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Slate ahoy
Kinsley heads for uncharted waters with a great on-line mag
by Dan Kennedy
It's been hyped more than any new magazine since JFK Jr. launched George. Its editor, former Crossfire talking head Michael Kinsley, has been profiled in the New Yorker, Esquire, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. He's even popped up on the cover of Newsweek, decked out in Pacific Northwest-style raingear, skeptically eyeing a long, silvery salmon.
The magazine is Slate, the latest of a spate of new publications to spurn paper and ink in favor of the World-Wide Web. It slipped into view a few minutes before 3 p.m. on Monday at http://www.slate.com. And guess what? The buzz was justified. Slate is a vibrant new voice, instantly competitive with weekly journals of ideas and opinion such as the New Republic (which Kinsley once edited), the Nation, and the Weekly Standard.
"This is an experiment," a weary-sounding but upbeat Kinsley told the Phoenix just a few days before Slate's launch. "I don't think we have any of the right answers yet, on editorial, business, or anything. That's what's so much fun about it."
Industry-watchers are paying particular attention to Slate to see whether its backer, Microsoft mogul Bill Gates, can be the first person to figure out how to make money from publishing on the Web.
There's not enough advertising in cyberspace to support free content, and Net-surfers are thought to be loath to pay. Yet Gates and Kinsley are determined to break the rules. Following a free trial period, the magazine will be available by subscription starting on November 1 ($19.95 for one year). Single-issue sales are a possibility as well. "That's something that the whole industry will be watching," says Songline Studios editorial director (and Slate contributor) D.C. Denison. Songline recently suspended publication of its year-old free webzine Web Review for lack of advertising; the publication reportedly lost $500,000.
Certainly a lot of skeptics think Kinsley and Gates will fail. "People aren't going to pay, not in anywhere near the numbers needed," says Bill Bass, a senior analyst for Cambridge-based Forrester Research. The everything-is-free ethos of the Web, he explains, is just too much to overcome except for sites with unique information for specialized audiences. For instance, the Wall Street Journal (http://www.wsj.com) will start charging for Web access this summer ($49 per year, or $29 for those already subscribing to the paper edition), and Bass predicts success. The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com) plans to charge for access outside the US, where the paper edition is expensive and hard to get. Analysts predict a quick profit; after all, the content is already bought and paid for. To date, though, no general-interest magazine has dared to charge for access to its Web site.
And though it might someday be possible for webzines to turn a profit through advertising, that day is at least three years off, Bass says. Advertisers will spend about $80 million on the Web this year, a barely measurable fraction of the $150 billion they'll spend overall. The number of people on-line is expected to grow from 15 million to 50 million between now and 2000, and Bass estimates that the Web ad budget over that time span will rise to $4.8 billion. But the next few years are likely to be rocky for all Web projects, including Slate.
"I just think Microsoft is making the wrong call on this," Bass says. "I think it's going to be a fairly embarrassing thing for them."
Yet if the Web is to offer useful, original content, someone has to pay for it. Kinsley is certainly correct in asserting that readers should pay something for Slate, just as they would for a traditional magazine.
Indeed, in a recent on-line conference, David Zweig, publisher of the free webzine Salon, said that "the dawn of the pay era is something I will greet with almost as much relish as the coming of the Lord." He warned, nevertheless, that "the market is not yet ready."
Gates, with the deepest pockets in America, may just be able to wait for the market to get ready. In a recent Wired piece on Gates's plans to morph Microsoft into a media force, he offered this gem of an understatement: "We are not capital-constrained." That comment is reminiscent of the late Henry Luce, who lost money on Sports Illustrated for about a decade before it finally turned a profit. Today, SI is a cash cow, and Luce's folly looks like anything but.
Besides, Gates and Kinsley are hedging their bets. Slate will continue to be offered free to the million or so people who subscribe to Microsoft Network, the company's commercial on-line service. A monthly compilation of highlights, Slate on Paper, will be sold at Starbucks for $3, and by annual subscription for $29. And a few features will be reprinted in Time magazine.
Slate's principal asset is the 45-year-old Kinsley, who traded in a lucrative career in Washington, DC, for an uncertain future in Washington State. "I used to be on television," he says with a laugh when asked why Slate's gotten so much attention. "I find it puzzling and bewildering and pleasant. I imagine that people putting out other webzines must find it equally puzzling, equally bewildering, and much less pleasant."
Kinsley's self-deprecating assessment is accurate but incomplete. Kinsley is widely considered one of the most talented magazine editors of his generation, and he's often been criticized for wasting his prodigious talents on trading soundbites with the likes of Pat Buchanan and John Sununu. Now he's returning to his roots -- and with his only marching orders being not to blow his budget, he's free for the first time in his career to produce a magazine that is completely, and undeniably, his.
"Michael is incapable of producing an uninteresting publication," says Martin Peretz, publisher of the New Republic, which Kinsley is credited with reviving during his stint as editor during the 1980s. Peretz, though, has a reputation for being a hands-on publisher. At Slate, Kinsley's on his own.
Judging from the debut edition, Slate isn't perfect by any means. Some sections need tinkering; others need to be euthanized. But its flaws are those of a major new magazine, not of an amateurish Web project. With talent such as the Atlantic Monthly's Nicholas Lemann and James Fallows, former Washington Post Outlook editor Jodie Allen (Slate's assistant editor), and former SF Weekly and Washington CityPaper editor Jack Shafer (Slate's deputy editor), Kinsley clearly has the means at his disposal to keep at it until he gets it right. And with a clean, attractive design, an easy-to-navigate interface, and some impressive content, Slate is off to a good start.
