by Nicholas Stein
Stein is CJR's Associate Editor

For Michael Kinsley, the world has become a raging sea of content, its inhabitants floundering in an endless news cycle. What they need is a filter, and as the editor of the online magazine Slate, Kinsley is trying to provide one -- a tool to help his readers navigate the political, technological, and cultural issues of the Information Age.

For David Talbot, the editor and c.e.o. of the competing online magazine Salon, the world is awash instead in commentary: opinion dispensed by wise men who comment passively from the shore. What readers need is more reporting. Wading into the currents, Salon relishes introducing new topics to The Conversation, with the expectation that its readers will construct filters of their own.

Other Internet-only publications have claimed their own positions along this reporter-pundit continuum, but Slate and Salon have become defining editorial visions of the medium. What fascinates is how different are these two evolving visions of what an online magazine can and should be.

EVOLUTION

In the summer of 1996, around the time the Internet began to emerge as a populist medium -- and some observers began to forecast the death of print-- Microsoft entered the world of online publishing with the launch of Slate. The fiscal might of its owner, coupled with the reputation its editor had built during his battles with Pat Buchanan on CNN's Crossfire and his editorships at Harper's and The New Republic, gave Slate the lavish media attention necessary to pierce the public's consciousness.

"The basic test was to show that serious magazine journalism can succeed on the Web," says Kinsley. "We tried to develop features that are both suited to the Web and useful to our readers." In his attempt to execute this combination, Kinsley has seen his views about online journalism change dramatically, and Slate has changed with him.

In its inaugural issue, June 24, 1996, Slate ran a 2,218-word article by Nicholas Lemann titled "Jews in Second Place: When Asian-Americans Become the ‘New Jews,' What Happens to the Jews?" A profile of Bob Dole in the same issue added another 1,648 words. Italicized word counts appeared below the headlines, taunting those who claimed that traditional magazine-length pieces couldn't succeed on the Internet. In fact, Kinsley consciously modeled his mix of political commentary and arts criticism on a magazine that helped to define the tradition -- The New Yorker.

Nearly three years later, long features have all but disappeared. "One thing we feel we just cannot do on the Web is New York Times Magazine- New Yorker-type articles," says Kinsley. Instead, Slate has developed a stable of what he calls "meta-features" -- intelligent and readable syntheses of news events and issues of the moment. "Our meta-features are intended to couple understanding with a little bit of wit," he says. "To save you the time and trouble of reading something you don't want to, and to direct you to what you do."

Slate has faced the same challenges as other online publications: to transmogrify the principles of print journalism onto the Internet. It has adapted by molding itself into an observer that distills and comments on the political, social, and cultural affairs of the day.

In November 1994, while the San Francisco Examiner was embroiled in a bitter labor dispute, its arts and features editor David Talbot, and several of his colleagues -- including Gary Kamiya, (now Salon's executive editor), Andrew Ross (its vice-president of business and strategic development), Scott Rosenberg (its technology senior editor), and Mignon Khargie (its design director) -- left the paper for the unknown world of Internet publishing. Launched in late 1995 with about $100,000 in seed money from Apple Computer, Inc., Salon delivered, in a distinctly irreverent voice, a biweekly mix of cultural criticism, social and political commentary, book reviews, and author interviews. The New York Times described it as "an interactive magazine of books, arts, and ideas."

But soon Talbot began to notice an Internet phenomenon: "Readers came back only as long as we had new material --- especially material tied to the day's news." Based on this discovery, Talbot began, in early 1997, to produce an issue every weekday. Traffic rose nearly 40 percent, to more than 400,000 unique visitors (from distinct Internet addresses) per month.

Salon also increased emphasis on breaking news, notably after the death of Princess Diana. Her accident occurred during Labor Day weekend, 1997, when many media organizations were on cruise control. The Salon staff's newspaper background enabled it rapidly to translate breaking news into fluid articles, like Jonathan Broder's "Blood on their Hands," one of the first to implicate the paparazzi in Diana's death. Salon posted eleven pieces on the subject between August 31 and September 8, producing further readership gains. Encouraged, Talbot began to divert resources -- and space -- from the cultural commentary of Salon's past to the investigative stories and breaking news he was certain were its future.

On September 16, 1998, only a month after publishing an attention-grabbing five-part series alleging a conspiracy between chief Whitewater witness David Hale, right-wing mogul Richard Mellon Scaife, and independent counsel Kenneth Starr, Talbot published an account of a five-year extramarital affair between House Judiciary Committee chairman Henry Hyde (who was forty-one years old at the time) and a married women with three children.

The story, about a twenty-nine-year-old affair, had been rejected by many other media outlets, and Talbot's decision to publish drew fire from politicians and media figures alike. One of his harshest critics was Salon's own Washington bureau chief Jonathan Broder, who offered to resign after publicly questioning the decision --- despite instructions from his bosses not to do so. Talbot accepted the resignation.

These kinds of high-octane stories brought Salon a giant leap in readership, from 620,000 to more than one million visitors a month. Three months later, Salon had retained half of those new viewers, and its readership was estimated to be about 850,000 visitors a month.

CONTENT

"I don't think the world needs more scoops," says Kinsley, defending his decision to curtail original reporting. Slate's content can be divided into three categories: summaries, features, and dialogues.

In "Today's Papers," Scott Shuger highlights the leading stories in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal. "In Other Magazines" distills the views of Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, The Economist, The New Yorker, and The Weekly Standard. "International Papers" touches on some of the lead stories from English, French, German, Spanish, and other papers.

