THE LATE-’90s scrum between Slate and its online competitor Salon has often served as a barometer for the health of stand-alone online journalism. But it was always more of a culture clash than a real war. Salon was the stuff of Icelandic saga — scrappy journalistic Vikings looting pop culture and sacking conservative castles. By comparison, Slate featured wonky monks busily scribbling away in the Microsoft monastery, giving the full-on Book of Kells treatment to Beltway conventional wisdom — and charging close to $20 a year for it.

The comparison lost its luster, in a business sense, a few years back. Slate dumped its paid-subscription model in 1999 — and as a part of the Microsoft machine, its finances escape the scrutiny given to a stand-alone public company such as Salon. For its part, Salon adopted a paid-subscriber model in April 2001, when the confluence of its need for cash and dwindling stock prices forced a switch in tack.

Not only have the two magazines flipped revenue schemes, but they’ve also edged closer to each other content-wise. Salon does less of the hard-nosed reporting that once brought it acclaim and notoriety, such as its 1998 scoop on Republican Illinois congressman and Clinton-impeachment hound Henry Hyde’s long-time affair, which exposed the hypocrisy of one of the president’s chief accusers. Slate, on the other hand, has edged slowly but steadily toward a Salon-like blend of politics and culture.

For his part, Salon founder David Talbot doesn’t see much difference between Weisberg’s and Kinsley’s versions of the journal. In a reply to an e-mail query about his take on the Weisberg era, Talbot writes, "I don’t read Slate as deeply as I’d like, but I just don’t see that much difference between the Kinsley and Weisberg regimes. Many of the same writers, the same commitment to wry intelligence. I guess, like everyone else, I’ve noticed some more emphasis on pop culture and a little bit of naughtiness (taking a page from Salon there, I imagine). But other than that, still seems very much like the same smart product to me."

Talbot is correct in observing that Slate has kept a lot of the magazine’s recipe intact. Stuff that’s not broken — such as sharply written digests ("Today’s Papers," "In Other Magazines," "International Papers," "Summary Judgment"); Matt Gaffney’s excellent weekly crossword; or the long-standing "Explainer" column (lucid breakdowns of complicated news features, often penned by New America Foundation fellow Brendan Koerner) — has been merely tweaked, at best.

Yet big changes are cropping up in Weisberg’s Slate — particularly on the cultural front, where coverage had been allowed to dwindle in the last years of Kinsley’s reign. Slate’s expansion of its cultural coverage is a "work in progress," according to Weisberg. "It’s halfway there," he says of Slate’s new emphasis on cultural commentary, which has included everything from establishing DVD and tech reviews to publishing more "Culturebox" features. "Maybe more than halfway there."

Slate has made some significant investments in resources to get this job done, including hiring the New Yorker’s Meghan O’Rourke as a second NYC-based cultural editor. It's adapting its format to these changes as well. Most notably, the magazine has begun to ditch the forced glad-handing of its e-mail-discussion approach to culture — in which various writers poke and prod each other on the pop-culture Zeitgeist — in favor of presenting stronger critical voices in a more traditional format.

Of course, this tactic works only if you’ve got good writers, and Slate's stable is a bit uneven. The decision to bring on Harper’s Virginia Heffernan to write about TV was a good one, as was the move giving movie critic David Edelstein a more prominent forum. Heffernan (who has also written book reviews for the Phoenix) pokes at the absurdities of the highly rated tube and reaches into the bowels of niche cable with equal vigor. One recent Heffernan article tackled the Oxygen network’s yoga guru, Steve Ross, whose tough-guy talk and rigorous posing put Heffernan in what she dubbed the "I-hate-you asana." Edelstein, for his part, writes sharply and without jargon. His review of the Chuck Barris biopic Confessions of a Dangerous Mind captures the flick’s gleeful slash ’n’ burn through the silly ’60s and ’70s without losing sight of the film’s flaws.

Heffernan’s and Edelstein’s lively but serious criticism shows how just 800 killer words from a smart writer can whack the stuffing out of more pompous fare, as when Slate gave four shrinks and an author who’s done a psychological analysis of Hitler (Explaining Hitler’s Ron Rosenbaum) weeks and weeks to break down The Sopranos' new season.

At times, however, Slate’s cultural coverage still falls into the "Duh!" category — by digging in a couple of months, or even years, too late, or by just plain getting it wrong. Sometimes, this gets downright embarrassing, as when Mike Steinberger provided a lengthy explanation of why Beaujolais nouveau sucks, proving once again that some whines don’t get better with time. "Although the wines still sell briskly," he wrote, "and the party goes on, the nouveau mania has plainly ebbed, and it is fair to say the campaign has done the Beaujolais brand more harm than good, especially in the United States." It’s a tale that has 1999 printed all over its label — not 2002 or 2003.

