Kinsley in Cyberspace: A Lot Is on the Line

In one of Microsoft’s hushed industrial parks outside Seattle, Michael Kinsley spends his days busily fomenting a counter-revolution in cyberspace.

Within a few weeks, the former CNN combatant, columnist and New Republic editor is scheduled to launch Slate--an online current affairs magazine designed more for ordinary readers than techno-wizards. And even though the details are secret (one small scoop: its borders are a deep plum color), Kinsley is at the center of a storm of cyber-hype, the focus of an angry debate about the essence of journalism on the Internet.

On one side are the “Websters” who cruise easily through the World Wide Web, the now-dominant portion of the Internet that can transmit graphics, video and audio as well as text. Many see Kinsley as a hostile interloper--an arrogant time-traveler trying to turn back the clock to the age of paper and ink. On the other side are those who wander through the strange highways of the Internet and wonder if there is anything out there worth the time and effort.

“Look, cyberspace is a big space,” says Kinsley as he prepares for the sneers about Slate from seasoned Internet browsers. “There’s room for everybody. I’m not looking for the true cross,” he answers quickly. “I’m just looking for one way to do it.”

In many ways, the Internet is a medium defining itself, an untamed universe that has yet to be domesticated by any of the newspapers, magazines, television networks and other entities experimenting with online products.

Like others gambling in this new universe, Kinsley is trying to find his niche on the Net. Unlike others, he is playing with much higher stakes: the full faith and credit of Microsoft, and the hopes and fears of his professional colleagues.

For Microsoft, Kinsley represents a leap of faith, that a “content provider,” in this case a journalist from the old order of print and television, can successfully mate with the company’s whiz-bang methods of organizing and accessing information. The hope is that Kinsley will create a place so attractive that large numbers of people will subscribe, thus making a profit for Microsoft while establishing a new forum of communication in the new medium of cyberspace.

For Kinsley’s print and broadcast colleagues, his adventure is their suspense. If he has a future on the Internet, then maybe they do as well.

“The one thing that’s really clear on the Internet--if you pull up to 30,000 feet to see what’s going on--is that it’s all up for grabs out there,” says Paul Saffo, a director of the Institute for the Future, a research and consulting firm in Menlo Park. “And when you have a new medium like this, you enter an era of heretics. Kinsley has already shown us he can fit in this category. He showed he was good at twisting tails as a member of the media. Now, the question is whether he can create something himself.”

Heretic is not a bad word for the 45-year-old Kinsley, even though in person he is gentler, tending to seem more mischievous than his combative public persona. But clearly, after years of debating John H. Sununu and Patrick J. Buchanan on CNN’s “Crossfire,” he is not afraid of courting controversy, especially from the establishment--whatever that is at this stage in the evolution of the Internet.

Thus, in interviews on his project, Kinsley has been prone to criticize what’s already available online. “Most of what’s on the Web is crap,” he said on CNN before he joined Microsoft six months ago. Needless to say, this does not go over too well on the Web.

‘Online Newbie’

Feed magazine, an online publication that some consider a competitor and perhaps precursor to Slate, recently attributed Kinsley’s criticisms to the “willful ignorance of an online newbie.” It recently railed that: “All the evidence suggests that Michael Kinsley’s uber-zine, Slate--due on these silicone shores in mid-June--will continue Microsoft’s tried-and-true corporate strategy: first, let the other guys do the real innovation, then swoop down on the market and cop all their moves”

“There is a huge debate going on now about the true nature of the Internet,” Kinsley says. “It’s like asking, what is the true and essential nature of paper? Is it the essence of paper that makes Foreign Affairs or . . . Penthouse or House and Garden? No. It’s what you do with it.”

When he describes journalism on the Internet, Kinsley sees two basic areas: so-called “shovelware,” products that the established media “shovel” from their newspapers, magazines or networks onto Web pages; and more creative “zines,” Internet-spawned magazines that draw more fully on the technology and graphics of the Web and frequently are written with what Kinsley calls “attitude.”

Slate aims to be “somewhere in between these two,” he says. He pauses, Jack Benny-style, and adds: “But I must say, we’re not straining to be hip.”