Slate looks much more like a typical magazine than almost any other webzine. Even Salon (http://www.salon1999.com), which is relatively conservative in its use of technology, keeps its articles short (usually no more than 800 words) and stresses the interactive nature of the Net by heavily promoting "Table Talk," its discussion area. By contrast, several Slate articles check in at more than 2000 words, and its discussion area, "The Fray," won't be ready for a few more weeks. Slate does include hypertext links to off-site content, as well as video and RealAudio sound clips (including a Fats Waller theme song and Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney reading one of his poems), but the point is to read, not to surf.
The magazine kicks off with "The Week/The Spin," a look at how the media has handled major stories, from Hillary Clinton's séances with Eleanor Roosevelt to the debut of The Rosie O'Donnell Show. With a laundry-list feel to it, this clearly needs rethinking. More promising are "In Other Magazines," a fairly comprehensive synopsis of Time, Newsweek, et al.; "The Horse Race," an amusing politics-as-stock-options feature by Hotline co-founder William Saletan; and "The Gist," a statistics-laden take on issues (this week: the so-called war on drugs) by Slate assistant editor David Plotz. Other winners are "Doodlennium," by cartoonist Mark Alan Stamaty, and "The Dismal Scientist," by Stanford economist Paul Krugman. Screenwriter David O. Russell's "Diary," though, is pointless and self-indulgent.
"Varnish Remover," a weekly feature on political advertising by political consultant Robert Shrum, gets off to a problematic start: his charge, he writes, is to explain what makes political ads tick, while avoiding any assessment of their accuracy, but he has trouble respecting this fine distinction. Well, no wonder. Shrum is a liberal Democrat, and it's going to be difficult for him to be impartial. I also found it impossible to watch the video of the ad, which can probably be attributed to my ineptness at setting up a viewer that I downloaded. Fortunately, the soundtrack is available in RealAudio.
The lead piece in the "Features" section is a roundtable discussion, "Does Microsoft Play Fair?" It's a well-meaning attempt by Kinsley to show that he's not going to be Bill Gates's toady, but unfortunately, what emerges is an image of Microsoft that Gates himself would probably like: no, it doesn't play fair; no, its products aren't always the best; but by God, it's the only standard there is, and if you don't truckle under you're going to find it hard to get any work done. "Why have I lain down before the steamroller from Redmond?" asks New York Times Magazine columnist James Gleick. "Because there's really no choice."
Other pieces include a graceful essay by Nicholas Lemann on how Asian-Americans have taken the place of Jews as the most upwardly striving ethnic group; a wonk's look at why Bob Dole should resist the temptation to embrace a tax cut, by Jodie Allen; and a hilarious concept piece, Henry David Thoreau's Web site, by Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam and D.C. Denison ("QuickTime Users! Check out my new Bean Cam -- a new image from my beanfield every 30 seconds.").
And there's more: performance art, books, television, quickie psychotherapy, and the Atlantic's Cullen Murphy on the difference between "Jesuitical" and "Talmudic."
Slate's status as "a fairly conventional magazine," as Kinsley puts it, is controversial among those who see the Web as a chance to create new kinds of interactive media that lower the walls separating editors from readers. "The key to the Web is not just the multimedia capabilities, it's the many-to-many capabilities. On the Net, the membrane between editorial and audience is semi-permeable," says Howard Rheingold, author of Virtual Community (Addison-Wesley, 1993), who accuses Kinsley of a "profound failure to understand the medium he is thrashing around in."
Other critics see the Web as more of a broadcast-style, quick-hit environment than a reading room. "This medium is not about reading long, thoughtful pieces," Starwave (http://www.starwave.com) executive Geoff Reiss, who publishes SportsZone (http://espnet.sportszone.com) for ESPN, told the New York Times recently.
But as the Web grows from a playground for computer junkies to an information source for the masses, it's likely that read-only projects such as Slate will find a niche. After all, not everyone wants to go on-line to talk. "I don't feel that using the Web for publishing a more traditional magazine is necessarily a bad thing," says David Waxman, creative director of the highly interactive entertainment webzine Firefly (http://www.firefly.com).
Indeed, given how expensive it is to publish a serious, relatively small-circulation magazine, the Web's sheer cheapness could lead to a revival of independent print-oriented journalism.
Richard Parker, a senior fellow at the Kennedy School's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, is a former publisher of Ramparts, which died long ago, and Mother Jones, which is still around, though perpetually strapped for cash. "We could have unloaded about half of our costs" if those publications could have been done as webzines, he says, because there are no printing and distribution bills on the Net.
It would be ironic if giant Microsoft helped point the way for a new generation of entrepreneurial publishers. Kinsley credits Microsoft for trying to break the stranglehold of media giants such as Time Warner and Rupert Murdoch, but Gates doesn't seem particularly interested in slugging it out in the trenches: he's already formed an alliance with NBC, and similar partnerships are said to be in the works.
Says Kinsley: "I'm certain that people without the backing of Microsoft Corporation will be putting up successful things on the Web. If I had more guts, I might have done it that way myself."