Slate (magazine)
Based on Wikipedia: Slate (magazine)
The Magazine That Taught the Internet How to Argue
In the mid-1990s, when most people still accessed the internet through screeching modems and considered email a novelty, a former editor of The New Republic had a peculiar idea: what if you could publish a serious magazine that existed only on computer screens?
This wasn't obvious at the time. Magazines were things you held in your hands. They arrived in mailboxes. They had glossy covers and that distinctive new-magazine smell. The notion of reading long-form journalism by staring at a glowing cathode ray tube struck many as absurd, perhaps even a little sad.
But Michael Kinsley had a hunch. And Microsoft, flush with Windows 95 money and eager to stake a claim in this strange new digital frontier, was willing to fund his experiment. On June 24, 1996, Slate was born.
The Economics of Cyberspace
Kinsley's stated mission sounds almost quaint now: proving that "the economies of cyberspace make it easier for our kind of journalism to pay for itself." He was trying to solve a problem that still plagues the news industry three decades later—how do you make money writing things people want to read?
The early Slate pioneered features we now take completely for granted. Hyperlinks—those blue underlined words that take you somewhere else when you click them—were still novel enough to be considered a distinguishing feature. The idea that readers could communicate directly with writers? Revolutionary.
In 1998, just two years after launch, Slate tried something bold: they put up a paywall and asked readers to pay for access. This was wildly ahead of its time. Most newspapers wouldn't seriously experiment with digital subscriptions for another fifteen years. Slate managed to attract around twenty thousand paying subscribers, which sounds modest but was actually remarkable for an era when most people still weren't sure if the internet was a fad.
But the paywall didn't last. The economics didn't quite work out, and Slate went back to being free, supported by advertising. It's a decision many digital publications have oscillated on ever since. The right business model for online journalism remains stubbornly elusive.
What Exactly Is a "Slate Pitch"?
If you've spent any time in media circles, you've probably encountered the term "Slate pitch." It's not entirely a compliment.
The Columbia Journalism Review defined it as "an idea that sounds wrong or counterintuitive proposed as though it were the tightest logic ever." Think of headlines like "Actually, Traffic Is Good" or "In Defense of Mosquitoes" or "Why You Should Stop Exercising." The format became so recognizable that in 2009, Twitter users created the hashtag #slatepitches to mock it.
Here's the thing: Slate was doing something interesting, even if it sometimes veered into self-parody. The internet rewards novelty. If you write "Exercise Is Good for You," nobody clicks—they already know that. But "Exercise Is Overrated: Here's the Evidence" demands attention. You have to at least peek to see if they're serious.
This approach has intellectual roots. Kinsley came from The New Republic, a magazine with a long tradition of iconoclasm, of taking unexpected positions and defending them vigorously. At its best, contrarianism challenges lazy assumptions and forces readers to examine why they believe what they believe. At its worst, it becomes a formula, a trick for generating engagement rather than insight.
Julia Turner, who served as editor-in-chief from 2014 to 2019, acknowledged that the reputation for counterintuitive arguments was part of Slate's "distinctive" brand. But she insisted the hashtag misrepresented what the site actually published. Most Slate articles weren't elaborate defenses of unpopular positions—they were straightforward reporting and analysis. The contrarian pieces just got more attention.
The Contrarian Paradox
Something peculiar happened to Slate during the Trump years. Former editor David Plotz observed that the "Slate pitch" became much harder to pull off. Why? Because the political environment had become so polarized that there was less middle ground to stake out.
When politics becomes tribal warfare, nuance looks like betrayal. Saying "here's something unexpectedly good about the thing you hate" or "here's something problematic about the thing you love" gets you attacked from both sides. The space for productive disagreement shrinks.
By 2022, anonymous Slate staffers told The New York Times that the publication's contrarian reputation had faded. Matthew Yglesias, a former Slate writer who went on to found his own Substack newsletter, agreed, noting that the journalism industry as a whole had become more homogeneous. Everyone was converging on similar takes, similar concerns, similar framings.
This is the contrarian's dilemma: the approach works best when there's a comfortable consensus to push against. When consensus fractures into warring camps, there's no stable ground from which to be cleverly contrary.
The Podcast Empire Nobody Expected
While Slate's written journalism drew the attention and the mockery, something quieter was happening: the magazine was becoming a podcasting powerhouse almost by accident.
In 2005, Slate launched Political Gabfest, a podcast inspired by the magazine's internal editorial conference calls. The concept was simple: get a few smart people in a room to talk about the news. The original episodes ran just fifteen minutes.
According to the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, Slate was involved in podcasting "almost from the very beginning" of the medium. This is remarkable timing. Podcasting in 2005 was genuinely obscure. The word itself had only been coined the previous year. Apple had just added podcast support to iTunes. Most people had never heard a podcast and weren't entirely sure what one was.
