Newer Media
Nate Thayer, a reporter, took grave offense when The Atlantic asked him to adapt a basketball story for one of The Atlantic’s weblogs but didn’t want to pay him. He lost his temper colorfully, and also published the editor’s email address, which wasn’t terribly nice.
Alex Madrigal replies at length in A Day in the Life of a Digital Editor, 2013. It’s a shaggy post and gets off to a slow start, but it’s also one of the all-time best pieces of new media on the Web.
I'll be damned if The Atlantic dies with my generation, if all that is left of it when I leave is some moldering books and cold servers. Quite possibly, I would get to the gates of heaven and Ida Tarbell would be sitting there like, “Wait, wait, you’re one of those guys who let The Atlantic die?” And poof: trapdoor in the clouds, burning in hell for all eternity. Actually, strike that, I'd probably get stuck in purgatory rewriting press releases about corporate sustainability, forced to eat tuna sandwiches every day for lunch.