'Slate to the party

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Feb 1, 1997 by Anne M. Russell

As an editor or writer, Michael Kinsley has been in all the right places: The New Republic where he was twice editor), Harper's (once), Time (contributing editor), The Washington Monthly, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. To the hoi polloi, however, Kinsley is best known as the witty liberal and cohost of CNN's "Crossfire," where he served from 1989 to 1995.

So, at 45 what does that leave him yet to accomplish in the magazine world? Apparently nothing. As of November 1995, Kinsley officially quitted the East Coast publishing establishment for Redmond, Washington, where he entered Bill Gates' employ at Microsoft. Kinsley's mission today, after 16 months on the job, is what it was at the inception: To create a "successful" Webzine named Slate.

Over its short existence, however, Slate's definition of success has shifted. After announcing a goal of 100,000 paying subscribers at its launch in June 1996, Slate -- as a free Web site -- is currently attracting a modest 20,000 visits from "unique browser IDs" (meaning, usually, one individual reader) a week, according to publisher Rogers Weed. The Fray, which is Slate's electronic bulletin-board discussion group, has grown steadily and now has 20,000 registered participants.

At first scheduled to go into effect with its launch and then rescheduled to begin last November, the $19.95-per-year subscription fee was stymied, Kinsley explained, by "purely technological" reasons -- a rather ironic glitch, considering Slate's ownership. Then, in mid-january, just when it should have been preparing to announce the terms of its promised February subscription drive, Microsoft abruptly threw in the towel on the much-postponed effort, setting it aside this time, says Weed, "indefinitely." "This time the delay is a business decision," he adds. "At this stage of the Internet, it's more important to build a strong brand for Microsoft in the area of opinion journalism."

Today, Slate is put together by fewer than 10 full-time editors, most of them in Redmond with Kinsley. Advertising sales are handled by a central sales group, which also sells ads for the MSNBC site and other Microsoft Web projects. And there is a printed version -- slate on Paper -- that went weekly in mid-january at $70 a year. SoP, which launched as a &29.95 monthly last September, has only a "few hundred subscribers" and is produced largely as a courtesy for not-yet-Web-literate Kinsley fans, says Weed.

Q: What do you think of e media coverage you've gotten for this project? There were 400 references in Nexis for it last year. A: There was an absurd excess. But I enjoyed it, of course. We've had two kinds of coverage: non-Web coverage, which has been excessively gushy, and Web coverage, which has been excessively nasty.

It would be very ungrateful to complain about the overall publicity, though. With the big profiles in The New Yorker and Newsweek, you can't really complain if a few Websters want to take potshots.

Q: You were quoted in The Washington Post in 1995 as saying that most of what's on the Web is crap. First, did you actually say that, and, second, if you did, are you sorry you did? A: I said that, yes. What I did not say was that most other magazines on the Web are crap. Everyone misinterpreted it as demeaning other Webzines. Most of what's on paper is bad, too. The difference is that people don't go around saying, "Wow, have you seen this new stuff called paper? You can get really cool things on it."

When I said that, people were still getting off on the fact that there was that stuff up on the Web. The first time you go on the Web you think," "Wow!" and the third time you go on, you think, "There's nothing to see here." My point was that if the Web was going to make it, it was going to have to pass higher standards than the mere fact that it exists. [The comment] has been misinterpreted as hostility to the Web. If I were hostile to the Web, I wouldn't be staking my whole life on it.

Q: Slate's content is rather elite, which seems contrary to the nature of the Web, that it's accessible to everyone. A: One of the miracles of the Web is that there will be room for all sorts of different publications -- large ones and small; elite ones and mass ones.

I don't think we're especially elite, but we are higher brow and, frankly, going for a smaller audience than many other Web sites. Our sister site MSNBC, for example, could not make it at the level we can make it at. Slate is very democratic in the sense that anyone can get it all over the world.

Q: How dose is Slate to where you ultimately want it to be? A: is it fully evolved? Oh no. First of all, there are features that aren't ready yet that we're going to be adding. I'll tell you one: interactive puzzles. Second, we're still experimenting journalistically.

Q: Do you see the length of the individual stories getting shorter? A: No, things have already gotten shorter.

Q: What about your frequency? Right now, you're posting weekly. A: We are a weekly, evolving toward a daily. We're posting a lot of stuff daily and then on the other side of a weekly concept certain stuff is staying up longer than a week and evolving, like these discussions [The Fray].