Paul Boutin

Since everyone else at Slate is navel-gazing this week, I might as well throw in my two cents and three bullet points. Here are the biggest goofs I think Slate has made in either tech coverage or use of technology during my four years writing for them.

• Rejecting my pitch to prove whether or not Salam Pax was blogging from Iraq on the day US attacks began. “We just did a piece about him,” the usually scoop-sharp Chris Suellentrop shrugged. So I blogged what I had instead, and print/radio/TV journalists from all over pounced on me as a source. Still, only 75,000 people have read that blog post to this day. As a Slate story, it would have reached at least ten times as many people while the bombs were still falling. It would’ve gotten a lot more pickup from network news than my blog post did. And with Chris editing, it would’ve been better.
• Not posting a simple one-page stock answer about Slate’s editorial relationship with Microsoft—particularly for articles about tech and business—through 2005. Perhaps something akin to the one-page disclaimer Henry Blodget posted and I can’t find right now. It wouldn’t have stopped the most unfounded baloney (”See, Gates ordered Slate to publish an article touting Firefox at exactly the right moment…”) but it would have put the minds of more rational tech readers at ease. The parenthetical, pro forma “Microsoft owns Slate” disclaimers didn’t tell them anything they didn’t know already. What they needed was a counterpoint to their personal experiences in the tech biz, where modifying your product or your message to meet financial interests, instead of what you think is right, is standard procedure. I was once told to reverse-engineer incorrect behavior into my software to make it “bug-compatible” with the industry leader. So of course tech people were going to consider it plausible that someone at Microsoft got to take a red pen to Slate articles. A concise but unambiguous “No one at Microsoft dictates, edits, approves or redacts a word of what we write about their Swiss-cheese software or its over-evangelized competitors” would’ve probably sufficed to put tech readers at ease.
• Slate’s RSS feed doesn’t do enough to get link-happy bloggers trolling it for material. I’ve forwarded all reader mail I’ve gotten on the topic, which boils down to two feature requests:
  • Include more of the story text; the headlines and decks don’t tell enough to decide if it’s worth a click.
  • Create per-author and per-section feeds.

If this were a Slate article I’d need a clever kicker here. But it’s not.

One more thing: We were kidding about Newsmashing, “the new technique that will change blogging forever.” More people than I expected took every word of that piece completely seriously. Lesson learned: Leave satire to The Onion. Still, marking up my editor was fun.

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban: “i have gotten more than 12,000 emails in the last week and probably 80pct have questioned some level of honesty.”