Wiping the Slate

		(1,374,235 words; posted Sunday, Aug. 25; to be composted immediately) S o, the Web's finally grown up and become a big boy. A real big boy. There are Fortune 500 companies flocking to peddle their wares ... indications that more and more people are relying on the Internet for their news and entertainment needs ... and finally there's some worthwhile reading: Slate. Of course, with maturity comes pimples and stinky armpits. Nasty blemishes like Wired and odiferous stenches like Stim. Readers out here are willing to swallow their pride, lower their standards of quality, and wander through the thorned thickets in search of a nugget or two of interesting datum. So plant your feet at Slate for a little while. Blemishes will fade from memory. Stenches will deodorize. All will seem whole and good and -- dare I say it -- normal for a change. A carefully sanitized environment awaits in the hallowed halls of Kinsley & Company. Content thoughtfully clean and pure, like the ozone-charged air coming straight out of a new air-conditioner. Mild opinions and careful analysis are quietly displayed alongside humble black-and-white drawings. (Just what the hell is this doodle to the left supposed to be?)
	S late is an incredible oddity on the Web. It has a stiff rigidity that I always thought was the exclusive domain of The New Yorker. The layout is sparse and colorless, so much so that you can almost feel between your fingers the rough rag that would be used to publish this sort of stuff. The fact that it is produced on the West Coast, in the heart of one of the fastest growing corporations in the world, belies the starched Atlantic-seaboard establishmentarian ambiance that is projected. Michael Kinsley, as you're probably sick of hearing by now, has made it clear that he's most excited by electronic publishing because of a lack of material costs. Is that the best this wundereditor can think of -- not cutting down trees or licking stamps? Surely an hour or so clicking through the Web can convince anyone that the Internet is a superior information delivery vehicle, opening opportunities for greater communication and promoting widespread interactivity. Cha-hah. As if. And a monkey flew out of my butt.
		S ure, it's a little cheaper to publish on the Web, if you're just looking at the pulp and ink costs. Postal rates are high -- a big thirty-two cents an ounce -- but compare that to the costs of the "ubiquitous" net. Internet access is twenty to thirty bucks a month. A decent computer system costs at least fifteen hundred smackers. And the phone line is fifteen bucks a month, but you're already paying for that anyways. Oh well ... the browser's free. This is the gift of technology. Rather than walk down to the local newsstand amid all that toxic oxygen and damaging sunlight, you can sit in a shuttered air-tight room, face bathed in the healthy VGA glow of a crummy 14" monitor, reading twelve-point digressions framed between animated advertisements. (Okay, it's not like this is Slate's fault. I'd rather blame all this cruddy stuff on HotWired.) From these thrift-conscious statements it seems obvious that Kinsley misses the bigger picture. The Web has an immediacy rivaling CNN's multimillion dollar newsfeeds. When NASA found a couple of prehistoric cockroaches on Mars, television and newspapers were able to report the story within twenty-four hours. After that, to them, it's a dead story. The news becomes mulch for commentary and analysis. Science and Omni have a three month turnaround time, from accepting articles to getting them to print to getting the mag into readers hands. Web publications can run the whole cycle in less than a week. C'mon Mike -- that's the real win out here. Surely someone who's spent a ton of time producing rags would have picked up on that pretty damn quickly. I should back off -- Slate is doing just that, and had an article on the little Martian critters up in a couple of weeks. Except that the commentary wasn't focused on proof of extraterrestrial life, but on how people are convinced of the superiority of life here on terra firma. Methinks Kinsley should make the Nielsen reports on The X-Files required reading for staff writers.
	I 've been following Slate since it hit the Web, trying to make heads or tails of this newest Microsoft franchise. There's the snippets of music ... what's up with this elevator music? It sounds like stuff you'd hear at your sister's piano recital. Are you supposed to play it while you read the articles? Just listening for a half a minute made me want to go shopping for penny loafers. Slate's got diary entries (huh?), opera reviews (aggh .. choke), an art gallery (snotty and Schnaubish, of course), and a nice little poem to wrap up the issue. Holy shit -- this is the magazine my mom wishes I produced, rather than some third-rate amateur zine ripping off humor from a stash of decade-old Mad magazines. How can I blame her? If bOING bOING is the rouge-and-fishnet "hey-sailor-gotta-minute" magazine for the Web, then Slate's the little angel who stays home Saturday nights with her mom making cakes for the church fundraiser. I mean, if I owned a vintage blank-and-white Macintosh I'd feel right at home browsing Slate's black-and-white-and-orange layouts. Is this visual deficiency an attempt to mimic everything about paper magazines, right down to the four-color press? Is there simply no middle ground between the pale blandess of Slate and the garish acidity of Wired?	The Internet's demographics -- pimply white male engineers in their early twenties with plenty of discretionary dough and spare time -- does not denote a raging market for PBS-cum-HTML.
		M atter of fact, the entire spectrum of Web publishing is captured by these two, er, "giants" of journalism. Wired and Slate (which incidentally anagram to Weird and Stale) are as far apart as you'd think possible. Wired models itself as the new, the exciting, the daring. And yet it reminds me more of MTV. Remember when MTV was just that, Music Television? And now, it's littered with Real World and news and game shows and Beavis and Butthead? Wired's done the analogous devolution in a mere twenty-four months -- but we all know how much faster things change on the Internet. Slate is the old, the conservative, the appropriate. No garish graphics or animations, no Java scripts, no cutting-edge HTML tags. Slate has captured the feeling of a magazine laid out by hand, copy boys running typewritten stories into the editorial room where draftsmen feverishly build a layout with the original cut-and-paste tools, an X-Acto knife and a can of Elmer's. Gosh, let me whip up a glass of Ovaltine and I'm ready to start reading! "West and wee-waxation at wast!"
	T here's plenty of stuff to dig into while you're enjoying that tall cold one. But what you won't see a lot of is what Suck graciously calls a "circle jerk" -- the tendency for Web publications to spend an inordinate amount of time writing about each other. Not only is it an easy way to meet a deadline, but it creates an artificial sense of significance as everyone rattles on and on about the importance of everyone else. A mass of whorish material has been accumulating on the Web since day one, and Slate won't take a part in it (although Ad Nauseam's more than happy to contribute to this recursive self-gratification -- and so is Suck for that manner.) Matter of fact, Slate's all but ignored the Web as a source of material, which makes you wonder if they have enough geeks on staff. Look at what your choices are for light reading: "Are the Clinton's tied to the Mob?" "Are Jews losing their place in the meritocracy?" Poetry? (Not like I should talk or anything. But the poetry here is a lot cooler than theirs.) The dearth of mind-numbing entertainment and a propensity for tickling higher intellectual modules leaves one with the sensation that perhaps Kinsley's little experiment is either truly brilliant or doomed for failure. Someone explain to him that the Internet's demographics -- pimply white male engineers in their early twenties with plenty of discretionary dough and spare time -- does not denote a raging market for PBS-cum-HTML.
		W hat it does indicate is that just about anything goes on the Web, because even with those kinds of demographics Slate has been successful in drawing attention. Sure, the advertisers are lining up with cash in hand -- they're probably sick of trying to figure out how to navigate through HotWired's labyrinthine hotlinks. Kinsley's come up with the perfect message for the power-tie club: a return to normalcy. Come to Uncle Mike, and we'll make sure your message isn't atop a page talking about navel-piercing or covered with "KILL SENATOR EXXON!!!" threads. I have seen the future, and the convergance of television and Internet is going to look a lot like ... The New Yorker. My God -- I'm already starting to yearn for Dukes of Hazzard reruns.