Name: The regrettable death of the Slatepitch
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The regrettable death of the Slatepitch

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SubscribeSign inShare this postThe regrettable death of the Slatepitch www.slowboring.comCopy linkTwitterFacebookEmailFeb 17Share this postThe regrettable death of the Slatepitch www.slowboring.comCopy linkTwitterFacebookEmailAs an industry veteran, I hate when critics assert that a site’s business problems simply reflect the consequences of their own personal editorial critiques, so I want to be clear: plenty of websites that I think are garbage (like Dan Bongino’s) seem to be doing well as businesses, and I think a digital media operation of Slate’s size would struggle no matter how excellent its product.But the identity point is one I feel acutely as someone who read Slate for years before working there, loved every minute I was on the job with a great group of people, and has been sad to see the site lose a lot of its distinctiveness over the last few years.SlateThat’s something Slate has sort of lost. But more than just Slate, I feel like it’s been lost by the internet as a whole. Publications employ any good writers they can manage to hire and lump them together with whichever not-so-good writers they happen to have on hand. Management hopes for the best, while staff plans for the worst, unionizing so everyone at least gets a decent severance when the layoffs come. When I first moved to D.C., I worked for a small liberal magazine called The American Prospect. When I described it as being to the left of The New Republic and to the right of The Nation, people knew what I meant. At the time, TNR had a very clear moderate Democrat brand, while The Nation had a clear left-of-the-Democrats brand. There was also The Washington Monthly, a center-left publication like TNR that was less hawkish on foreign policy and perhaps a bit more interested in exploring heterodox ideas on domestic policy. Mother Jones was down-the-middle liberal like the Prospect, but more grounded in environmentalism and crunchy stuff, while TAP was more grounded in the labor movement. On the right, Reason was (and remains) libertarian. But there was also The Weekly Standard, which was a distinctly neoconservative publication (they supported John McCain over George W. Bush in the 2000 primary, for example), and National Review, which was more grounded in Christian Right conservatism. The American Conservative was a paleocon magazine that tended toward isolationism in foreign policy and was very into articles about how immigration is bad. An article about the Bush administration’s nefarious plans to launch a war with Iran could run in TAP or The Nation or The Washington Monthly or Reason or TAC but definitely could not run in TNR or National Review or The Weekly Standard. A piece arguing that conservatives should try to become more populist in their economic thinking could run in The Weekly Standard or TAC but not National Review or Reason or any of the left-of-center publications. trying to And then there was Slate. Floating above these grim ideologues was Slate, a less political and less partisan publication. Slate was contrarian. But not like today’s “contrarians” who are like “I’m a liberal but…” and then just agree with conservatives about everything. Slate was the place to say the things that were not being said elsewhere. Creed, for example, is bad. And yet Creed was a very popular, very successful band. There are presumably lots of people who do not think that Creed is bad, yet Creed was so unfashionable that there was nobody around to champion them. The troll caricature is someone pretending to like Creed to get attention on the internet. But we’re talking, again, about a very popular and successful band! Weiner did not convince me, but he championed something many people felt was worth championing. Thanks to the pandemic, we’ve all learned to appreciate outdoor dining and perhaps even dabbled in it during some unseasonable weather. But this was 2013. When I wrote a piece saying I prefer to eat inside, even when the weather is nice, I got lots of denunciations. But also lots of people emailed me to say “hey, yeah, you’re right.” Preferences differ. interestingToday, publications are all the same. Here are some headlines:andWhenever someone would say something kind of weird and provocative over lunch at Slate, David Plotz and the other editors would try to give them the courage to be daring. They recognized that it’s psychologically risky to come out as a Creed fan knowing that people are going to make fun of you. But doing the take provides a great service to all the other indoor kids. And it improves the overall intellectual health of society to have annoying people picking at the edges of conventional wisdom. alsoexplicitlyWhat’s particularly weird about the convergence on this brand of politics is that it’s roughly the ideological space occupied by the New York Times opinion section. The New York Times opinion section is really great. When we started Vox, I think we hoped we’d be disruptors of the media scene and knock off legacy dinosaurs like the Times. But the Times has astutely avoided that fate, hiring a huge share of the best people from across the world of digital media. It makes them extremely hard — indeed, almost impossible — to compete with. bestWhat I try to do here at Slow Boring is provide something that is, to the best of my abilities, highly differentiated. I deliberately lean into ideas that I don’t think could be successfully pitched elsewhere.There’s nothing worse than middle-aged people going on about how things used to be better back in the day, so I want to end by acknowledging that there were some serious shortcomings to the good old days. Some things have changed for the better even as others have changed for the worse. But I also don’t think this is a question of tradeoffs so much as two ships passing in the night. CORRECTION: An earlier version said all the top editors were men except at Mother Jones, but I forgot Katrina vanden Heuvel at the Nation. Like this postShare this postThe regrettable death of the Slatepitch www.slowboring.comCopy linkTwitterFacebookEmail358 CommentsFor your security, we need to re-authenticate you.Click the link we sent to , or .Expand full commentExpand full commentNo posts© 2022 Matthew Yglesias ∙ ∙ &nbsp;is the home for great writingThis site requires JavaScript to run correctly. 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SubscribeSign inShare this postThe regrettable death of the Slatepitch www.slowboring.comCopy linkTwitterFacebookEmailFeb 17Share this postThe regrettable death of the Slatepitch www.slowboring.comCopy linkTwitterFacebookEmailAs an industry veteran, I hate when critics assert that a site’s business problems simply reflect the consequences of their own personal editorial critiques, so I want to be clear: plenty of websites that I think are garbage (like Dan Bongino’s) seem to be doing well as businesses, and I think a digital media operation of Slate’s size would struggle no matter how...

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Writer and editor, Slow Boring. Senior Fellow, Niskanen Center. Bloomberg columnist. Vaxxed and relaxed. These tweets are worth what you pay for them.

The regrettable death of the Slatepitch

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