Welcome to SLATE
An
introduction and apologia.
By Michael
Kinsley
The name? It means
nothing, or practically nothing. We chose it as an empty vessel into which we
can pour meaning. We hope SLATE will come to mean good original journalism in
this new medium. Beyond that, who knows? Good magazines are exercises in
serendipity. Credit--or blame--for the name "SLATE," by the way, goes to David
Weld, then of Microsoft, now of Cognisoft Corp.
A Seattle cyberwag says
that the name "SLATE" is appropriate, because whenever he asks anyone from
Microsoft, "How's your project coming along?" the answer he usually gets is,
"'s late." SLATE , in fact, has been reasonably prompt. Less than six
months ago, it was a four-page memorandum and a single Internet naif. SLATE is
not the first "webzine," but everyone in this nascent business is still
struggling with some pretty basic issues. Starting an online magazine is like
starting a traditional paper magazine by asking: "OK, you chop down the trees.
Then what?"
To be honest, we are
running late on a few things. For the reader--you--there is good news and bad
news here. The good news is that our billing system isn't ready yet. We intend
to charge $19.95 a year for SLATE. That is far less than the cost of equivalent
print magazines, because there's no paper, printing, or postage. But $19.95
($34.95 for two years) is more than zero, which is what Web readers are used to
paying. We believe that expecting readers to share the cost, as they do in
print, is the only way serious journalism on the Web can be self-supporting.
Depending completely on advertisers would not be healthy even if it were
possible.
And we
want to be self-supporting. Indeed one of SLATE's main goals is to demonstrate,
if we can, that the economies of cyberspace make it easier for our kind of
journalism to pay for itself. Most magazines like SLATE depend on someone's
generosity or vanity or misplaced optimism to pay the bills. But
self-supporting journalism is freer journalism. (As A.J. Liebling said, freedom
of the press is for those who own one.) If the Web can make serious journalism
more easily self-supporting, that is a great gift from technology to
democracy.
For the moment, though, SLATE is yours for free. So enjoy.
We expect to start requiring registration in a few weeks, and to require
payment beginning Nov. 1.
The bad news for readers
is that some features aren't quite ready yet. Prime among them is "The Fray,"
our reader-discussion forum. Meanwhile, though, please e-mail any comments you
may have to [email protected]. We'll be publishing a traditional "Letters to the
Editor" page until The Fray is up and running in a few weeks.
We
especially need, and appreciate, your comments in these early weeks. Every new
magazine is a "beta" version for a while, especially a new magazine in a new
medium. SLATE has gotten enormous hype--some of it, to be sure, self-induced,
but much of it not. We appreciate the attention. But of course, it also makes
us nervous. We have a smaller budget and staff than most well-known
magazines--even smaller than some webzines. We don't claim to have all the
answers. But, with your help, we plan to have all the answers by Christmas.
[LINK TO TEXT BBB]
So What's in It?
First, let me urge you to
read a special page called Consider Your Options. This page explains and
executes the various ways you can receive and read SLATE. If you don't like
reading on a computer screen, for example, there's a special version of SLATE
that you can print out in its entirety, reformatted like a traditional print
magazine. If you don't mind reading on a screen but hate waiting for pages to
download--and hate running up those online charges from your Internet
provider--you will soon be able to download the whole magazine at once and read
it offline.
Also on the Consider Your
Options page, you can order SLATE to be delivered to your computer by e-mail.
(Caution: This may not work with your e-mail system.) We'll even send you
SLATE
on Paper , a monthly compilation of highlights from SLATE,
through the U.S. Mail. (The cost is $29 a year. Call 800-555-4995 to
order.)
Individual copies of
SLATE
on Paper will be available exclusively at Starbucks. And
selected articles from SLATE will also appear in Time magazine.
While you're on the
Consider Your Options page, please read about how to navigate around SLATE. We
use page numbers, like a traditional print magazine, and have tried to make it
as easy as possible either to "flip through" the magazine or to and from the
Table of Contents.
OK, But What's in
It??[STET double "??"]
SLATE
is basically a weekly: Most articles will appear for a week. But there will be
something new to read almost every day. Some elements will change constantly.
Other elements will appear and be removed throughout the week. Every article
will indicate when it was "posted" and when it will be "composted." As a
general rule the Back of the Book, containing cultural reviews and commentary,
will be posted Mondays and Tuesdays, the longer Features will be posted
Wednesdays and Thursdays, and the front-of-the-book Briefing section will be
posted Fridays. If you miss something, you can easily call it up from our
archive, "The Compost."( THIS NEEDS TO BE A HOT LINK)
Let me try to describe a typical issue of SLATE.
The Readme column will not
always be as solipsistic as this one. It will usually be a commentary on public
affairs by one of SLATE's editors.
