Slashdot Mirror
Washington Post Buys Slate From Microsoft
securitas writes "The Washington Post has bought online magazine Slate from Microsoft for an undisclosed sum believed to be in the millions of dollars. The sale comes almost five months after Microsoft put Slate on the block (Slashdot) in late July. If you're looking for a perspective from someone other than Slate's editor Jacob Weisberg, Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz writes about the sale: 'According to ComScore Media Metrix, washingtonpost.com drew 4.5 million unique visitors last month, while Slate drew 4.8 million.' David Carr reports in the New York Times that Neilsen NetRatings recorded 6 million Slate visitors last month. Either way, Slate's audience is larger than the Post's online edition. You can learn more about the deal from AP via IHT or get streaming audio at NPR (Real|Windows Media)."
Microsoft seem to be selling off bits and pieces of itself all of a sudden. I wonder why, I mean, it's not like they need the money.
There are still some them hippies there at slate. Fox News needs to buy em. People might figure out George W. don't know what he doin.
'why would one modern company buy something so low-tech from a tech company, of all people?'
Then my mind saw those funky slate 'newspapers' from the Flintstones...
*shudders*
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
yawn....
I don't read either of those corporatist propaganda outlets unless I come across a pertinent and interesting article in a blog.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
I could never accept that Slate had genuine editorial independence from Microsoft. It's like MSNBC, Newsweek (I think), MSN, etc. that are all owned or influenced my Microsoft, and it's all very likely part of a grand marketing strategy.
Microsoft putting their brand on something is like a poison pill for credibility.
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
Didn't slate run a pro-linux story a while back? ... Coincidence, I think not.
GETPKG - Package Management for Slackware
There is actually a VisualCobol. I had to program it in college. COBOL should not be able to render windows!!! I guess the idea was people could take legacy COBOL and put in a Windows world. Too bad you really had to rewrite it anyway and most companies use screen scraping.
With a few exceptions both the Post and Slate revealed themselves to me as CorpGovMedia mouthpieces during the run-up and aftermath of the Iraq war. That really opened my eyes. So, I couldn't really care less if they both went under....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
According to the next forthcoming story by ComScore Media Metrix, Slate drew over 9.6 million unique visitors this month... after the site being mentioned on slashdot'
Sorry, Washington Post, but buying Slate does NOT mean you get the "New Media", anymore than Pathfinder meant that Time-Warner got it. The citizen-journalists of the blogsphere are where journalism is heading. There's a million fact-checkers out there, and the Old Media better wake up to it, or be cast aside.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
If you're looking for a perspective from someone other than Slate's editor Jacob Weisberg, Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz writes about the sale
In other news, if you're looking for a different perspective on the two party system and it's ramifications for a healthy democracy other than Republican George Bush, here's Democrat John Kerry.
Wow someone buying something of Microsoft's for once...is that breaking the rules?
I guess Microsoft is tired of their magazine supporting Firefox.
MOUNT TAPE U1439 ON B3, NO RING
.. when companies were buying others according to the number of clicks on their home page.
washingtonpost.com drew 4.5 million unique visitors last month, while Slate drew 4.8 million....Either way, Slate's audience is larger than the Post's online edition.
And how much of that slate traffic is caused because slate is so tied in to MSN which is the default startpage for 90% of the home computer market?
I have a strong suspicion that if slate is divorced from MS, its readership will decline drastically.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Either way, Slate's audience is larger than the Post's online edition.
Well, sort of. Slate's audience may be bigger in terms of "unique vistors," but washingtonpost.com recieves many more hits / page views for each visitor.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
i find slate extremely helpful, between the explainers to todays papers. some of it can be quite silly, but the majority of the content is excellent stuff. i've been checking out the washington post lately because of slate. they have quite a bit of helpful information that you don't find anywhere else, and they seem to carry full stories. if i want to find out what is actually going on and the motivations for that, i read the post. hopefully they can bring more of that to slate and slate can give them a bigger online audience.
What happens when people stop buyng newspapers?
Wasn't Slate the MS owned magazine that was writing bad reviews about IE or something like that?
I used to read newspapers like the WP on a daily basis--even multiple newspapers. I even wrote tv news scripts for a CBS affiliate! I know their slant, now. I don't need to fill my head with their propaganda anymore. Already got enuf of it floating around in there....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
I used to think that, too. Ya got a lot of reading to do, bud, Best start now.....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Slate, Salon, etc have all been displaced by blogs which are a much better venue for partisan punditry.
To be honest, I really like Slate. Read it every day. They are really quite independent, like when they bashed IE. This might be quite a non-news item, ultimately (I hope)
Recursive (adj.): see 'Recursive'
Most of them think it means socialist or something. I myself only found out what it means just a couple of years ago, when I was radicalized by the run-up and aftermath of the Iraq war. When I say "neoliberal," I mean it about the same way you do--a defender of or a participant in unrestrained capitalism or corporatism.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Apparently, Microsoft wants to focus on its core incompetencies.
:)
Internet Explorer?
Who reads Slate? I do...obsessively. Some reasons why:
Slate isn't a substitute for reading a newspaper, but if you want to get more insight into what's going on, it's a good place to look.
I am regular visitor to Cagle.slate.msn.com
I wonder what is going to happen to this political cartoon site.
There is no mention of Cagle in the news media.
Without the ban, the "Washington Post" web site would be much more popular, based on the number of clicks.
Without the ban, the "Washington Post" web site would be much more popular, based on the number of clicks.
Surely that post must be parody. I mean, "citizen-journalists of the blogsphere".
