An affable but to-the-point 39-year-old, Weisberg discusses Slate's increasing emphasis on timeliness. "When we started it," he says, "we had in our heads the model of a weekly magazine. Mike really thought that what the Internet would do is give us an innovative delivery system—you'd be able to get a weekly magazine right away. You'd be able to get it in a variety of formats. But mentally, we were still thinking The New Republic, The Economist—a weekly magazine. It took us a while. But we've come to something entirely different. The best description is a daily magazine, although in some ways we're more like a wire service."
This quickening of Slate's metabolism, as one writer puts it, came about after the magazine was caught behind the curve. That was in August 1997, when Princess Diana died. While the Net exploded with the news, Slate's site stayed dead for a week. Like East Coast weekly magazines, Slate had shut down the office for the last week of August and everyone had gone on vacation. It wasn't the most important story in the world, perhaps, but it served as Slate's wake-up notice to pick up the pace.
Adam L. Weintraub
Slate founding editor and Seattle transplant Michael Kinsley.
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The magazine began to post new material every day, then several times a day. Now, Weisberg says, the running joke is that "the magazine isn't the type of publication to react immediately and write thoughts off the top of our heads—we wait an hour."
"Everything that you know about writing tells you that you do sacrifice something by trying to be so quick," Weisberg acknowledges. "Yet my own experience as a writer, and I think that of a lot of writers here, is that the things you write in a very limited amount of time are not worse but in fact better." The spontaneity of Web journalism, he maintains, more than compensates for the lack of time to think.
More than anybody else at Slate, Mickey Kaus practices this warp-speed form of journalism. He writes a mostly political blog called Kausfiles, which, like its peers, serves to publish thoughts as fast as they can be written down—or, as Webbies like to say, in real time. To get his musings on the Web as quickly as possible, Kaus is not edited. With a click of the mouse, he posts his own material along with a promotional teaser on Slate's home page.
Probably the first blogger from the mainstream journalism world, Kaus says that he had hoped that by getting in early, he could influence the national debate. In the next day's coverage of an event, Kaus hoped, the mainstream press would have to respond not only to the event itself but to what he had to say about it. "It's not clear that's really ever worked," he admits, speaking by telephone from his base in Venice, Calif. But he thinks he has an impact at least on second-day stories.
Kaus also believes that he and his fellow bloggers have played central roles in keeping stories alive after the mainstream press has moved on—for example, former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott's approbation of onetime segregationist Strom Thurmond, and the doubts about erstwhile New York Times editor Howell Raines in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal.
At the same time, Kaus says, he's recently confronted the fact that speed is a limited virtue. Shortly before Al Gore gave Howard Dean the nod in December, Kaus heard a rumor that a big endorsement was in the works. "I had a little item, 'Gee, there's some secret endorsement in Cedar Rapids,'" he recalls. He couldn't get any more specific than that, though he had spent a whole day trying to track down the players in order to get the word out 24 hours before everybody else. "What did I contribute?" he asks. Scooping the competition, he adds, is "fun while it's happening but doesn't have much lasting value."
Can Slate deliver lasting value in the few hours it gives itself to write stories? Much as Weisberg insists that speed does not necessarily affect quality, there are some things you just can't do in a limited amount of time. You can't write comprehensive pieces that dig deeply into a subject. You can't do investigative reporting beyond the nugget or two you can find out in a day. You can't craft a sprawling narrative that takes you into somebody's life. These are all things that other members of the club—The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's—routinely deliver. Slate only occasionally has such ambitions, and it does so by chipping away at larger stories in serial dispatches, like David Plotz's multipart chronicle of a sperm bank seeded by Nobel Prize winners.
But then, trying to blend thoughtfulness with speed, Slate truly is a different kind of club member, a creature of its medium. As Washington Monthly's Glastris says, Slate has "fresh but perishable content." Slate is the place to go to chew over the latest currents of thought, or when something happens and you want to figure out why, or how, or whether it's a good thing or a bad one. Around the magazine's offices, staffers like to quote the late journalist A.J. Liebling: "I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better."
nshapiro@seattleweekly.com
