Jeremy Zawodny is scratching his head over an odd thread in the Slate/Washington Post coverage:
I’m catching up on e-mail as my flight is delayed in O’Hare and came across the following tidbit about Slate Magazine in the latest Edupage mailing: “Although the magazine only recently achieved break-even status on revenue of about $6 million per year, Slate won a National Magazine Award for its editorial content, and mainstream news organizations frequently cite it. The publication is also given credit for shaping Web publishing and introducing the use of hyperlinks and Web logs.“ (Emphasis mine.) Am I reading that right? Edupage wants me to believe that Slate is responsible for introducing hyperlinks to the world? I’m having a very, very hard time believing that. Am I alone? |
No, Jeremy, you’re not alone. The source of this odd statement is almost certainly David Carr’s New York Times piece, which included the following passage: “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.”
Carr’s “pioneering” was marginally closer to reality than Edupage’s feeble substitution of “introducing.” But neither is particularly correct.
I sincerely doubt anyone at Slate would have claimed to have introduced either hyperlinks or blogs to the world. Slate was in fact rather shy of linking for the longest time — in the early days, the links in each article were typically segregated in a little afterword section. As for blogs, Slate gave Mickey Kaus’s blog a home at a time when, quite possibly, only three people in the Washington Post newsroom knew what a blog was; but at the same time, blogs were already a widespread format, and widely known to the web-aware world.
Slate deserves tons of credit for many things; after a lot of false starts in the first few years, it became quite adept at devising creative Web-native formats for writers (like the e-mail exchanges). But “pioneering the use of hyperlinks and Web logs” is just not an accurate statement.
I imagine Carr meant to write something more like “The publication is also given credit for raising the profile of hyperlinks and blogs in the media and government circles that constitute some of its core readership.” Or if he didn’t, he should have.
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