Slate’s 10th anniversary
Monday, June 19th, 2006Mike Kinsely recounts why and how he started Slate a decade ago. Most of the Slate-is-doomed rants of years past are too small potatoes for the frying pan, with the exception of Wired’s Kinsley Deathwatch that predicted he’d bail on Slate within a year of its launch, i.e. by June 1997. Any comment, Ned?
Obligatory red meat for bloggers from Mike:
From the beginning, the economics of publishing on the Internetóno paper, no printing, no postageówere more important to us than the hyperlinks and the multimedia. In a way, though, we got this point wrong. Slate is sleek compared with equivalent paper magazines, but we are a galumphing contraption compared with blogs and wikis and instant messaging and other Internet innovations. Individuals with no corporate backing have done more than Slate has done to upturn A.J. Liebling’s famous dictum “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”
Bonus post from Michael Wolff, What’s Wrong with Slate. “It’s as insufferable as Fox News.”