Slate also includes several sections that comment upon the news itself. In "The Week/The Spin," William Saletan looks at the top stories, and how the involved parties have spun them to their respective advantage. In "Frame Game," Saletan promises "20 spins you'll hear from partisan flacks." At "The Breakfast Table," a weekly duo, usually a pair of writers, "dissect the day's news via e-mail." More careful analysis can be found in "Chatterbox," "Pundit Central," and "Explainer."

In the issue just before the November elections, almost half of Slate's pages were devoted to commentary in some form. Some have faulted Slate for this emphasis. Vanity Fair media columnist James Wolcott describes the publication as a journalistic echo chamber, a place in which reviewing and reporting have been replaced by "a lot of writers with too much free time."

Slate also features "electronic discourses" -- lightly edited e-mail exchanges between writers. "The most interesting discussions of my life are with the half dozen close friends I e-mail with every day," says Kinsley, who envisions the discourses as "writing with the spontaneity of speech." In Slate, these pieces take one of two forms: e-mail discussions between two writers ("The Book Club," "The Music Club," and "The Breakfast Table") and individual journal entry prose ("Diary").

Unfortunately, many of these reveal nothing more than the mundane details of daily life, legitimized by the reputation of the writer. "Started the morning with a good swim in the beautiful Bel Air pool," begins the February 12, 1998 entry of architect Moshe Safdie. "At 9 a.m. I'm at the Skirball Cultural Center for a full board of trustees meeting . . . ."

When these pieces work, however, they achieve a gripping immediacy. "I want people to read me for the first time as though they were reading me for the second," writes André Aciman in his "Diary" entry on November 4. "I want them to feel that they've heard all this before, though they can't remember where, because every word they read is stalked by a pre-existing shadow seemingly originating from their own experience, not mine."

Talbot calls his magazine "a smart tabloid," and concedes that the headlines sometimes take artistic license. But readers drawn in by headlines like "Microsoft.orgy" (July 21), about an embarrassing mishap with Microsoft's video conferencing software, will often find that the articles themselves contain intelligent, well-written prose. "We live in an environment where even smart, educated people need to be gripped," he says.

Salon is not above gripping them with sex, using such columnists as Camille Paglia, the contrarian, lesbian, academic; Susie Bright, who dispenses advice in her weekly "Sexpert Opinion"; and until her abrupt, unexplained departure in September, relationship guru Courtney Weaver, whose more than 100 "Unzipped" columns (now languishing in Salon's "Discontinued Features" archive) tapped into the dating-scene zeitgeist. In October, the magazine introduced "Urge," a column that has included articles about a debauched bachelor party and the newly celebrated phenomenon of black homoerotic fiction.

Yet Salon reaches far beyond the bedroom -- to breaking news (Newsreal), technology (21st), the media (Media), academia (Ivory Tower), business (Money), and parenting issues (Mothers Who Think). Many of these include substantial reporting and run a couple of thousand words or longer -- a tactic frowned upon by many of the Net's talking heads. But, argues Talbot, "the Internet is a deep medium. People want to make up their own mind. If they are interested in a subject, they want to read a lot, to go deep, and to have links to other sources of information."

While coverage of politics has increased, Salon has not abandoned its movie, music, and television reviews. It has increased coverage of books, with reviews, author interviews, listings of author events, and an annual Salon Book Awards.

OUTLOOK

Kinsley admits that Slate probably will never be able to survive on advertising dollars alone. Readership fell dramatically after Slate introduced a $19.95 annual subscription fee in the spring of 1998. Paid circulation hovers in the high 20,000s. Yet in October, Slate's "Front Porch," the free section of its site, received almost 400,000 visitors. The vast discrepancy between visitors and subscribers clearly must be attributed to the cost.

"It will be a few years before we reach profitability, if we ever do," Kinsley says. "Yet people forget that it took Sports Illustrated almost ten years to turn a profit." In reality, Slate's continued viability depends on the whims of its corporate parent. Despite the red ink, Microsoft c.e.o. Bill Gates continues to praise the magazine.

Talbot estimates that Salon is still four years from turning a profit. It has attracted more than 120 advertisers, half long-term, who make up some of that shortfall. But most of the magazine's funding -- $11 million as of November 1998 -- has come from four major investors: the software giant Adobe; venture capital firm Hambrecht & Quist; the Japanese computer concern ASCII; and borders.com, which until recently had an "e-commerce" arrangement with the magazine: a percentage of each book bought on Salon's site went to the magazine. Salon has since switched its e-commerce allegiance to barnesandnoble.com, which may buy Borders's investment.

In an imaginative way to charge for editorial content on the Internet, Salon began in October '98 to sell "memberships." For $25 a year, members will get a Salon T-shirt, access to a members' lounge (a chat area that features exclusive discussions with Salon writers, editors, and special guests), and a CD-ROM reproduction of the first edition of John Milton's Areopagitica. Promotion letters compare the membership fee to contributions listeners and viewers give to NPR and PBS . Those networks, however, are nonprofit. Though Talbot admits "some readers have balked at supporting us because we accept advertising," he says the income from the club is "above what our projections were."

Attempting to extend Salon's franchise, Talbot plans, by the end of 1999, to launch European editions, financed jointly by Salon and European media partners. Eventually he hopes that these new editions will provide more international content to the U.S. edition.

SLATE AND SALON

Both Kinsley and Talbot hesitate to comment on each other's publication, though Kinsley does acknowledge his rival's visual superiority. "Their design and presentation is very attractive. They suck you in and lead you from article to article better than we do." Slate will undergo a design overhaul in early 1999, based in part on feedback from its readers.

"For us, we are building a medium as well as a magazine," explains Kinsley. "That's what makes it fun. In ten years, all of this will be defined."

"We have an opportunity with our medium to provide a real mix of popular content with insightful, investigative journalism," says Talbot. "There is lots of room between Matt Drudge and The New York Times."

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