Ran into a paywall on Slate, don’t remember that before. Been seeing talk around over Slate as it tries to figure out what it’s doing in the current media environment.

I remember Slate before it was even known for “slatepitches”, it was just like one of two publications made for the Internet. Salon had the Condé Nast lush, well-paid name writer pieces. Slate, which was actually part of a Microsoft venture into media team-ups (that’s also what the MS in MSNBC was) was thinner, a major feature was “Today’s Papers” where someone just read The NY Times, WaPo, WSJ, USA Today, etc and summarized what was interesting in them. Sometimes this would be where you found links, before the Twitter/Facebook timeline (or even the Reddit/Digg front page). Sometimes the stories weren’t even available online yet.

Salon seemed to run out of money and implode in the early 2000s. They started a subscription program. I did, but unlike the (surely pricey) quality stuff before it was Bush Derangement Syndrome stuff they could get nobodies to turn out by the bucketload, I think some of the remaining original quality decanted to Slate.