Survivors of the Fray

MICHAEL KINSLEY is sitting on a couch in his Madison Valley house, discussing the experimentation that has marked his Internet brainchild, Slate magazine. "I really want you to see this," effuses the normally calm, reasoned Kinsley. He jumps out of his seat, runs upstairs, and brings down a Tablet PC, Microsoft's wireless, state-of-the-art laptop. He wants to show me how you can print out the Internet publication as if it were a weekly magazine, incorporating everything posted on the site over seven days' time. What's more, you can choose from an array of formats, including ones that divide text into columns, just like a conventional print publication. He fiddles for a while with the Tablet, unable to bring up the option he wants. "Come on, I got a reporter here!"

Finally, he gives up and takes me up two flights of stairs to his book-lined office, where his desktop computer sits. After a series of clicks, the text arranges itself in proper column format. Then, he notices a function that says, "It speaks." He clicks on it. An automated voice begins slowly reading the text. "I mean, I didn't even know that!" Kinsley says.

This is the man who knew nothing about the Internet before he hit the Northwest seven and a half years ago? The highbred, intellectual, and slightly nerdy creature of the East Coast media establishment? Kinsley has changed. Thrust into the technology-obsessed culture of Microsoft, under whose auspices Slate has operated, Kinsley has turned into what Josh Daniel, a former editor at the magazine, calls "a gadget geek." Now a communications manager for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Daniel recalls going into the magazine's offices many a morning to find that Kinsley had been up late into the night "playing with some Excel spreadsheet that he wanted to do something really cool with on Slate."

The effort has paid off. Slate is a rare publication in the online world: It is alive. Remember Suck? Feed? The Industry Standard? For all the predictions that Internet journalism would supersede traditional media, it is the Web that offers a storied tale in media casualties. For the most part, the Internet publications that have made it to the top of the heap are those riding the coattails of mainstream media outlets such as the The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Time magazine. Of course, Redmond-based Slate has been carried comfortably in Microsoft's incredibly deep pockets, a factor that cannot be overestimated in understanding why Slate has thrived while its peers have died. That does not, however, diminish the publication's standing as the fourth-most widely read entity on the Web, appearing on the screens of nearly 5 million computers every month, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. Slate's archrival, Salon, in comparison, attracts 1.7 million monthly readers (measured by unique computer addresses) to its free content, according to Nielsen, and just 62,000 to content available only to paid subscribers, according to the most recent publicly released data. (It should be noted, though, that Slate attracted less than half as many subscribers as Salon has now during a brief, dismal foray into paid circulation five years ago.)

Slate heads into 2004 poised for growth. It's got a new broadcast jointly produced with National Public Radio, called Day-to-Day. Featuring snippets from Slate writers, it promises to increase the magazine's brand recognition beyond the Web.

What's more, this is a presidential election year. With a heavy political bent, the magazine typically sees its readership increase by half in the months leading up to a Big Kahuna election. The magazine is gearing up. It recently came out with a book, The Slate Field Guide to the Candidates 2004, taken from dispatches on the site. (When Howard Dean says, "I'm here to represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic party," for example, he really means "any candidate to my right is a sellout.")

On the Web site, you can read constant campaign updates that drill down into the blow by blow. Why did Al Gore endorse Dean? Slate's chief political correspondent William Saletan wanted to know in December. Wasn't that inconsistent with Gore's professed desire, post-Florida, to let voters, not politicians, decide elections? In the run-up to the New Hampshire primary, writer Chris Suellentrop entertained farcical reasons for John Kerry's baffling ascension—"the candidate who uses the most superlatives is now guaranteed victory," "the candidate who receives the worst introduction speech of the campaign wins"—before concluding, "I'm left with one answer: He's taller."

On the Red West Campus of Microsoft, Slate Publisher Cyrus Krohn, left, and Editor Jacob Weisberg. (Adam Weintraub)

That's Slate all over: analytical, running through the A, B, and C of possible explanations, reflecting the Harvard law student that Kinsley once was—but also funny. "It's got whimsy, which is very hard to get in prose," says Paul Glastris, editor of the small but esteemed political magazine Washington Monthly, where many of Slate's writers got their start. When The Atlantic writer William Langewiesche came out with his much anticipated, three-part series on the aftermath of 9/11 at the World Trade Center, a feature on Slate let you click to hear him pronounce his name—a wink at the verbal convolutions happening at select dinner parties across the country.