By getting in early, Slate developed expertise and audience when competition was minimal. The podcasts grew longer as listener habits changed—by 2012, most episodes ran around forty-five minutes. They also proliferated. By 2018, Slate was producing twenty-five different podcasts.
The business side looked promising too. In 2012, industry reports indicated that Slate's podcasts had unusually high advertisement rates and "sell-through" rates—meaning advertisers were willing to pay premium prices, and listeners were actually engaging with the ads. This was partly because podcast audiences tend to be loyal and attentive in ways that website visitors aren't. When you're listening to the same voices week after week, often through headphones during a commute or while doing dishes, you develop a parasocial relationship. The hosts feel like friends. Their endorsements carry weight.
Some of Slate's podcasts achieved genuine cultural significance. Slow Burn, a documentary series that did deep dives into historical events like Watergate and the Clinton impeachment, won awards and attracted the kind of prestige that written journalism increasingly struggled to generate.
Corporate Musical Chairs
The ownership history of Slate tells a smaller story about the broader chaos of digital media economics.
Microsoft founded and owned Slate for its first eight years. This made sense in the 1990s, when tech companies were pouring money into content as a way to make the internet seem useful and worth connecting to. Microsoft's MSN portal funneled traffic to Slate, helping the fledgling magazine build an audience.
In 2004, The Washington Post Company bought Slate. This was an era when traditional newspaper companies were still confident they could figure out the internet. The Post Company was diversifying, hedging its bets. The purchase agreement specified that MSN would continue redirecting traffic to Slate—a clever provision that maintained the audience pipeline.
By 2008, the Post Company had created something called The Slate Group, an online publishing entity that would manage Slate and other digital properties. This was standard corporate reorganization, the kind of reshuffling that happens when a media company isn't quite sure which of its divisions is the future and which is the past.
That same year, Slate launched The Root, a news site focused on African American issues, and The Big Money, a business news site. Some of these ventures would thrive; others would quietly disappear.
The really interesting ownership moment came in 2013, when The Washington Post Company sold its flagship newspaper—The Washington Post itself—to Jeff Bezos. But the company didn't sell Slate. Instead, it renamed itself Graham Holdings (after the Graham family that had owned the Post for generations) and kept the digital properties. The company that had originally been built around a legendary newspaper had decided its future lay elsewhere.
France Calls Back
In 2009, something unusual happened: Slate launched a French edition.
This might seem like a straightforward international expansion, but the structure was revealing. Five French media veterans founded slate.fr, including editors from Le Monde, Libération, and Les Echos. Also among the founders was Jacques Attali, a political advisor who had served under François Mitterrand—a reminder that in France, the line between intellectual life and political life has always been thinner than in America.
The ownership split was telling: the French founders held fifty percent of the publishing company, while The Washington Post Company held just fifteen percent. This wasn't an American company colonizing a foreign market. It was more like a licensing deal, where local operators borrowed a brand and a concept to build something adapted to French sensibilities.
Two years later, slate.fr spawned Slate Afrique, covering African news with a Paris-based editorial staff. France has extensive historical and linguistic ties to West and Central Africa, so this made strategic sense—though it also raised familiar questions about whose voices get to shape coverage of the African continent.
The Unionization Moment
In 2018, Slate's staff joined the Writers Guild of America, East. This was part of a broader wave of unionization sweeping through digital media—places like Vice, Vox, HuffPost, and Gizmodo were all seeing union drives around the same time.
The pattern was consistent: young journalists, working in industries with low pay and uncertain job security, were finding collective bargaining. The romance of digital media—the sense that you were building something new, that the old rules didn't apply, that eventually the business model would work out—had curdled into recognition that the economics were brutal and management couldn't be trusted to prioritize worker welfare.
After Slate's union members authorized a strike, management agreed to a three-year collective bargaining agreement in January 2019. The specifics of what was negotiated matter less than the fact that it happened at all. A magazine founded with Microsoft money, later owned by a company that still bore the Graham family name, was now dealing with organized labor. The history of American media had looped back around.
Controversies and Corrections
No discussion of Slate would be complete without acknowledging that the magazine has stumbled badly on occasion.
In June 2001, Slate published an article by a writer named Jay Forman describing fishermen in the Florida Keys who supposedly used creative techniques to catch rhesus monkeys. It was a vivid, colorful story—the kind of thing that seems almost too interesting to fact-check rigorously.
It was also a hoax.
The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times investigated and found that Forman had fabricated the entire thing. He eventually admitted as much to his editor, Jack Shafer. The incident was embarrassing, a reminder that even sophisticated publications can be fooled by an inventive liar with a good story.
This kind of failure isn't unique to Slate. The New Republic famously published years of fabricated reporting by Stephen Glass. The New York Times had its Jayson Blair scandal. Rolling Stone published a discredited story about campus rape at the University of Virginia. Every major publication that's been around long enough has made serious errors. What matters is what happens afterward—how the institution responds, what systems it puts in place, whether it learns.
