An Empty Slate

I used to really enjoy reading Slate.com, but over the last few months it seems to have lost some of its luster. If pressed, I don't think that a few days ago I could have pinpointed what it was that has caused my disappointment. All I had was just a vague feeling of not-so-freshness. When I came across this post from Matthew Yglesias though, it brought a focus to my previously hazy notion.

The quality of the writing from a wide variety of perspectives on an even wider range of topics, was what made Slate a great site. Politics, policy, television, books, music, architecture, shopping, business, the environment, Slate covered it all and in ways that were never dull and often often unexpected. It is this range that, of late, has been missing and I think I know why. Slate has developed too many new spin-off websites devoted to narrow interests and in the process starved the original Slate of the variety and quality that made it special.

The recent past has given us the new sites The Big Money, The Root, Foreign Policy, and now DoubleX. All brought to you by something called Washington Post.Newsweek Interactive, LLC. Who knew that limited liability may also limit your ability to be entertaining and informative.

It's as if the leadership at Slate looked at the mortgage backed securities debacle and decided that was a great business model for new media. They had a depth and breadth of content bundled together at one terrific site, Slate. A site where not every piece was a home run, or appealed to every reader, but that was its strength; it would bend, but not break. Someone visits the site because they like the advice column, but they stay and read Fred Kaplan on Pakistan. Instead of imitating that bundled structure, Slate has chosen to slice it up, just like those mortgage backed securities. So rather than a Slate characterized by variety, we now have tranches of content scattered across other sites.

As I've argued before, the slicers have a habit of keeping the weakest tranche for themselves. Now I am not saying the content at any of these spin-offs surpasses the original Slate, yet. But can a Slate site featuring Jack Shafer and Seth Stevenson on the media be far off? I suppose we'll always have Hitchens, but then what? A site dominated by reviews of gangsta rap or Hollywood's latest attempt to gin up some cash by appealing to our most debased tastes is not a site I'm interested in, no matter how well written.

Channeling your content into narrow fields not only leaves the original site weaker, but creates a new site that is weak on two counts. First, the new site is devoted to a single topic. What happened to reading across the curriculum? Second, the new site is largely dominated by a single way of thinking about that single topic. The DoubleX site is dedicated to women's issues, and run by women that have many ties to the original Slate. This results in a site with an editorial worldview that is a mix of post-feminist girl power and limousine liberal. While this particular brand of fusion punditry may have a broad appeal to mostly urban, college educated women, did we really need another entire website dedicated to promoting it? I don't think so.

By splintering their content, Slate is running the risk of splintering their audience as well. At a time when so much of the old media seem on the verge of non-existence, it's a little bit sad to see one of the veterans of the new media diminish, no matter how slightly. Emptying Slate of what made it great would be a mistake.

AIG, Goldman, Spitzer, and Me

Over the weekend I saw a google news headline that caught my attention since it was trumpeting news of a Goldman Sachs claim that they wouldn't have been negatively impacted if AIG had been allowed to fail.

Here is how the New York Times reported it on March 20th:

Hoping to reduce a swirl of speculation over its role in the bailout of the American International Group, Goldman Sachs reiterated Friday that its direct losses would have been minimal if A.I.G. had failed.

Funny, here was one of those much talked about AIG counterparties indicating that they wouldn't have collapsed along with a dissolving AIG. I thought the danger of just such an occurrence was the entire basis for the bailout from the very beginning.

In fact, I seem to recall that last fall we were forced to accept the bailout of financial firms like AIG or face the prospect of total global financial collapse due to a complex web of interrelationships. I am pretty sure that the threat also indicated an AIG collapse would cause clocks to run backwards, epidemic male-pattern baldness, previously obedient canines to refuse to roll over, and that gangs of wayward youth would overrun our streets, jaywalking and stealing candy from babies at will.

Sure enough, here is then-Secretary Paulson discussing the bailout last September:

“It would have been, in my judgment, unthinkable for AIG to declare bankruptcy,” he said, outlining “catastrophic” impacts on financial markets, money market funds and the savings of individuals and families.

So that was Saturday. I then spent two days snatching spare moments to think about how I would blog that the bailout was unnecessary and sold to the American people on false information (sound familiar?). It was going to be this great Gotcha! moment. And then today I read Eliot Spitzer in Slate:

What risk—systemic or otherwise—was being covered? If Goldman wasn't going to suffer severe losses, why are taxpayers paying them off at 100 cents on the dollar? As I wrote earlier in the week, the real AIG scandal is that the company's trading partners are getting fully paid rather than taking a haircut.

Scooped by Slate! No doubt thousands of other blogs probably covered this same topic, but I didn't read them, so I still felt like I was adding to the discussion, not just the noise. But once I read Spitzer's piece I thought well, what do I have to add.

Getting scooped is one thing, but getting scooped by the former governor of New York who resigned after it was revealed he engaged the services of call girls*, well, that's hard to top. Unless Bill Clinton starts a blog.

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*The news coverage on Spitzer often seemed to include the fact that the governor wasn't just trolling darkened alleys for your average street-walker. But let's face it, a call girl is just a high priced hooker. Econ majors that are too clever for their own good like to tell people that prostitution is good where high prices are used to signal quality. When you get right down to it, though, you can jack up the sticker price and call it a Lexus, but underneath it's really just a Toyota.