With concrete data about Slate are mostly a house secret, Kinsley can become as foggy about it as the rolling clouds that soften most of the edges around this area of the Northwest. Still, it is clear that even after five months in Redmond, where he admits being dazzled by the technical possibilities at Microsoft, Kinsley sees his mission more as a traditional editor of a more traditional magazine than some of those up on the Web.

Frustrations Persist

As Kinsley and colleagues from the old media know, exploring the computer world can be exhilarating and frustrating. The process still requires more patience than busy Americans can muster; most computers don’t cruise on the Internet; they crawl. Moreover, reading is often done in short bursts, and few computers can be carried as easily to the couch as a paperback--all of which gives some users the impression that this may be the medium of tomorrow, but not yet of today.

Such frustrations will disappear, the computer people predict. And they suggest that soon even old Luddites, after a few tries, will realize that going from paper magazines to Web zines is a little like leaping from photos to movies. Zines, using equipment not yet used by most computer owners, can show moving pictures. A singer can warble a few bars, a poet intone his latest couplets. A few minutes after a long essay or article goes on the Web, users can debate its worthiness in online forums.

In the meantime, there is some suspicion that for longer, more complicated material, many browsers resort to printing out what’s on the computer screen for convenience. Thus, the publisher launches the material on the Internet; the computer distributes it; and the customer does the printing.

Although Kinsley wants to court the younger generation with Slate, he clearly is aiming at these secret web-printers, at least in the beginning. “I’m using print metaphors,” says Kinsley, who also calls his customers “readers,” for example, not browsers and certainly not scanners.

And the people working for him include “writers” like Michael Lewis, Nicholas Lemann and economist Paul Krugman. Editors also are carefully plucked from the world of print. Jodie Allen, formerly the editor of the Washington Post’s opinion section, is his Washington editor. Jack Shafer, former editor of the San Francisco Weekly, will be deputy editor. Judith Shulevitz, a former columnist and editor for New York magazine, will be New York editor.

Kinsley’s conversations with writers and editors tend to focus on ideas and issues. When Allen visited recently, Kinsley warned her about the seductions of the computer that can waste hours of time and intellectual energy. As they huddled, in one of Microsoft’s tiny warren-like cubicles, they tried to focus more on economics and defense technology than on hyperlinks and megabytes.

But it may be a constant struggle for Kinsley to keep his bearings here. At a recent meeting of Microsoft executives, he was asked about progress on his “show.” “It’s not a show,” he corrected. “It’s a magazine.’ ”

“Some say that the Internet changes the nature of everything, and some say it is a new way to do the same old stuff,” Kinsley says. “I’m starting with the assumption that it’s closer to the second than the first.

“Frankly, there are some people--the true Web enthusiasts--who when they check out Slate are not going to be impressed, and I’m steeling myself for the what’s-the-big-deal reaction from those people . . . But I really think that this has to be something that ordinary people can be interested in, and I think their tastes are more traditional.”

Weekly, at First

Kinsley recognizes that nothing on the Internet stays as comfortably static as paper. A normal question--like how often do you publish?--is difficult to answer.

“Basically it will be a weekly; at least at first,” he says. Different articles will go up at different times, “when they’re ready.” And pieces will appear with a date that shows when they first were posted. After a while they will be moved to the retrievable archives. (“Composted,” he says with a smile.)

Kinsley, a Harvard graduate and Rhodes scholar who was editor of Harper’s magazine in the early 1980s, last year began showing an interest in an online magazine--sending a proposal first to Time editor-in-chief Norman Pearlstine. When Newsweek carried an item about how Microsoft was trying to expand onto the Internet, Kinsley called Redmond and within a few weeks, the deal was struck.

For Kinsley, the deal will mean earning a reported $200,000, which is less than he made as a host on “Crossfire.” For Microsoft, the software giant with $6 billion in annual sales, Slate is only one of several efforts to expand beyond technology and into content.

“It’s not like Slate is one of the mega-projects here at Microsoft,” says company vice president Russell Siegelman. “Frankly, our main objective is not to make a profit in the near-term. It’s to establish a best-of-breed Website in the content or editorial area.”