The Pesca Departure
In 2021, Slate parted ways with Mike Pesca, who had hosted the popular daily podcast The Gist since 2014. The circumstances were complicated.
The controversy began with internal Slack discussions about a New York Times reporter, Donald G. McNeil Jr., who had been pushed out of the Times after it emerged that he had used a racial slur during a trip with high school students. McNeil's case sparked debates about context—he had apparently used the word while discussing its usage rather than directing it at anyone—and whether intent should matter when evaluating the harm of certain language.
Pesca waded into these waters in Slate's internal communications, and the reaction was intense. He was suspended and ultimately left the publication, taking his podcast independent.
The episode illustrated how workplaces had become sites of cultural conflict. What could be discussed? What positions were acceptable to voice, even in ostensibly private forums? Where were the lines between good-faith disagreement and harmful speech? These questions have no easy answers, and organizations across the media industry have struggled to navigate them.
The Long View
The Nieman Foundation for Journalism once called Slate "the web's oldest living magazine." This is technically debatable—other publications have been online longer—but it captures something true about Slate's cultural position. For a certain generation of internet users, Slate was simply there, part of the furniture of online life.
What's striking is how much the magazine has adapted while remaining recognizably itself. It started as an experiment in digital publishing when most people thought "publishing" meant ink on paper. It survived the dot-com crash, the 2008 financial crisis, the collapse of traditional advertising, the rise of social media, and the Trump-era polarization that reshaped American discourse. It went from being owned by the world's most valuable software company to being a subsidiary of a holding company named after a newspaper family that no longer owns its newspaper.
In 2014, Slate reintroduced a paywall through a program called Slate Plus, offering ad-free podcasts and bonus materials to paying members. By the following year, it had attracted nine thousand subscribers generating about half a million dollars in annual revenue. The numbers were modest—nothing that would impress Silicon Valley investors—but they represented real people willing to pay real money for something they valued.
As of 2025, Slate operates on a hybrid model: some content is supported by advertising, some sits behind a metered paywall. This is common in digital media now. The all-or-nothing debates of the early internet—"information wants to be free" versus "quality journalism requires payment"—have given way to pragmatic compromises.
That same year, Slate took on an unexpected adversary: it filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google. The details of the lawsuit matter less than what it represents. A publication that began as a Microsoft property was now challenging a different tech giant's dominance over the digital ecosystem. The power dynamics of the internet had shifted in ways nobody anticipated in 1996.
The Question of Influence
How do you measure what Slate has meant to journalism?
The awards offer one answer. In 2003, Slate won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence—the most prestigious honor in American magazine publishing. It won again in 2011 and 2016. Between 2009 and 2014 alone, it received fourteen National Magazine Award nominations.
But awards only capture part of the picture. Slate helped establish that serious journalism could happen online, that readers would accept digital-first publications as credible, that the internet wasn't just a distribution mechanism for work produced elsewhere but could be a home for original thinking.
The "Slate pitch" phenomenon, love it or hate it, influenced how other publications thought about generating engagement. The podcast investments demonstrated that audio could be a viable business, not just a promotional add-on. The early paywall experiments provided data points for everyone else trying to figure out sustainability.
And yet Slate has also shrunk from its peak ambitions. The staffing has fluctuated—in 2011, the magazine laid off several high-profile journalists including co-founder Jack Shafer. The contrarian energy has mellowed. The sense of pioneering something genuinely new has inevitably faded as the internet itself became ordinary.
Where Ideas Go to Be Tested
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Slate is that it survived being proven right. Digital-first journalism is now the norm, not the exception. Podcasting is a major industry. Paywalls are everywhere. The contrarian take has been absorbed into the broader media ecosystem—every publication now knows that "actually, the thing you think is bad is good" will generate clicks.
Slate made these ideas mainstream enough that they stopped seeming distinctively Slate-like. The pioneer's dilemma: if you succeed, everyone copies you, and your original contribution becomes invisible precisely because it's everywhere.
For readers who encountered Slate in its early years, the magazine represented something that the internet promised and often failed to deliver: intelligent conversation, regular writing worth reading, a place where ideas were taken seriously enough to argue about. It wasn't perfect—it could be smug, it could be contrarian for contrarianism's sake, it could get fooled by fabricators. But it showed up, day after day, with something to say.
That might not sound like much. But in a media landscape littered with the corpses of publications that couldn't sustain themselves, showing up counts for something. Nearly three decades after Michael Kinsley's experiment, Slate is still arguing about the news. Still occasionally infuriating its critics. Still trying to prove that the economics of cyberspace can make journalism pay for itself.
The jury remains out on that last part. It probably always will be.