Can They Hack It?

“Who’s the fairest hack in all of journalism?” To find out, the online journal Slate (https://www.slate.com) has invited four writers to compete for that dubious distinction in its first Hackathlon, a series of four weekly events designed to “showcase journalistic glibness, intellectual sleight of hand, greed under pressure, and a total disregard for what the rest of the world thinks.”

The idea, says Slate Deputy Editor Jack Shafer, is to celebrate hack work--writing for maximum effect with the minimal effort--not denigrate it. “You write and leave a cloud of dust behind you,” he said. “There’s no torture to a hack. A hack doesn’t agonize and turn it in late; a hack realizes that the deadline is the greatest muse.”

That and a check. Each week the hackathletes--the New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell, the New Republic’s Hanna Rosin, the New York Times’ Michael Specter and freelancer Geoffrey Wheatcroft--line up at their computers and wait for an e-mail message giving them a cheat sheet of information from which they must assemble a story in two hours. The cheat sheets, noted Shafer, take more time to assemble than the hack work, “but the hack work, of course, is much more artful.” The results are posted for readers to vote on.

The first test of journalistic prowess--and the ability to stay awake--was to compose a New York Times op-ed on NATO expansion, which the Timesman won hands down. The second event was to craft a New Yorker “Talk of the Town” piece on a charity fund-raiser, in which the New Yorker scribe bested the competition. Then came the challenge of writing the top of a Vanity Fair profile on Richard Gere, which was won by Specter.

The final event--a breaking news story--will be posted this week. Like real life, the winning hack will not reap riches and fame but merely the chance to return next year to face three new challengers.

“But as you consider whether to vote for me, remember this,” Gladwell writes in an introduction to the art of hackery. “If I lose, it will not bother me in the slightest. The way I see it, I spend eight hours over the course of a month and Slate writes me a check. Trust me. It’s just another job.”

Spoken like a true hack.