Slate magazine: Review and rate

If you like to catch up on all the news but are not so keen on regular newspapers, then visiting one of the many news and current affairs web-based journals can offer a great alternative. One such example is the Slate magazine. Here follows a brief outline and review of this popular service.

Overview

Slate magazine was originally founded by the former New Republic editor Michael Kinsley in 1996. It began its life under the stewardship of Microsoft who incorporated it into the MSN service. However, since December 2004, the magazine has been owned by the Washington Post Company, which four years after having established a web-specific publishing group, christened the Slate group, passed the everyday running of this US-based magazine into their hands. Free content A couple of years after its foundation, the owners of the magazine decided to charge an annual subscription fee that was set at $19.95. This made it one of the first sites, with the notable exception of certain pornography services, to do so. However, the idea proved particularly unpopular and after receiving very few subscriptions, the site reverted to free content less than a year later.

Popular features

The Slate is certainly more than just a political magazine and has several very popular regular features and columns that include the informative 'Explainer' section as well as a lively advice column known as 'Dear Prudence'. Although a lot of the articles are relatively short, recent times have seen an increase in much more involved and longer pieces.

Podcast

Since 2005, the magazine has been running its own podcast that is overseen by the current editor Andy Bowers and which regularly features lively and interesting stories carefully selected from around the site. Various topics are covered through this podcast including politics, culture and sport. In addition, there is a special movie review podcast known as 'Slate's Spoiler Special'. There also now exists (since 2007 in fact) an alternative online video magazine that is known as 'Slate V'. This video magazine takes a different slant on most of the topics covered in the written magazine.

Opinion

In 2011, Slate was to receive four nominations at the National Magazine Awards and eventually ran out the winners of the General Excellence Award. On a personal level, this site has become one of my favourites for catching up on the latest news, most of which are carefully and interestingly analysed. The look of the site is fantastic and it uses some cool technology to great affect. While my favourite section remains the Explainer column, all the other contents are well-organised, unique and while often thought-provoking remains fairly light in tone.