Atlantic Media Case Study

Movable Type Enables Streamlined Content Management for The Atlantic Online

In early 2008, one of America's foremost magazines, The Atlantic, launched a rich set of community-focused features on their website. Built on the Movable Type 4 platform, the new blogs allow the company to publish and manage multiple content types and offers a variety of ways for readers to form a community around this venerable collection of writers, editors and thinkers.

Customer Profile

In 1857, a group of visionary writers, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes, gathered at Boston's Parker House Hotel for a dinner that sparked the creation of one of America's most esteemed magazines, The Atlantic. Over 150 years later, the Atlantic Media Company now employs more than 350 individuals, and has holdings that include The Atlantic, National Journal, Congress Daily, Government Executive and The Hotline.

The Challenge

We were looking for the quickest way to get to market. We already had a CMS in place, but we realized that it would be faster to build the site in Movable Type than to use the existing CMS.

Movable Type had all of the content management features that the company was looking for; it allowed customization of layout and content fields, posting by multiple authors, and visibility into the most popular content. It was easy to use, while also being flexible enough to accommodate their custom requirements.

- Jay Brodsky, CIO, The Atlantic

The Atlantic Media Company employs many writers and editors, each with a different publishing schedule; in addition, it generates a massive volume of content, from articles to photographs to video feeds.

"The content we wanted to publish was complicated," Atlantic Media CIO Jay Brodsky reflects. The company needed a system that would allow a number of people to publish content quickly and easily. They considered a simple blog format, but concluded that most blog platforms don't offer the ability to manage multiple types of content.

"Normally, a blog post is an entry," Brodsky says. "There is a set of metadata about the entry. You can add an image or a headline, and you can add tags or keywords - that's it."

The Atlantic wanted to do more than simply create blog posts; many of their marquee writers already had individual blogs, and the company envisioned a site that would offer a rich, interactive reader experience. They needed a system that would enable them to publish many different types of content every day, to archive that content for search capability, and to simultaneously provide the ability to encourage and manage interaction among readers.

The Solution: Custom Fields

Movable Type's ability to integrate custom fields was a key feature for Atlantic Media. "We added around 80 custom fields, trying to keep the editors from having to do too much mark up on their own," says Ben Plotas, senior architect for the project: "Each field can link an author, a publication, another site, and a story. It's easier to do as a custom field than to ask the editors to do the mark-up."

Another reason Atlantic Media chose Movable Type was the strength of its community management tools. "The kicker was the ability to comment and the flexibility in comment moderation, as well as the built-in comment management and spam filtering," Jay Brodsky says. "The community stuff is a pain to manage from a CMS."

The entire development cycle was extremely aggressive; the first prototype took a day to build in late November 2007, and the entire development cycle from code to launch lasted only 8 weeks. "This is our first implementation on MT4," Brodsky remarks. "We're pretty proud of it."

The Change

The Atlantic's portfolio of blogs are now a rich source of content, enabling readers to quickly find articles of interest and interact with the authors. One of the most compelling features of the new site is the ability for editors to cross-link to other web content that relates to the feature story.

For example, on a popular story about the Democratic race for the presidency, the editor was able to offer links to four other related pieces - one from a YouTube video, one on a similar issue published by Newsweek, and two others. Says Ben Plotus: "Movable Type allowed us to say: if you want to read more, go here. Now that you've read what other people think, what do you think? Give us your comments. That one post got more than 500 comments in 2 days."

Future Uses

Atlantic Media is continuing to explore new ways of creating rich experiences that draw readers in. The site has an intelligent audience, and the comment sections are already a rich source of insight, which the company hopes to build on in the future.

"We want to involve readers in the product," Jay Brodsky says. "Movable Type allows us to be nimble and test out new ideas."

"This site allows us to continue in the grand tradition of journalism that was begun in 1857," says Brodsky. "Using whatever tools we can to get the story out."