Such a plea seemed, on the face of it, alarming, an admission of flaws in the basic business. If Slate's virtues, intelligence and style didn't immediately move us, we should contribute $50 a year if for no other reason, the letter said, than as a personal favor to Jacob. (A variety of letters are going around from other Slate managers asking "friends" to subscribe as a personal favor to them. I have written my check.)
But the other detail in the letter that jumped out at me was Jacob saying he had been at Slate for 17 years. This is long enough to be a publishing epoch. During it, Slate has gone from one of the first indigenous Web publishing ventures to one competing with ever-more-indigenous players such as BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post and Upworthy, hardly recognizable in traditional publishing terms at all.
Slate has always been something of an experiment. It began as a way for Microsoft to help prove its Internet bona fides. Microsoft hired a noted editor, Michael Kinsley, and gave him free rein to translate best practices of intelligent magazines into a digital format. (This was successful enough for Slate to become, for many years, a leading source of talent for many prestigious mainstream publications.) When it outlived is usefulness to Microsoft, it was adopted by the Graham family, then-owner of The Washington Post. It is still owned by the Grahams after the sale of the Post last year to Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, but it likely has outlived its usefulness to them.
So the experiment is, in a sense, ongoing: Can Internet economics support a class publishing venture?
Perhaps this is an unfair test. After all, in any 17-year perio! d in my long magazine career, I have seen a wide variety of inspired magazines hit the dust. On the other hand, the analogue world, to give it its due, has certainly supported many literate and artful magazines, something that seems less true about the Internet. It disgorges information, useful and useless, but not taste or sensibility.
The new membership program at 'Slate.'(Photo: Slate)
Now, taste and sensibility have been things that advertisers paid a premium for — a model Slate thought could be transferred to the Internet. But either there is a paucity of taste and sensibility on the Internet, or it doesn't shine brightly enough to be a digital business. Hence, publishers have adjusted to the lack of premium advertising by becoming vast traffic funnels instead of exclusive harbors.
Some publishers are trying pay walls to help make up for lost advertising, but Weisberg, in his letter, said the obvious: Pay walls are difficult to implement, and you risk losing much of what you've gained.
Even The New York Times, which has a successful pay wall, is now resorting to a premium, pay-more-to-identify-more, plea.
In part, this is a hopeful new idea in publishing, that there might be something beyond advertising and circulation and, behaviorally, that there is something beyond reading (another imperiled part of the publishing model). That belonging is a business.
Or, as with NPR and PBS, that liberal guilt might become another revenue stream.
On the other hand, what also is suggested here, or what ought to be considered, is that the two pillars of conventional upscale publishing — brand advertising and discrete audiences — don't work very well on the Internet.
High-margin brand advertising is an amalgam of not only ! marketing! strategy but of corporate ego — it needs to make the advertiser as well as the audience feel good about themselves. Nobody has yet figured out quite how to do this among deficit-attention, low-margin, buy-this-product junk ads that populate the Internet.
As for discrete audiences, particularly ones not defined by interest, but by, well, taste and sensibility, that's a snobbery that's almost anti-digital, partly explaining the rise of such leveled, mass-market panderers as BuzzFeed. It used to be that the extraordinary accomplishment of a magazine was to not only bring together a specific audience but also to define it — often in a way that it did not even know itself — give it purpose, indeed, membership. But the vast new business of Internet middlemen now claim, quite convincingly, that they can, with all the Internet's data markers, identify and reproduce any audience at will, without the advertiser having to pay the publisher a premium price for reaching this unique audience.
Audiences are basic commodities, easily reproducible.
There remains a grit-their-teeth belief among high-end publishers that there will be a way to become self-sustaining and even figure out a growth model in the digital world, that it is a process of experimentation and that, even after 17 years or so, the Internet is still young, that if the audience is here, advertising — profitable advertising — must eventually follow. And subscriptions. And premium memberships. And… and…
But, too, maybe the experiment proves that print was better.
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