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
...and they want their paper of record back.
No, the windchill factor is a unique phenomenon known to man. The effect of wind on the body's perception of temperature is intangible yet shared by all human beings. Pretty interesting stuff.
I'm curious as to how many visitors independent news sites get, including sites like slashdot, fark, democracynow, kuro5hin, etc. Is it anywhere close to the 4.5-4.8 million slate and Washington post get, or do most people just think "getting their news online" means going to cnn.com?
Buying up other companies in direct competition with them...oh, wait.
I just checked the numbers over at Instapundit and they work out to about 3.8 million visitors per month. So, Microsoft + "professional" journalists = 4.8 million visitors. One law prof + laptop + WiFi = 3.8 million.
[Insert pithy quote here]
No, you are the one who is wrong, not me. America is not nearly as much of a "democratic capitalist" regime as you claim. The countries of NW Europe and Canada are far more "democratic capitalist," in that the wealth is more evenly spread around. Neoliberalism is a system that has as its goal the concentration of increasing amounts of wealth dispersed into the hands of a decreasing number of people and corporations. Not too democratic a system, if you ask me....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
And if you don't want to be modded down to a -1 by a Slashdot moderator, you don't make off topic comments about the rating system.
...Oh. Damn.
~ Crummy
Much better.
Jesus, I thought I was the only one that remembered Pathfinder. For those that don't know, Pathfinder was Time-Warner's attempt to create a service similar to AOL or CompuServe's portals, but on the web without a dial-up service. This was before they got swallowed up by AOL, way back in the early 90's. Apparently, they decided to lump everything owned by them under the "Pathfinder" name, from CNN to Loony Tunes to Babylon 5. It was a disaster, from most accounts.
I was a regular on their Babylon 5 forum, and to this day I have great memories of the people there, and I prefer that board's layout to others like Slashcode and UBB. Unfortunately, Time-Warner basically thought of the boards as a place to get free PR and marketing, and their management of the boards was pretty poor.
The admins did not do much to try to foster a community, and they often seemed to be fighting with the users. I remember they would occasionally delete some sections, and force changess on the board with no warning. It was like the whole BB system was just a forgotten corner of the T-W empire, and we were tossed about by high-level decisions of their marketing dept. The whole board ended up closing with short notice before the end of season 4, I believe. That's when I discovered the joys of Usenet and rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated, but that's another story...
Anyone here from the old Pathfinder Bab5 boards? I was ZoqFotPik, and that was my first BBS...
Isnt the Wash Post owned by the Rev Moon ?
Would get more hits if it let GoogleNews search its articles.
The Muddled Maternal Murder Series A Washington Post investigation loses its way. By Jack Shafer Posted Monday, Dec. 20, 2004, at 7:21 PM PT Bad timing dude. Perhaps Jack should start checking the job ads?
Since when does a daily newspaper cost 25 cents? Most are at least 50 cents if not a dollar.
This is my sig.
Another NYT article says :"Although Slate has never achieved steady profitability, it is credited with helping to shape Web publishing as well as pioneering the use of hyperlinks and Web logs."
What? Did I just pioneer the use of hyperlinks?
Most of Microsoft would probably agree themselves that Firefox is better, even if the boss wouldn't admit it. Just because a few things slip under the radar of someone who lives miles away doesn't mean they're independant.
I can see it now:
* This story is posted to slashdot
* Slate gets slashdotted
* The head of the washington post wants to see this website they just paid "millions of dollars" for
* "503: Service Unavailable!! "
* "We paid what for this thing?"
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Try looking at subscription prices, not news stand prices. That will be more in the quarter range.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
From Jeff Jarvis' blog:
Howard just called to get react from the two-headed hydra I am as Media Man by day and Blog Boy by night. I said it's a good thing for both; they fit well together, not unlike Dow Jones and Marketwatch. Kurtz said the Post's rationale is that it will bring them more traffic while they bring Slate better ad sales (and thus the first taste of profitablity, they hope).
But I also said that the Post could have met the same goals without the cost and without the risk by establishing with a network of citizens' media, selling ads on and getting traffic from and extending their reach through the best blogs, which can then stay independent.
That requires thinking in a distributed way and that's hard for the old centralized marketplaces to do.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Wasn't that a Doc Smith novel?
Does anyone remember the site sidewalk.com from the mid 90's? It was a great site for local information on what is going on in your city (at the time I lived in NYC). The writing was excellent, eccentric and entertaining.
/. I guess :-)
Then MS sold it to Citysearch. Within a month they got rid of most of their good writers. What was once a fun and edgy site became a boring advert driven portal. It has not been the same since. To this day it has the all excitement of the yellow pages.
I hope I'm wrong, but past experience does not look promising. Oh well, more time to read
OS X, Linux, Tivo, Amiga, my fascination with cult-like technologies would intrigue any psychiatrist.
... why Neilson NetRatings even exist?
I guess because it's SO difficult to determine if anyone is hitting your website, right? Sheesh.
Can we have a new moderation, (-1 Gratuitous anti-China slam)? You post something like this for every single article.
Slate: Home, News & Politics, Arts & Life, Business, sports, Technology, Travel & Foord.
WashingtonPost.com:
REGISTER NOW -- IT'S FREE AND IT'S REQUIRED
Any theories why Slate gets more traffic?
That was the url for zmag itself. Here is the ZBLOG url
eat shiat and bark at the moon
You're right--I've noticed this prolific Anonymous Coward fellow posting all sorts of racist, spurious and otherwise idiotic comments on every article /. posts!
Hey... wait a minute...