MICKEY KAUS’S blog may indeed be the most interesting addition to Slate in recent months. Not because of its quality, however. Kaus’s sharp writing on normally dull policy issues once stood out in the crowd, but the shrill political and media fetishes he indulges in his "Kausfiles" blog annoy the reader in gnat-like fashion — and carry precisely that much intellectual weight.

Yet one can make an excellent case that Slate’s short, sharp political embroiderings over the past six years fashioned and then set the pace for the blogging phenomenon's recent explosion. Even in its earliest days, Slate stood alone in its ability to react quickly and smartly to the push-and-pull of Beltway politics. Thus, Slate led the way in creating a market for instant opinion, which writers such as Andrew Sullivan and Joshua Micah Marshall have exploited with interesting results.

One can also argue that Slate is becoming a victim of its own success, now that large news organizations are getting into the act and threatening to overtake the field. ABCNews.com’s "Note," for example, has become an indispensable daily digest of political reporting. It's written with the verve of a blog — but none of the self-indulgence — and it figures to be a pacesetter.

Thus, Slate's decision to import a blog such as Kaus’s marks a vital concession to a trend the magazine’s own political reporting helped to create. (Slate has also allowed Kaus to revive his "Gearbox" column on automobiles as a blog — and mau-maued Saletan into blogging on the 2002 midterm elections. "I’m against blogging," Saletan wrote in November, "for the following reasons: 1) It encourages you to form and disseminate opinions before you know enough facts or have thought through your opinions. 2) It emphasizes who’s writing rather than what’s written. However, I’ve been asked to blog for a few days about this election. So blog I will.")

Weisberg agrees with the theory that blogging "developed out of the political coverage Slate was doing before one called it ‘blogging.’" He describes himself as a "conservative enthusiast" for the new form. "It has elements of fad," he says. "I don’t want to acquire a lot of new blogs for the magazine. I want to be picky about it."

Timothy Noah — who writes Slate’s consistently excellent "Chatterbox" column — also worries a bit about overkill. In response to an e-mail query, Noah writes that "you’re right that blogging is in some respects an outgrowth of what Slate has been doing. Chatterbox started out as a much bloggier feature than it is now, in both format and content. And of course Mickey Kaus, who wrote Chatterbox before I did, later transferred that formula to his own pioneering blog.

"As the blogosphere has grown," Noah continues, "I’ve made the Chatterbox column less bloggy — that is to say, less off-the-cuff, a little more formal in the writing and the thinking, and more reportorial." Noah adds that he prefers to link to primary sources rather than to other bloggers — "ˆ la The Smoking Gun (of which I’m a great fan)" — and that he’s sensitive to what one might dub "blogrolling" — an endless echo chamber of bloggers congratulating and ripping each other.

"I haven’t avoided this completely," admits Noah. "But I think I’ve avoided it more than the blogs have."

As far as blogs go, Plotz says he thinks Slate "can have it all ways on this.... We can blog when we want to, but lots of us aren’t suited to it. You have to have opinions about everything."

Blogging has had its effects, however. "I don’t really think blogging is going to kill off Slate, or that Slate is going to kill off blogging," Noah argues. "It’s a big Web out there. But I do think that the proliferation of blogs has prodded me (and probably others at Slate as well) to change my approach a bit so that we’re not doing what the rest of the world is doing."

Slate’s cozy, yet uneasy, relation to its "blog-children" is just one way the mag Kinsley built has had a big influence on American journalism. Slate’s influence has also extended to other areas of media ethics and business. The double journalistic hoaxes played on Slate — one by a renegade freelancer, another by a malicious Web prankster — provided considerable merriment to those who assess the seriousness and efficacy of online journalism. "The self-correcting machinery of the Internet makes it that much harder for fabricated accounts to stand unchallenged," noted an Online Journalism Review senior editor in an April 2002 "scorecard" of online-media ethics. Not that such things don’t happen every day at newspapers or TV stations, of course. But a relatively new form of journalism always has its doubters and deniers, quick to seize on sizable screw-ups to impugn the entire endeavor.

In fact, Slate’s handling of both episodes is a textbook case of how news organizations should respond to such situations. It made early and forthright admissions of error, and Slate has not used the Web’s capacity to obliterate evidence of these events from its archives. It’s almost impossible, for instance, to get a copy of noted fabulist Stephen Glass’s work, which should be required reading for editors everywhere. It’s as if the New Republic — where he published his fabricated accounts — never had a hot young writer named Stephen Glass.

"I’m very impressed with our editorial staff in the approach they take to corrections," says Krohn. "We’re more forthright about it than most."

Yet these hoaxes did take place. So has Slate instituted any checks — fact-checkers, et cetera — to make sure that such things don’t occur again? The blunt answer is "no."

Weisberg, Plotz, and Krohn agree that the magazine has redoubled its efforts to scrutinize stories and contributors. "We’re definitely less trusting," says Weisberg. "We really check out people we don’t know. A journalist who makes stuff up is like a suicide bomber. He can do harm that you can’t prevent."

However, Weisberg says that fact-checkers aren't necessary at Slate. "Fact-checking is a system for making writers lazy," he observes. "From my experience in journalism, the most important tool is a good bullshit detector." Plotz agrees that the magazine "has not changed the larger ethos of writers as fact-checkers."

Such questions continue to be important because Slate’s prominence and success have made them important. When Weisberg talks about the "rational view" of online publishing that he sees reasserting itself in the wake of the tech crash, he consciously evokes the model Kinsley established way back in 1996 — making use of the speed and flexibility of Web publishing without the large fixed costs of print or broadcast media.

Slate’s success — and influence — argue that at least the content portion of the "beta" magazine has been completed. The question of whether Slate can continue that success as it seeks to bring the digital magazine into the black is another question entirely.

Richard Byrne is a freelance journalist based in Washington, DC. He can be reached at richardbyrne1@earthlink.net