The casual reader could be forgiven for assuming that The Atlantic is not a hot center of high-velocity digital innovation. We are, after all, 160 years old. But here’s something I’ve learned in my brief time as editor in chief: Our digital leaders are so twitchy, so creative—and so impatient—that as soon as they launch a digital innovation, they begin renovations on that innovation.
Such has been the case with our homepage, our digital face to the world. In April 2015, we launched an entirely new, visually arresting homepage, which represented a substantial improvement over the previous homepage. (I started posting on The Atlantic’s website in 2007, when it was constructed from glue, string, and the tears of its writers. “Bloggers” was what we were called back then, if I remember correctly.)
Within a month of the launch, our team was already thinking of ways to make the homepage better, to help it keep up with the faster pace, the rising quality, and the ever-greater volume of our journalism. The redesigned homepage we are launching today is the product of this two-year rethink, and of an immense amount of hard work by our designers, editors, and developers, the best in our business.