Santa Slate
: Howard Kurtz just reported that The Washington Post has bought Slate. Here’s Slate Editor Jacob Weisberg’s announcement.
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.