Several regular
departments in the Briefing section are attempts at "meta-news": the news about
the news, a sense of how the week's big stories are being played and perceived.
The Week/The Spin takes a dozen or so topics, from this week's
election-campaign developments to the latest big book from Knopf, and analyses,
as objectively [LINK TO TEXT CCC]as possible, the spin they're getting, the
sub-angles that are emerging, and so on. In Other Magazines uses the covers and
contents of Time , Newsweek , etc., as a handy measure of what the
culture considers important. (We aim to have these magazines in SLATE even
before they reach the newsstands or your mailbox.) The Horse Race
tracks the presidential candidates like stocks, as priced by the opinion polls,
the pundits, and a genuine market in political candidates run out of the
University of Iowa. Our man William Saletan will compute and analyze changes in
the pundits index.
The
Gist, by contrast, is SLATE's effort to provide a quick education on some
current issue in a form as free of spin as possible. Also free of quotes,
anecdotes, and other paraphernalia. The only 1,000 words you'll have to read
when you might rather read nothing at all.
In a weekly department called Varnish Remover, political
consultant Robert Shrum will deconstruct a 30-second TV spot from the election
campaign. You can download a video or audio clip of the spot itself.
"Assessment" will be a short, judgmental profile of some figure in the news.
(Coming up soon: James Fallows on Wired magazine's godfather, Nicholas
Negroponte.)
Stanford economist Paul
Krugman writes The Dismal Scientist, a once-a-month column on economic policy.
(See his debut essay in this issue, about the economic war within the Clinton
administration.) University of Rochester economist Steven Landsburg writes
monthly on "Everyday Economics," using economic analysis to illuminate everyday
life. (His first column, in our next issue, will explain how sexual promiscuity
can actually reduce the spread of AIDS.)
"The Earthling" will be a
monthly column by Robert Wright, contributor to the New Republic and
Time , and author of the acclaimed book on evolutionary psychology,
The Moral Animal . Other regular Briefing features will include a Press
column by our deputy editor, Jack Shafer.
Doodlennium is our weekly cartoon strip by Mark Alan Stamaty, whose
"Washingtoon" appeared for many years in the Washington Post and
Time . Our SLATE Diary will be an actual daily diary, written and posted
every weekday by someone with an interesting mind. Our first diarist is David
O. Russell, writer and director of Flirting With Disaster . Our second
diarist will be novelist Muriel Spark.
Can There Possibly be More?
Our Features section
begins each week with the Committee of Correspondence, our e-mail discussion
group. The committee is run by Herbert Stein, a former chairman of the
president's Council of Economic Advisers best-known now for his witty columns
in the Wall Street Journal . We have great hopes for e-mail as a medium
of debate that can combine the immediacy of talk-television with the
intellectual discipline of the written word. We hope for something halfway
between The McLaughlin Group and the correspondence page of the New
York Review of Books . Will it work? Check out our first attempt--Does
Microsoft Play Fair?--and let us know what you think.
The Features section is
also where we run longer articles [LINK TO TEXT DDD] and occasional humor
pieces (that is, pieces that are intentionally, or at least aspirationally,
humorous). This week in The Temptation of Bob Dole, SLATE's Washington editor,
Jodie Allen, cruelly analyzes the arguments for a tax cut. Social critic
Nicholas Lemann writes on Jews in Second Place, about what happens to American
Jews as Asians replace them at the top of the meritocracy. And the legendary
recluse Henry David Thoreau emerges to give SLATE readers an exclusive peek at
his new Web page.
In
SLATE Gallery, we have a continuous exhibition of computer-based art. You may
like or dislike this stuff (we'll have plenty of linked commentary to help you
decide). What appeals to us about computer art is that SLATE can show you not
reproductions, but the actual art itself. We start with an offering by Jenny
Holzer.
This week's reviews include Ann Hulbert's book review of
Miss Manners' latest encyclical; Sarah Kerr's television review of the changing
fashions in season finales; Larissa MacFarquhar's High Concept column, about
how managed care could improve psychotherapy; and Cullen Murphy's The Good
Word, about the difference between "Jesuitical" and "Talmudic."
In general, SLATE's Back
of the Book will contain a weekly book review, alternating television and movie
reviews, and a rotating menu of columns on music (classical and popular),
sports, web sites, and other topics. Jeffrey Steingarten will be writing
monthly on food ("In the Soup"), Anne Hollander on fashion ("Clothes Sense"),
and Margaret Talbot on "Men and Women." Audio and video clips will be offered
where appropriate.
Every issue will have a
poem, read aloud by the author, with text. In this issue is a new poem by
Seamus Heaney.
And
coming up soon, two additional Back of the Book features: an interactive
acrostic puzzle, and a stock-market contest.
Does SLATE Have a Slant?