Kinsley has said that because this is Microsoft’s first venture into publishing, he has pressed them to make certain he has editorial independence--including independence from advertising, marketing and even public relations. So far, his trust in Microsoft has been rewarded. Whether it will remain so after he does something outrageous, like perhaps criticizing a project by Chairman Bill Gates, is still open.

On the less-philosophical side looms the question of who will read Slate? And in a few weeks when Microsoft starts to charge for Slate, who will pay for it?

Siegelman hopes that of the 10 million to 15 million people he estimates regularly use the Web, between 100,000 and 400,000 would become regular readers.

“With Slate we only need a couple of hundred thousand, and it can be a smashing success,” he added.

There may be about 1 million people now using the computer who are the “highbrow achievers” who might be interested in a magazine like Slate, says Gary Arlen, president of Arlen Communications, a telecommunications consulting firm in Bethesda, Md.

But achieving success, if it comes, may well be two or even three years away. Now, the Web is crawling with sites that are competing for the user’s time.

“It’s kind of like the Wild West out there, a very free market,” says Jack Fuller, publisher of the Chicago Tribune and author of a new book on journalism and the Internet. “What Kinsley brings to Microsoft is a brand name, and the brand name is his name. That’s important because there is so much stuff out there that it’s all very difficult to quantify and understand.”

Nobody knows quite how much stuff is really out there. One recent estimate was that there are 30 million pages on the Web. Libraries, universities, established publications and corporations--most of the nation’s institutions--already have a toe in this huge electronic ocean. Moreover, thousands of individuals have established home pages, often a patchwork of photos and writing that serve as a kind of personal scrapbook.

So how does the consumer figure out what to read--whether to pick Slate, the new kid on the block, or some of its more established competition like, Salon or Feed or Time or the New York Times or the Irish Times or Mother Jones or HotWired? At this point, the uninitiated browser can feel a little like an ant trying to make sense of a mountain range.

This chaotic era will not last long, the experts predict. Very soon consumers will decide which sites they like and which are more trouble than they are worth.

Mark Kvamme, president of the CKS Group, a multimedia marking firm in Cupertino, told newspaper publishers recently in New York that most users are beginning to shop on the Internet the way they do at the newsstand. “Soon the average person will have seven to 10 sites that they will go to regularly,” he says. “And people are just now beginning to choose which ones.”

At this point, it may have been smart politics for Microsoft to lure a big name from the old journalism world to start an upscale magazine in the new one. But eventually Microsoft, like hundreds of other corporations experimenting on the Internet, is going to have to figure out how to make such publications profitable.

One of the favorite cliches is that corporations are spending billions on the Web to make millions.

Learning Experiment

So far, the question of profit appears to be low on the priority list, at least for Kinsley’s corporate sponsor. As Siegelman explains it: “In the long term, this could be profitable. In the near term we’re considering Slate a learning experiment. Nobody’s making money yet on the Web in the short term. Why should we be different from anybody else?”

Advertising is just one example of how the old systems must adapt to this new medium. The reader has to point and click a mouse on an ad to see it. As daunting as that sounds for some merchandisers, the medium also has allowed advertisers such new devices as games, or computerized catalogs that allow you to see a shirt from all angles.

What advertisers pay at this stage is fluid. Prices may range from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands per ad.

“But this problem reflects the problem of the whole new medium,” says consultant Arlen. “How do you charge for space in cyberspace? The rules are just being invented all over the place on this.”

Microsoft’s methods for billing its readers and the cost of the magazine are company secrets. (Billing estimates are $20 to $30 per year). When asked, Kinsley defends the right to charge for Slate--a subject that has put him in conflict with those who think that everything on cyberspace should be free.

When he steers away from the details of his new magazine, Kinsley sounds less like a corporate being and more like an adventurer. For many of his friends back East, watching Kinsley leave the warm glow of television and the accolades of Washington seem ludicrous until he begins talking about the chance to stake a claim in the new world.

As he describes his thinking over the last five months: “It’s like starting a magazine by saying: ‘First, you chop down the trees.’ ”