Slate's David Plotz: 'The Great Journalistic Scandals of the Past 15 Years? That's All Print'
There are people who will say, with certainty, that Slate is the longest-running and most-successful news magazine on the Internet. It is pointless to argue with these people. First, they may be right. Second, they are probably Slate regulars, and Slate regulars are among the most fanatical and disputatious readers on the globe.
Slate editor David Plotz talks to TakePart about what he and his staff have done to attract their rabid, media-literate, well-educated legions, and the challenges to maintaining that loyal following.
TakePart: Slate seems to have more in common with a traditional news magazine than with an aggregating site. What are the challenges to presenting original news and commentary on the Internet?
David Plotz: The great benefit to creating original, exclusive content is that you have a strong identity that readers connect with. Readers of Slate—and there are lots of them—identify with Slate, and they know our sensibility. While we don’t own a particular beat like Politico does, we’re a leader in a particular sensibility: intelligent, wry, analytically rigorous, funny, counterintuitive. Slate is always going to have great stories and features and visual features.
The kind of people who read Slate tend to be media literate; they tend to be well-educated. Slate can attract the really classy set of excellent advertisers because they’re reaching really top-quality readers.
The challenges are obviously the cost structure. We have to pay journalists real salaries and pay our contract writers real money to write for us. There’s a tremendous amount of really good competition. There’s no shortage of excellent fun writing on the Web. We have to work really hard to distinguish ourselves.
Four or five years ago, you could count on major, traditional media to be really poor on the Web. The New York Times or Wall Street Journal or Time would have a web presence. They just weren’t that good at it. They didn’t really get the medium.
But it’s completely different now. Not only do you have these amazing web-only sites—Huffington Post being the grand champion, in terms of traffic at least—the traditional media has also gotten very, very, very, very good on the Web.
TakePart: How do you go about recapturing that intelligent, media-literate demographic every day?
David Plotz: There are no days off. When Slate started back in 1996, we basically treated it like a weekly print magazine. The site launched on a Friday; we didn’t touch it for a week. We launched again the next Friday. Then didn’t touch it for a week. It took a long time for us to realize that people have to be able to come back every day and find fresh things.
We’ve worked very hard to develop a core cadre of writers who readers love to read week after week. Whether it’s Christopher Hitchens or Dahlia Lithwick on the Supreme Court, or John Dickerson and Dave Weigel on politics, or Jack Shafer on the media, people come back to read those journalists week after week.
I wake up every morning and think, “You know, this could be the day where instead of having a million unique hits, we could just have fifty thousand. This will be the day that people decide: ‘I don’t need to check Slate today.’ ”
We’re not a necessity. People want Slate because we stimulate their mind. But they’re not going to lose their job if they haven’t read Slate.
TakePart: Tell us about Slate’s initial business model and how that’s evolved.
David Plotz: Initially, when we launched, we were a free site. But from day one, [founding editor] Michael Kinsley intended Slate to be a pay site. So we had about a year and a half as a free site. Then, in the late 1990s, we were a paid site, briefly, for about 11 months. It was a terrible, terrible experience. We lost a huge percentage of our readers just at a time when we were starting to grow. We didn’t have much advertising at the time, but we lost a lot of advertising revenue, because we lost our reader base.
Even today, literally a dozen years later, I’ll hear from people, “Oh, Slate—don’t you have to pay for that?” After we dropped the pay wall, our model was to build a huge audience of really, really smart, engaged, well-off people and get advertisers who want to be around that. It’s been more or less successful.
TakePart: What is the importance of partnerships between Slate and other sites?
David Plotz: We have a partnership with Financial Times. We publish Financial Times weekend content. We publish stuff from Project Syndicate. We have a partnership with New America Foundation and Arizona State University around technology content.
While Slate does a lot of things well, we don’t do everything well every day. In particular, on the weekends we have less content. We thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if we had great content from partners and make sure the site is as live on Saturday as it is on Thursday?” That’s why we’re doing stuff with Longform and the Financial Times. It’s good for the brand.
TakePart: What needs to happen before Internet news sources are given the credibility that’s normally reserved for something like The New York Times or the Washington Post?
David Plotz: That’s happened. I don’t think that’s a question that holds today. There’s a slight premium to the New York Times that’s practically unique to the New York Times. After that, it’s a pretty level playing field. If we have a scoop, if Talking Points Memo has something, if Politico has something, if it’s in the Washington Post or Foreign Policy—it’s all the same. Internet sources get things wrong absolutely more often than the New York Times does, but the New York Times gets things wrong, and the Internet is a pretty good self-correcting mechanism.
[Credibility] was a huge problem for all online media 10 years ago. When Drudge was breaking the story on the Lewinsky scandal, people were very skeptical in the media. Not anymore. If you think of the great journalistic scandals of the past 15 years—you know, Jason Blair, Judith Miller, Stephen Glass—that’s all print.
TakePart: As a consumer, where do you get your news?
David Plotz: The print Washington Post and the print New York Times. The New York Times is my major daily news source. And then obviously Slate is central to my day. For political stories I go onto the Washington Post. I spend a lot of time on a few blogs, like kottke, Boing Boing …
TakePart: Can you discuss the current state of the Fresca Fellowship?
David Plotz: I’d love to. One of the luxuries at Slate is that we have enough great employees that people don’t have to work every single day, every minute, on their beat for us to be a fully fleshed-out magazine. Every staffer at Slate is compelled to take a month off every year from their regular job, a month during which they may not write or edit on their normal beat, and instead work on a long form project.
There’s a huge variety. It can be an investigative feature story. Someone wrote a chick lit novel in real time. Michael Agger traded places with his wife. He became a stay-at-home dad, and she became a Slate editor, and they wrote about this exchange.
We just did a project a couple of weeks ago called “The Rosslyn Code,” which is about this strange church in Scotland, which actually has an appearance in the novel The Da Vinci Code. A series of stone symbols were put into the church in, I think, the 15th century. It’s a strange mystery of code. This was an investigation by a Slate reporter, Chris Wilson, about this code. Can it be cracked? What do you get out of it? What does it mean? Does it have any significance? It was a fantastic, delightful journey that turned out to be connected to music and the Holy Grail and the Knights Templar and all that stuff. It was great.
In a world in which there’s just so much clutter—and there’s so much good stuff, too—we need to remind people that Slate is special and different. You will not find another story about the Rosslyn Code anywhere. It is unique. It’s special. It’s awesome.
It’s a huge investment of money and time, but we think it’s definitely worth it in terms of content. It’s probably worth it as an economic investment.
TakePart: That’s very old school.
David Plotz: This goes back to your original question. If you’re the newspaper of record—if you’re the Times—you have an unparalleled reporting staff. If you’re almost any other place, why are people coming to you? What do you do that nobody else does? That’s what we’re all looking for. With Slate, our comparative advantage is our sensibility, it’s our intelligence, and that we have resources to throw at strange, fresh, ambitious projects. Not every one will end up being great, but the ones that are great make people think: “Oh, that’s Slate. Cool.”
To further conversations raised in Participant Media's new documentary "Page One: Inside the New York Times," TakePart is presenting "Consider the Source," a multi-part original series featuring award-winning reporters, photojournalists and voices in digital media.
Participant Media—TakePart's parent company—acquired "Page One: Inside The New York Times" at the Sundance Film Festival and is releasing the film theatrically with Magnolia Pictures.
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