'Slate to the party - media guru Michael Kinsley discusses Web magazine - Interview

As an editor or writer, Michael Kinsley has been in all the right places: The New Republic where he was twice editor), Harper's (once), Time (contributing editor), The Washington Monthly, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. To the hoi polloi, however, Kinsley is best known as the witty liberal and cohost of CNN's "Crossfire," where he served from 1989 to 1995.

So, at 45 what does that leave him yet to accomplish in the magazine world? Apparently nothing. As of November 1995, Kinsley officially quitted the East Coast publishing establishment for Redmond, Washington, where he entered Bill Gates' employ at Microsoft. Kinsley's mission today, after 16 months on the job, is what it was at the inception: To create a "successful" Webzine named Slate.

Over its short existence, however, Slate's definition of success has shifted. After announcing a goal of 100,000 paying subscribers at its launch in June 1996, Slate -- as a free Web site -- is currently attracting a modest 20,000 visits from "unique browser IDs" (meaning, usually, one individual reader) a week, according to publisher Rogers Weed. The Fray, which is Slate's electronic bulletin-board discussion group, has grown steadily and now has 20,000 registered participants.

At first scheduled to go into effect with its launch and then rescheduled to begin last November, the $19.95-per-year subscription fee was stymied, Kinsley explained, by "purely technological" reasons -- a rather ironic glitch, considering Slate's ownership. Then, in mid-january, just when it should have been preparing to announce the terms of its promised February subscription drive, Microsoft abruptly threw in the towel on the much-postponed effort, setting it aside this time, says Weed, "indefinitely." "This time the delay is a business decision," he adds. "At this stage of the Internet, it's more important to build a strong brand for Microsoft in the area of opinion journalism."

Today, Slate is put together by fewer than 10 full-time editors, most of them in Redmond with Kinsley. Advertising sales are handled by a central sales group, which also sells ads for the MSNBC site and other Microsoft Web projects. And there is a printed version -- slate on Paper -- that went weekly in mid-january at $70 a year. SoP, which launched as a &29.95 monthly last September, has only a "few hundred subscribers" and is produced largely as a courtesy for not-yet-Web-literate Kinsley fans, says Weed.

Q: What do you think of e media coverage you've gotten for this project? There were 400 references in Nexis for it last year. A: There was an absurd excess. But I enjoyed it, of course. We've had two kinds of coverage: non-Web coverage, which has been excessively gushy, and Web coverage, which has been excessively nasty.

It would be very ungrateful to complain about the overall publicity, though. With the big profiles in The New Yorker and Newsweek, you can't really complain if a few Websters want to take potshots.

Q: You were quoted in The Washington Post in 1995 as saying that most of what's on the Web is crap. First, did you actually say that, and, second, if you did, are you sorry you did? A: I said that, yes. What I did not say was that most other magazines on the Web are crap. Everyone misinterpreted it as demeaning other Webzines. Most of what's on paper is bad, too. The difference is that people don't go around saying, "Wow, have you seen this new stuff called paper? You can get really cool things on it."

When I said that, people were still getting off on the fact that there was that stuff up on the Web. The first time you go on the Web you think," "Wow!" and the third time you go on, you think, "There's nothing to see here." My point was that if the Web was going to make it, it was going to have to pass higher standards than the mere fact that it exists. [The comment] has been misinterpreted as hostility to the Web. If I were hostile to the Web, I wouldn't be staking my whole life on it.

Q: Slate's content is rather elite, which seems contrary to the nature of the Web, that it's accessible to everyone. A: One of the miracles of the Web is that there will be room for all sorts of different publications -- large ones and small; elite ones and mass ones.

I don't think we're especially elite, but we are higher brow and, frankly, going for a smaller audience than many other Web sites. Our sister site MSNBC, for example, could not make it at the level we can make it at. Slate is very democratic in the sense that anyone can get it all over the world.

Q: How dose is Slate to where you ultimately want it to be? A: is it fully evolved? Oh no. First of all, there are features that aren't ready yet that we're going to be adding. I'll tell you one: interactive puzzles. Second, we're still experimenting journalistically.

Q: Do you see the length of the individual stories getting shorter? A: No, things have already gotten shorter.

Q: What about your frequency? Right now, you're posting weekly. A: We are a weekly, evolving toward a daily. We're posting a lot of stuff daily and then on the other side of a weekly concept certain stuff is staying up longer than a week and evolving, like these discussions [The Fray].

The archive -- The Compost -- is a much more important part of the magazine than I realized at first. It becomes totally arbitrary as to what's in The Compost because it's all [still] there. People are looking at stuff there and we're referring to stuff there. There's almost a dialog between things in the magazine and things in The Compost. In the very first issue we ran a column about Clinton and the drug war and we've ended up referring to it half a dozen times. At first I said, let's not do too much of this: it's pretentious. Then I thought, [but] it's so useful to people. If we're going to WA to somebody else's site, why shouldn't we link to our own?

Q: What's your ideal frequency? A: We're evolving-in both directions: toward much more stuff changing every day and toward permanency. The whole concept of frequency starts to lose its meaning. I did start off with the idea that once a week you would post a whole magazine and then it would disappear after a week.

I would love to put out a real newsmagazine on the Web. But that's not what this is; this is not of that scope. For all the publicity, this is a rather small deal. And that's good because I think from a business perspective the gap we have to close between where we are and financial success is that much smaller.

Q: But what's in a small project like this for Microsoft? A: Several things are in this for them: Number one, they have as good a shot as anybody of making a going business out of the Web.

Q: Before we get to reason two, let me say something about reason one: Microsoft's entire business is built on mass-market sales; they don't seem to be interested in developing niche businesses. A: Right, right. I don't think as a small profitable business we'd be of any particular interest, but it certainly is a plus.

Number two, it helps establish them as a purveyor of digital journalism. And number three, we're a laboratory for them. We're a laboratory in any number of ways: in small ways like writers, contracts, and in big ways like technology. We're helping them move down the learning curve. There are all sorts of sites -- magazines shows, as they like to call them now -- that are benefiting from Slate's experience in ways big and small.

And it doesn't cost them that much. In the sense that everything on the Web is an experiment at this point, this is a rather small experiment for them.

Q: I don't see how Slate fits into Microsoft's grand plan. A: It doesn't fit in all that well, but so what?

Q: I expect Microsoft to have some overarching strategy. A: Well, they do. But a good magazine has to be open to serendipity and maybe the same is true of a big company like Microsoft. When I showed up at their doorstep, they took me in. And they're backing me terrifically, not just with money, but with technical support and lots of good people.

Q: Do you visit any other sites regularly? A: I try to@ there are so damn many of them. I read the The Washington Post every day on the Web. I can still get The [New York] Times on paper.

Q: What else? A: I look at the traffic report. I look at MSNBC. And Politics USA; it's good.

Q: Have you seen the Web parody of Slate? A: Stale? Yeah, of course. It was so flatteringly complete that obviously it all didn't work, but quite a lot of it did. One of these things you try to do when you're creating a magazine is create personality, a flavor, and it makes me feel sort of good about Slate that we already have enough of a personality that you could do a parody.

Q: Having passed on the editorship of New York in 1994, what do you think of what happened with [editor] Kurt Andersen [being abruptly fired in September 1996]? A: I feel like I dodged a bullet there.

Q: Do you think the same thing would have happened to you? A: Who knows.

Q: Well, what do you think happened? A: Kurt says Henry Kravis didn't like him picking on his friends and they [K-III] say they wanted more circulation. I suppose it's 60:40 one direction or the other. I think Kurt did a good job.

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