The Atlantic To Shut Down ‘The Wire’

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The Wire, the Atlantic’s breaking news and aggregation site, is going dark, according to a memo sent to staff on Monday.

James Bennett and Bob Cohn, co-presidents of the Atlantic, announced in the memo that they “will bring the staff of The Wire back into The Atlantic’s fold.”

“We are very proud of what The Wire has accomplished editorially, and we think that joining its aggressive, deft news coverage with The Atlantic’s ideas-driven journalism will provide a richer experience for The Atlantic’s readers, a firmer foundation for our ambitions to cover the news, and greater opportunities for growth for The Wire’s team,” the two wrote in the memo, which was obtained by Gawker.

The memo did not mention any layoffs, with Bennett and Cohn telling staff that the “current Wire team will remain in New York while acquiring some new titles and reporting relationships as staff of TheAtlantic.com.”

The news marks the culmination of the site’s steady demise after it entered the year with lofty goals. Formerly known as the Atlantic Wire, the site underwent an ambitious rebranding at the end of 2013, dropping the parent company’s name from its title.

In January, the Wire’s general manager Andrew Golis, who formerly worked for TPM, said the site was in “investment mode,” forecasting as many as a dozen new hires.

But it turned out to be a turbulent year for the Wire, as it endured a massive exodus. The site went several months before it finally hired an editor-in-chief in June, when news editor Dashiell Bennett was elevated to the role.

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Notable Replies

  1. Stopped reading “The Wire” a while ago when it devolved into day-old, leftover clickbait. Good riddance.

  2. Well it was still on my daily list. I didn’t care for the new CSS, but I’m very sorry to see it go.

  3. Who fucking cares?

    Honestly, I expect more of this kind of reorganziation and business model molding across the board soon. For example, CNN has apparently shut down its “Political Ticker” for the most part…not allowing any comments for a couple/three weeks at this point. MSM outlets have an agenda…even to the extent that the agenda is simply false equivalence and maintaining tight control over the narrative they have fabricated and are busy trying to promote (compare, say, outright partisan nonsense like Faux)…are quickly learning that in order to control the narrative and feed the public the misinformation and spin and angles and “think about this the way we tell you to think about this” they desire, well, comment sections are anathema to that. Those of you who’ve seen me here (been busy lately though) probably saw me lighting up the CNN Political Ticker with facts contrary to their narratives all the time and there were several other consistent posters doing the same. This was, of course, amidst a sea of sockpuppet talking point regurgitation from mindless Teatroll parrots, so I have to admit it was probably a combination of the two…the idiocy posts and the narrative breaking posts…that got the Ticker turned off. Quite frankly, I think they fucking hate it and got fed up with having some asshole pop up under their superficial, carefully tailored narrative feeds to tell them “you’re a gaggle of pseudo-journalist fairy tale spinners and boom boom boom here’s a list of facts, statistics etc. that show what a crop of misinformation peddlers you really are” (and kudos to TPM for being such a consistently great source of taht factual ammunition hehe!).

    Anyhoo…I guess what I’m saying is that the comment board fad may, to some extent, be seeing some decline in the future, or at least slowly relegated to sites where the commentary is predictably mindless and dependably in agreement with the narrative the publication is manufacturing. Faux no doubt has no trouble (altho I think even Faux cut down on commentary), and to be honest, the remainder of CNN that uses Disqus is actually uniformly overrun with Teatroll astroturf and and extremely hostile environment towards anyone with liberal views/opinions, which is apparently just fine with CNN. I can see places like MSNBC or CBS doing away with comments too though. I suppose the point I’m trying to get at, bottom line, is that MSM outlets aren’t really in the market for providing people with somewhere to express views and share information. Sure, they’ll tell you they are…4th Estate, journlism, inform the public, blah blah blah excuse us while we feed you half-assed let’s-pretend story time and tell you it’s truth…but they’re not. Keep an eye out for it. I’m predicting that comment sections that consistently blow up the articles under which they exist with contrary information are not long for this world. To some extent, it almost makes me daydream about organizing a large enough network of people to make such posts…ridiculing the inaccuracy of articles and narratives and, above all, providing the information that proves it…that it throws the MSM’s entire intertubez strategy into the crapper.

    TL;DR - Fuck the MSM.

  4. Where have you been?

    Missed your commentary here for quite some time.

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