Happy Birthday, Dear Slate

So a little online magazine is all grown up. On Saturday, Slate celebrated its 10th anniversary. From a one-year-old to a ten-year-old, we'd like to wish Slate a happy 10th birthday.

At the Huffington Post, we're still in the infancy stage, where people are regularly amazed at every milestone -- "isn't that cute, they're walking!" or "look at them, they're potty-trained!" But Slate is so grown up now -- one of their alums (Frank Foer) is running a non-virtual publication (The New Republic), and they're hiring columnists (John Dickerson) from Time magazine, of all places.

Is Slate still new media? Is it old new media? New old media? Medium-new old media? It's always been something of a hybrid, and although it seems odd to imagine the media landscape without it, such was not always the case.

Though we had no shortage of doubters when launching the Huffington Post, it was nothing compared to the naysayers Slate faced -- including myself. I remember when Michael Kinsley told me he was going to Redmond, Washington (where's that?) to edit something called an online magazine (what's that?), I looked at him as if he were crazy. You mean it would only be on people's computers? It seemed so...unsubstantial. Like a fall from grace, a downward move. Well, good luck, I stammered. (Michael's been gracious enough not to remind me of all this since my own leap into cyberspace.)

But after all the gossip and chatter died down there was, you know, the actual product. And I was instantly hooked. Though at first not on the online version, but on the print version that was mailed to subscribers who weren't yet ready to navigate Slate online.

So much of how to do content online seems axiomatic these days, but there was a time when it wasn't at all clear. And, in fact, a lot of how to tailor content to the fact that it was appearing online was thought through by Slate editors. Which was why I came to love sections like "Today's Papers," which summarizes -- and has links to -- the top stories in all the major newspapers. Or the "Breakfast Table," which consisted of a week-long e-mail exchange between two or more people. (A few months after it was born, I did the Breakfast Table with Harry Shearer.) Or the "Diarist," in which one person would write for a week on anything. And as Jacob Weisberg, Slate's editor, wrote in his anniversary piece: "Slate's most regular voices, including Dahlia Lithwick, David Plotz, Daniel Gross, Fred Kaplan, Emily Yoffe, William Saletan, Bryan Curtis, Seth Stevenson, and Jack Shafer, are hardly exhibitionists. But if you've been reading them over the years, you've gotten to know them in a way that's hard to ever know anyone who writes for the New York Times." Which is also what I most love about the relationship between our bloggers and our readers.

The synergy between Slate and the Huffington Post includes something else: our joint custody of the Kaus brothers. Slate gets Mickey, we get Stephen, and we've agreed to switch every ten years.

So how does a ten-year-old new-/old-media publication celebrate its birthday? Why, with a panel, of course. (Love of panels is something both old and new media share.) This one was held in New York at the definitely old-media New York Public Library. The subject was the ambitiously titled "Online Media and the Future of Journalism." The panelists included former editor of Time Inc. Norman Pearlstine, New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, Weisberg and me, and was moderated by, of course, Michael Kinsley. When Jake first invited me to be on the panel, I thought we could do it in our bathrobes from our computers at home. What? Get on a plane? But isn't the whole point of being online not having to do that? I got overruled.

We never really got to the bottom of exactly which form journalism's future would take, but you'll be relieved to hear we all agreed that it does have a future. For those who can't get enough of meta-media talk, there's a good summary of the panel at Editor & Publisher. (Also check out FishBowlNY and the Sydney Morning Herald.)

At the party afterwards, old media -- Charlie Rose, Mark Whitaker, Nicholas Lemann, Katharine Seelye among them -- paid respect to new media, while a decidedly not new-media band played on.

So clearly, and happily, Slate is here to stay. And now that it is firmly established -- and on the edge of adolescence (a time typically associated with changes) -- I'd like to offer my one bit of advice. I realize Slate's brand is to be iconoclastic, irreverent, wry, witty and smart. But, in their second decade, I wouldn't mind seeing Slatesters occasionally get really passionate, bear down on a topic, get hot and heavy and not be afraid of going over the top. Being cool and steady all the time is a little bit like sex on SSRIs -- it's still fun, but it's just harder to reach the tipping point.

All I ask is that the thing they pick to be passionate about is not Meet the Press -- we want Tim all to ourselves.