reader survey The Atlantic used for user testing “Two out of two news organizations recommend user research” (July 29, 2015) Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic The Matt Thompson tag page on Nieman Lab “Building permission structures for short content (Vox edition)” (May 19, 2014) “The blog is dead, long live the blog” (December 19, 2013) The Sully lede Infocom #thedress Email newsletters on Nieman Lab Podcasts on Nieman Lab TheAtlantic.com homepage in 2011 media-venture-to-include-nbc-buzzfeed-and-new-york-times.html?_r=0">“Facebook Begins Testing Instant Articles From News Publishers” (May 13, 2015) “A confab with Matt Thompson: Noodling the future of context” (May 5, 2009) Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 true fans (March 4, 2008) Power laws Slack Alexis C. Madrigal Stewart Butterfield Game Neverending FiveThirtyEight makes an article out of its Slack Snarkmarket Project Argo, an NPR blogging initiative Matt led Nieman Lab coverage of Project Argo The Argolinks WordPress plugin, developed by Project Argo, now powering our What We’re Reading “The 2016 U.S. Presidential Race: A Cheat Sheet” (updated September 7, 2015) “Wikipedia-ing the news,” Matt’s RJI Fellowship project in 2008 Vox’s card stacks Nieman Lab coverage of Circa Parse.ly MediaWiki, the software that underlies Wikipedia An example of a Vox StoryStream on The Verge Radiolab: The Rhino Hunter Pop Culture Happy Hour An array of Walking Dead response podcasts