Slate's New Editor

My reaction to the selection of Jacob Weisberg as editor of Slate was "Of Course!" Slate wouldn't want to be provocative, or shake things up, or be innovative with its little webzine. No, it's much safer to replace the liberal Michael Kinsley (who is actually a good editor) with a similarly liberal but much duller version of Michael Kinsley.

I agree with Wlady Pleszczynski's tongue-in-cheek characterization:

Yesterday it was reported that the great two-man race to succeed Michael Kinsley as editor of Slate.com had ended, and that the winner was Jacob Weisberg. The stock market promptly rose to pre-post-bubble heights, and the fellow Weisberg had defeated, Jack Shafer, learned he was slated to be transferred to the web magazine's Tajikistan bureau.

Now if there had been no JFK and we could rest confident that life is fair, there would have been no Weisberg-Shafer contest. But this was one of those deals where the fix was in from the start. Weisberg is a good conventional corporate liberal, but with about as much sparkle and unpredictability as a year-old open can of Coke. Shafer, by contrast, as I'm sure anyone who has ever worked with him will tell you, is brilliant, original, independent, and probably more than a little impossible at times -- but the results, the results! Left to his own devices he'd shake up the gray-flannel suited journalistic world. Microsoft-owned Slate obviously couldn't dare make an interesting choice.

And so we were left with such valedictory comments to yesterday's New York Times as this one from Kinsley, who said of Weisberg that "Many of the more successful editorial ideas on Slate are his -- he came up with the Today's Papers feature, for instance -- and he thinks very Webby. He has a gift for this." That's it? Kinsley's successor's major claim to fame is that he suggested their webzine run a daily review of the morning papers? How very webby of him. Weisberg's own remarks weren't any better. Noting Slate's "strong orientation toward politics, policy and economics, and some very good arts and cultural comment," he added that he'd "like to increase the quantity of cultural comment with more music, perhaps a TV column and more life-style stuff." Life-style stuff? Shafer would beat the stuffing out of a lazy comment like that. But high time someone recognized the crying need for another TV column. Never can have enough meaning in our lives.

[Posted at 21:02 CST on 04/30/02] [Link]