Music coverage also remains a weak point. A recent music feature by David Samuels lumped together Interpol and Matt Pond Pa — both definitely bands of last year — along with the author’s teen-Brit-rock fetishes, and emerged with 2003’s new pop trend: "mope rock." (News flash: real mope rock’s been back in town for a while — as any listen to Belle & Sebastian, Kings of Convenience, or Elysian Fields would tell you.)

The laggard pace and thinness of Slate’s cultural coverage is proof that the magazine still has a way to go in this area. Its willingness to experiment is laudable, but a number of these lab reports deserve grades of "incomplete" — including the "Gizmos" tech column and Rob Walker’s "Number One" column (exploring "how popular culture gets popular"), which hasn’t seen much action since the autumn. (Walker still pens "Ad Report Card," an excellent column grading television commercials, however.)

The slow and uneven upgrade in culture writing also proves that politics remains Slate’s meat and potatoes. When observers talk about Slate’s political tone, "snarky" is a word that gets thrown around a lot. But that catchall elides substantial differences in quality and style among the magazine’s political contributors. For instance, as Slate’s genial but often goofy granddad, Kinsley writes a weekly column (called "Read Me") that alternates between fussily elliptical essays on deficit spending (after much verbiage he concludes that "newfound Republican fondness for deficits" actually "conflicts with obvious reality), oddball takes on "power women" (they like to watch Law & Order reruns), and personal confession (he didn’t read all the books nominated for the National Book Award, of which he was a judge). "Snarky" just isn’t the word for it; "spotty" or "dotty" are more like it.

When Slate is good on politics, however, it’s very, very good. Slate’s Supreme Court reporter, Dahlia Lithwick, is one of America’s best writers on federal jurisprudence — smart, passionate, and a first-rate stylist. Whether Lithwick uses a satirical scalpel (skewering the Winona Ryder trial) or a sledgehammer (her commentary on the continuing war on civil liberties is provocative and well-reasoned), pretty much everything she writes is worth a look. And whether you agree or disagree with the magazine’s chief political correspondent, William Saletan, or deputy Washington bureau chief, Chris Suellentrop, their writing is consistently smart and lethal in a way that rarely borders on the dreaded "snarky." Washington editor Plotz’s willingness to experiment with a continuing series of features that meld politics with graphics and wit — he’s the guy behind the "Saddameter," an Enron "board game," and corporate-scandal playing cards — also signals a willingness to imbue politics with the unusual — that is, humor.

Perhaps Suellentrop’s essay on a possible Democratic presidential bid by General Wesley Clark, posted January 8, is a perfect example of what’s best about Slate’s political writing. After assessing Clark’s "ability to articulate" intellectual grounds for opposing President George W. Bush’s foreign policy "better than other Democrats, who sometimes resort to tiresome calls of ‘chickenhawk’ or ‘quagmire,’" Suellentrop continues with this smart and succinct observation:

Clark is no dove. But he argues that the biggest mistake the Bush administration made in the aftermath of Sept. 11 was its refusal to conduct the war under the auspices of NATO, despite the alliance’s declaration that an attack on the United States was an attack on all its member nations. As a result, Europe is not accountable for success in the war on terrorism, only the United States is. European leaders see it as George W. Bush’s war, according to Clark, because Bush has made it his war. "Not a single European election hinges on the success of the war on terrorism," Clark wrote in the September Washington Monthly. Clark even went so far as to employ a classic Vietnam metaphor to describe Bush’s policies: "Because the Bush administration has thus far refused to engage our allies through NATO, we are fighting the war on terrorism with one hand tied behind our back."

Suellentrop may often be well ahead of the curve, but Slate as a whole hasn’t entirely thrown off its rep for clubby snarkdom. Sometimes it’s a reflexive thing. A December 9 article by Emily Yoffe on the awarding of a Rhodes scholarship to Chesa Boudin — son of Weather Underground radicals still in jail for murdering two police officers and a security guard as they tried to rob an armored car in 1981 — is an excellent case in point. In brief, Yoffe visits the parents’ sins on the son, arguing that the 22-year-old Boudin "shares their obtuseness" and at one point noting cattily that Boudin’s mom "is the daughter of a prominent lawyer and graduated from Bryn Mawr." So children of felonious activists should never get Rhodes scholarships unless they publicly repudiate their own parents? The very definition of "snark."

Weisberg’s Slate also hasn’t ditched the magazine’s touch for neocon "wildings" — columnists bunched up together and flailing away at one topic. For instance, Howell Raines’s stewardship of the New York Times has been the focus of piece after piece on Slate in recent months. Shafer, who writes the magazine’s "Press Box" column, has focused 10 of his last 18 columns on the old Gray Lady — including a December 6 opus headlined pity the poor new york times: a pitiful, helpless giant has fallen and can’t get up. Resident Slate blogger Mickey Kaus has been even more over-the-top: his entire blog for the week of December 2 through 6 was taken up with Times-lashing — dubbed "flooding the zone" by its author. That’s a fancy term for overkill.