Slate asks that you please Google the topic of your article to see what has already been written on the subject—they strive for fresh content and new perspectives. Include a short bio on yourself. Slate asks that you please refrain from emailing multiple editors. Due to the high volume of submissions that they receive, if you do not hear back from an editor in a few days, your article was not accepted. Slate could be a great option to look into for those writing about push-button topics in the LIS field.
Publication circulation: According to their media kit, Slate reaches 20 million unique visitors a month. Audience location and language or cultural considerations: Slate is a U. Reader characteristics: According to an older article published by Slate, their general demographic is comprised of mostly college-educated readers between the ages of It introduced Slate V in , [17] an online video magazine with content that relates to or expands upon their written articles.
In , the magazine was redesigned under the guidance of Design Director Vivian Selbo. In the same year, the magazine laid off several high-profile journalists, including co-founder Jack Shafer and Timothy Noah author of the Chatterbox column. The next year, Slate became profitable after preceding years had seen layoffs and falling ad revenues. In , Slate introduced a paywall system called "Slate Plus," offering ad-free podcasts and bonus materials. Slate moved all content behind a metered paywall for international readers in June , explaining "our U.
The end result is that, outside the United States, we are not covering our costs. Slate's articles have presented news and opinions from a liberal perspective, eventually evolving into a self-proclaimed liberal news site. However, the website claims that writers use factual evidence to back up their claims. Since , [13] Slate has been known for publishing contrarian pieces arguing against commonly held views about a subject, giving rise to the slatepitches Twitter hashtag in In , Slate ' s editor-in-chief Julia Turner acknowledged a reputation for counterintuitive arguments forms part of Slate 's "distinctive" brand, but argued that the hashtag misrepresents the site's journalism.
But journalism is more interesting when it surprises you either with the conclusions that it reaches or the ways that it reaches them. According to NiemanLab, Slate has been involved in podcasts "almost from the very beginning" of the medium. Slate podcasts have gotten longer over the years.
The original Gabfest ran 15 minutes; by , most ran about 45 minutes. Ultimate Pop Culture Wiki Explore. Wiki Content. Explore Wikis Community Central. Register Don't have an account? Slate magazine. Edit source History Talk 0. Slate px px Type of site. List of languages. See also: Panoply Media. Alexa Internet. Also, Slate takes advantage of its immediate distribution to provide previews of these other magazines before they reach their subscribers. There are two other uses of the online medium where Slate shows promise compared to traditional magazines: the first is multimedia which is used in very appropriate ways to enrich the stories.
No spinning GIF89a's bravo , but a clip from an Ella Fitzgerald song in her obituary and a video clip of a Republican anti-Clinton commercial in a very good column analyzing political advertising. The analysis of the anti-Clinton commercial gains significantly from the user's ability to actually see the video and observe the pacing, tone of voice, etc. As we all know, movement, color, and tone of voice have much more emotional appeal than the actual words, so deconstructions of political campaigns need multimedia.
The second good use of the online medium is the so-called "committee of correspondence". This is a too-long 40 screenfulls on a medium-size screen scrolling debate between five pre-selected participants. The topic of the debate in the premiere issue is "Is Microsoft Evil? The debate format is innovative in allowing the participants to post new arguments daily throughout a week. By restricting follow-ups to once-daily and by having a select group of contributors, the editors avoid flaming and encourage reasoned writing.
Even so, the actual quality of the writing is not on the superb level one would expect from an elite magazine. Sure, we are a level beyond netnews threads, but not several levels up. There are not many new arguments relating to Microsoft's possible evilness in the Slate discussion that have not been seen many times in various comp. Maybe the topic has been beaten to death on the Internet already and we will see better results in future Slate debates. One benefit of the slow turn-around and selective list of participants is that rebuttals tend to be more credible and researched than the typical netnews comment.
At the same time, when Ballmer tried to minimize the anti-trust issue, there was a rebuttal by an anti-trust lawyer who quoted the actual Department of Justice court papers. As I said, better than your average flame and a level up from netnews, but no new insights.
Now turning to the design of Slate 's website, I sincerely doubt that they have conducted much usability testing since several of their design elements are likely to cause usability problems according to my studies of other websites. The first and most obvious is the use of two home pages which is often confusing to users. The initial home page contains an abbreviated list of the main feature stories and a small subtle link to a fuller table of contents.
Following this link leads the user to a larger home page that cannot be seen on a single screen due to its very spacious layout. In fact, it requires screens to see the full list and some of the main stories are not visible in the first window.
The table of contents uses several "cute" headlines to link to stories example: "Varnish Remover" is the link to the analysis of campaign commercials.
On the Web, cute links normally don't work since users rarely take the time to download stuff they don't know what is. In print, playful headlines work because the reader can easily glance around the magazine to see what the story is about. On the Web, every click carries a penalty and removes the user from the context of the previous page, so link anchors must be exceedingly intuitive.
In most articles, the author's byline has been made a link to a short lines bio at the end of the article. This type of author bio is left over from legacy magazines and a poor use of the power of the Web: instead, the short bio could have been left in the article as information for users with little interest in the writers and the link should have taken those users who do care about writers to a longer bio with photo of the author and links to other stories by the same author.
Interestingly, the only appropriate biography is the one provided by a New York Times columnist who is a contributor to the Microsoft-evilness debate and the bio lives on his personal website. Presumably, the reason for giving all pages the title Slate is to reinforce the notion of a unified magazine as opposed to a collection of stories, but the nature of the Web is to treat pages as the unit of navigation: there are no staples on the net.
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