Per Romenesko and, via same, the Online Journalism Review, it seems that Slate, Salon, and some other first-generation online journalism institutions are up for sale. I'm especially curious about Slate, knowing it has avid readers here & knowing it employs some good honest writers, & yet still wondering how a portal owned by the Microsoft company can maintain any kind of journalistic standards. Are these sales likely to be a good thing? Or more likely to cause the kind of dumbing-down and homogenization we've seen in the conventional print media?
Posted by Martha Bridegam at November 10, 2004 10:09 PMYet still wondering how a portal owned by the Microsoft company can maintain any kind of journalistic standards.
Um, why?
Because they're not "independent" i.e. dependent on the goodwill of their advertisers?
Slate has been running for several years now and has demonstrated no obvious constraints because of its ownership; they have run several articles critical of Microsoft that I can think of off the top of my head. I think you owe Bill Gates an apology.
Posted by: Alan Allport at November 11, 2004 03:51 AMWell, that's the paradox, isn't it? A company whose control-freakery over its own image is legendary owns a television network and a major Internet portal, and since Microsoft has strong non-journalistic commercial interests and opinions of its own, presumably the journalists therein are in some sense living on sufferance -- but these news outlets do publish a fair amount of critical journalism. It must be a strange dance, maybe not so different qualitatively from the edge-testing games played by employees of state-controlled media in less free countries. I mean, they've got considerable freedom in practice, but it's in the form of a conditional privilege, not the sacred right of free speech asserted as an indivisible aspect of citizenship. No, I don't speak freely either myself when I do certain kinds of hack-work, but it's at least a little more pleasant to negotiate one's compromises one by one. What do you suppose Kinsley's private feelings are about Bill Gates, and how many of them does he express?
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at November 11, 2004 11:47 AMThe problem I have with this is that you're juxtaposing by implication the position that Slate is in with some imaginary condition of 'independence'. It's all very well to talk of sacred rights of free speech, but in the real world no writer at any level is entirely free from external pressures and compromises if they want to make their work public and profitable. I think the relationship between Microsoft and Slate is an entirely honorable one. They make no secret of the financial dependence of the magazine on the company, and readers are free to take that into account when they read Slate's articles, should they choose. I prefer this kind of straightforward, up-front patronage to the chest-beating "independence" of magazines that are just as much in thrall to external forces as Slate is - just more of them, and without full disclosure. I don't know what Kinsley thinks of Gates (incidentally, I believe he's retired as editor now because he has cancer). What does the editor of Salon think of his advertisers?
Posted by: Alan Allport at November 11, 2004 12:20 PMKinsley has cancer? Very sorry to hear. He can't be much over 50 yrs old.
Yes, all magazines are kept by their advertisers one way or another, but there's a difference between depending on many advertisers & depending on one corporate owner in particular. We can argue whether it's a difference of type or of degree of patronage, but it's a difference.