Beware, Remnick
How one website (and thousands of editors) achieve the posture of an Atlantic or Harper's
Julian Dibbell
Tuesday, November 8th 2005
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image: metafilter.com
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You'd think this would be an easier trick to pull off. After all, the high-toned generalist magazines—The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly—have been at it for over a century, and there's no shortage of bloggers who've been absorbing their elegantly balanced worldview for decades. Nonetheless it's a reliable rule of thumb that if a blog isn't a scattershot case of attention deficit disorder, then it's a single-issue exercise in obsessive compulsion. And while some might argue that only heroic editorial effort can overcome the tendency of blogs—especially collaborative ones—to go to one extreme or the other, MetaFilter shows otherwise. Look under the hood, and you'll find that a few simple tweaks—tight limits on the frequency of posts, for instance, and an active but light-handed pruning of redundant items—account for much of its success. The rest is bottomless, unquenchable curiosity about the world, but that's the easy part, right?
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