The new version of the Atavist publishing software is based around building blocks. Stories are assembled with a Lego-like structure where text, photos, audio files, and social media embeds are sorted and stacked on one another. The software supports media from places like YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter, and Soundcloud. The drag-and-drop function lets you tinker with assets as well as design elements, letting users create block quotes or parallax effects, for example.
Launching today, the National Magazine Award-winning digital magazine turned publishing platform has revamped almost every aspect of its system to make it near-painless to create and sell beautifully designed long-form content across multiple platforms.
The company redesigned atavist.com, its portal for online publishers like The California Sunday Magazine and the Weather Channel, and also tweaked its publishing interface “to make it a lot more fluid and intuitive for the individual user,” Atavist co-founder and C.E.O. Evan Ratliff said.
Miles Teller has signed on to star in Universal’s adaptation of The Life and Times of the Stopwatch Gang, a long-form piece on The Atavist Magazine. Gangster Squad helmer Ruben Fleischer is attached to direct.
You have not read a truly digital book until you’ve read The New World. The novella is about a woman trying to reclaim her dead husband’s head from a cult-like cryogenics company. But more than that, it is the most ambitious attempt I’ve seen at exploring a future where books lack physical form and are better for it.
Bestowing praise upon an upstart indie title was among two echoes from last year’s awards. The other was the judge’s preference for ink-on-paper titles. Despite the nominations for several digital-only publishers — including The Atavist, Refinery29, Grantland and Matter, which is owned by the blogging platform Medium — the sole winner from this batch was The Atavist Magazine.
“No doubt the First Look folks lured her away from The New Yorker for some of the same reasons we’re now bringing her here: a sharp eye for stories, exceptional editing chops, and inventive ideas not just about what we publish but how we do it,” wrote Atavist founder and editor Evan Ratliff.
Joel Lovell, who served as a New York Times Magazine deputy editor and was most recently working on special projects for the paper, is leaving Friday to take on two new roles in narrative journalism.
This time we visited the offices of Atavist, which co-founder and CEO Evan Ratliff described as “a storytelling company” — it’s both a publisher of longform journalism and the company behind Creatavist, a platform used by other online publishers.
Atavist, the innovative multimedia longform journalism publisher, closed a $2 million debt-only round, according to an SEC filing. As this follows up on two previous equity-only rounds of roughly $4 million total, this could be a sign that the company has strong enough earnings that it believes it can finance its growth into the next phase rather than diluting its equity further.