MicroKinsley takes on the Web
We're as curious as anyone in the online publishing business about what Michael Kinsley has been cooking up since last November -- when the veteran New Republic editor-columnist and "Crossfire" talking head announced he was departing Washington to edit a new Web magazine for Microsoft in Seattle.
This is a business that's obsessed with alliances, and the Microsoft- Kinsley alliance -- for convenience let's call it MicroKinsley -- sounded auspicious from the start: The old media meet the new media! Mike's brains and Bill's bucks! Or, as the old-media headline writer would put it, the Beltway meets the byteway!
So we admit that when we nabbed a copy of the May 13 New Yorker, we delayed our perusal of the latest Samuel Beckett translation, put off reading Calvin Tomkins on Picasso or Lawrence Weschler on Ed Kienholz, and flipped straight to the report on how Kinsley is "reinventing magazines in the cyberland of Microsoft."
Sure, that cover teaser was cause for concern. Uh, "cyberland?" Nor did the byline allay it: Ken Auletta's ponderous, adulatory chronicles of media executive life have provided some of the low points of the New Yorker's Tina Brown era. (In a previous "Annals of Communications" essay, Auletta had lovingly chronicled Barry Diller's love-affair with his PowerBook -- reporting Diller's discovery that with a laptop, he didn't need a secretary as if it were a paradigm-shattering scientific breakthrough. This was a "welcome to the 20th century, pal" moment, like George Bush's run-in with a supermarket scanner, but Auletta seemed to think Diller was on to something.) Still, it might be worth slogging through Auletta's prose if the reporter could give us some details of MicroKinsley's plans.
Interviewed shortly after he'd announced his move, Kinsley declared that most of what he'd seen on the Web was "crap." It's hard to disagree; online as elsewhere, Sturgeon's Law applies. But as the opening salvo from the new kid in town, this dismissive knock reverberated. If the world of the Internet is in any way a community, as its more idealistic advocates have argued, then Kinsley had just snubbed the entire population of the city in which he was about to open a business. On the other hand, if the Net's just another "publishing platform," all he'd done was to challenge the competition.
The headline and deck over Auletta's piece promised to reveal "some very interesting ideas about journalism" from MicroKinsley, but the article doesn't provide much detail about what the readers of Slate -- the MicroKinsley publication's tabula rasa moniker -- will actually encounter. There'll be articles about politics and culture, longer than the Web norm, and roundtable-style punditry on public issues. Maybe a musical theme that plays over the cover page. Maybe cover cartoons that can become screensavers with a click.
The Auletta piece turns out to be a chronicle less of journalism than of corporate behavior. (To be sure, confusion between these two fields is epidemic these days.) What's interesting here aren't the "ideas about journalism" but the evidence of cross-purposes expectations in the MicroKinsley alliance. What Kinsley was getting from Microsoft is pretty obvious: it's the rare editor today who wins the freedom and the money to create anything new, online or off. Meanwhile, what Microsoft was getting from Kinsley emerges clearly in an e-mail from Microsoft exec Russell Siegelman that Auletta quotes: "Having him be an MS employee would legitimize MS as a content company to a large degree."
How the old media/new media fissures in this story cut depends on where you stand. Kinsley can imagine that he is breaking fresh new-media ground by leaving Washington for Microsoft's world. Microsoft, as a suspect new player in the world of "content," looks to Kinsley to provide old-media, East Coast legitimacy. To the New Yorker's headline writers, Kinsley is "reinventing magazines"; but to anyone who has spent much time on the Web over the last couple of years, it sounds as though Kinsley might be reinventing the wheel.
Auletta records memos and meetings at which the Slate-sters puzzle over how frequently to publish or "refresh the site," how to help readers keep track of what's new since their last visit, how to incorporate multimedia elements, and the biggest puzzle of all, how to bring in revenue. Kinsley's crew, in other words, is going through the same process of "reeducation" experienced by all the journalists who've preceded them in the online migration: over at HotWired and Feed and Word, at The Gate and Nando and Mercury Center and the short-lived but influential San Francisco Free Press, and obviously here at SALON, too.
It remains to be seen how "interesting" Slate's ideas are. Kinsley's apparent disdain for the whole notion of hyperlinking sounds potentially crippling, in a medium where links are the primary means of establishing relationship; it's a bit like a filmmaker being suspicious of the whole newfangled idea of cutting. And it's unclear from Auletta's account whether Slate will make any use at all of the Net's two-way communications -- which, far more than audio-visual enhancement or instant updates, represents its true potential for revolution.
"There is a reason some people get paid as writers and some don't," Kinsley tells Auletta. "I don't want to go to a restaurant and be told, 'This is a community restaurant, and the guy at the next table is cooking for you!'" That's a glib, superficial analogy. What most people like about the Net is that it breaks down the barriers between writer and reader. In Kinsley's terms, it makes old-fashioned media feel like a restaurant where the staff rarely comes by to take your order and pays no attention to it once they do. The torrent of feedback often terrifies old-line journalists -- but if they want to work online, they have to deal with it.
Still, we'd be the last to dismiss anyone's effort to bring a higher standard of discourse to the Web -- to offer words a bit of shelter in this rambunctious new medium. At SALON, we're used to taking barbs for our verbiage. "You guys," says the consultant, rolling his eyes, "still think people want to read online?" We do, and we'll read Slate with great interest. Just don't expect us to be dazzled by the ostensible "legitimacy" of the old-media insiders, as they poke under the hood of this new machine and try to figure out what makes it run.
The Web, after all, is a different town from Washington. Everyone in the capital may know who you mean when you say Michael Kinsley. But if you do an AltaVista search on "Michael Kinsley," seven of the ten first-page search results point not to the former New Republic man but to a progressive economist at the Rocky Mountain Institute who happens to share the same name -- and whose work has been on the Web long enough to become well-indexed.