SLATE is owned by
Microsoft Corp., and that bothers some people. Can a giant software company put
out a magazine that is free to think for itself? All we can say is that
Microsoft has made all the right noises on this subject, and we look forward to
putting the company's hands-off commitment to the test. But the concern strikes
me as misplaced. In a day of media conglomerates with myriad daily conflicts of
interest--Time Warner, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., Disney-ABC--how can it be a
bad thing for a new company to begin competing in the media business? A
journalist who worries about Microsoft putting out a magazine is a journalist
with a steady job.
Readers may also wonder
whether SLATE will have a particular political flavor. The answer is that we do
not set out with any ideological mission or agenda. On the other hand, we are
not committed to any artificial balance of views. We will publish articles from
various perspectives, but we will not agonize if the mix averages out to be
somewhere other than dead center. [LINK TO TEXT EEE]
A good magazine, though,
does develop a personality, an attitude, [LINK TO TEXT FFF]and some
prejudices--even crotchets. A few of SLATE's are already becoming clear. In
discussing current events, we have a preference for policy over politics. We'd
rather discuss the effect of Bob Dole's tax-cut proposal on the economy than
its effect on Bill Clinton. Within the policy arena, we seem to have a special
fondness for economics. This was not planned; it's one of those serendipitous
developments I mentioned. Whether it reflects good luck or bad luck is a matter
of taste (yours).
Finally, we intend to take
a fairly skeptical stance toward the romance and rapidly escalating vanity of
cyberspace. We do not start out with the smug assumption that the Internet
changes the nature of human thought, or that all the restraints that society
imposes on individuals in "real life" must melt away in cyberia. There is a
deadening conformity in the hipness of cyberspace culture in which we don't
intend to participate. Part of our mission at SLATE will be trying to bring
cyberspace down to earth.
Should be fun. Thanks for
joining us.
Michael Kinsley is
editor of SLATE.
TEXT AAA: No, this is
not a link to the Cognisoft home page. As a general rule, we plan to
avoid hyperlinks to outside sites in the text of articles, and to group them at
the end instead. It's a small illustration of our general philosophy--better
call it a hope--that, even on the Web, some people will want to read articles
in the traditional linear fashion--i.e., from beginning to end--rather than
darting constantly from site to site. Go back.
TEXT BBB: Only kidding.
Easter. Go back.
TEXT CCC: Objectivity, we
hope, will distinguish this feature from Newsweek 's "Conventional Wisdom
Watch," which is often an effort to set the spin rather than describe it.
Anyway, the "CW Watch" was a rip-off of a similar feature in the New
Republic when I was the editor there. And TNR 's feature itself was
lifted from Washington, D.C.'s, City Paper , which was edited at the time
of the theft by Jack Shafer, now deputy editor of SLATE. Go back.
TEXT DDD: Those dread
words "longer articles" raise one of the big uncertainties about this
enterprise: How long an article will people be willing to read on a computer
screen? We have several answers to this question: 1) We don't know. Clearly
it's less than on paper, but how much less is uncertain. 2) We're determined to
test the outer limits. 3) We'll do our best, graphically, to make reading on
screen a more pleasant experience (suggestions welcome). 4) We'll also make
SLATE as easy as possible to print out. 5) This will become less of a problem
as screens are developed that can be taken to bed or the bathroom. 6) Two
thousand words. Or at least we're starting--optimistically, perhaps--with the
hope that 2000 words or so is not too much. (By contrast, a typical
print-magazine feature or cover story might run anywhere from 5000 to 15,000
words.)
At least among
non-cyberheads, the computer-screen problem seems to be everyone's favorite
conversational thrust with regard to SLATE. In recent months I've been amazed
to learn of the places and postures in which people like to read magazines. Bed
and bath are just the beginning. At a Seattle dinner party, a woman made the
interesting point that her problem isn't the screen: It's the chair. Even
"ergonomic" computer chairs are designed for typing, not for reading. For this
woman, and for others who may feel the same way, we have asked several
furniture designers to sketch a real computer reading chair--one you can curl
up in with your mouse and your cup of Starbucks and read SLATE online. That
feature will appear in a week or two. Go back.
TEXT EEE: In this regard
we are more like the newsmagazines-- Time , Newsweek , U.S. News
& World Report --than the overtly political magazines such as the New
Republic , National Review , or the Weekly Standard . Each of
the newsmagazines may have an identifiable political tilt. But pushing a
particular line is not what they are fundamentally about, and knowing where
they average out won't tell you what any individual article will say. Go
back.
TEXT FFF: This is
different from "attitude"--that free-floating, supercilious cynicism that is
much prized in the culture of cyberspace. We may develop an attitude--a
set of prejudices derived from logic and evidence, as best we can determine
them--but we'll leave "attitude" to the kids. Go back.
