Slate

Mondo Times editors    Boulder Colorado USA

Posted at 9:56am on Thursday, February 4th, 2010

Answering J.D. Salinger's Mail

Slate reported on February 3, 2010:

"On my first day of work at Harold Ober Associates—one of New York's oldest and most storied literary agencies—I was shown the enormous, outmoded IBM Selectric on which I would type letters for my boss, the clunky Dictaphone that would provide me with the content of those letters, and the vast metal cabinets in which I would file all correspondence with authors. I was then escorted into the dimly lit corner office occupied by Phyllis Westberg, the company's president, whom I would be assisting.

"Sit down, sit down," said Phyllis. "We need," she said, as I arranged myself in the chair across from her large wooden desk, "to talk about Jerry." I nodded in an attempt to mask the fact that I had no idea what she was talking about. This was 1996, and the first "Jerry" to come to mind was Seinfeld. It was only later, when I noticed a wall of books opposite my new desk—all with plain spines, in maroon, yellow, and white—that I realized the Jerry in question was Jerome David Salinger.

"Now, his address and his phone number are in the Rolodex on your desk," Phyllis explained. "People are going to call and ask for his number. You think it won't happen, but it will." She paused to light another cigarette. "Grad students. Reporters. Just … people. They may try to trick you or manipulate you. They may give you some song-and-dance routine." She laughed a throaty laugh, then fixed me sharply in her pale blue eyes. "But you can never, ever give out that address. Or that phone number. NEVER. OK?" I nodded and gave her my most professional smile. "Because it's happened before," she told me. "I've had assistants who just don't understand."

The full story:
http://www.slate.com/id/2243299/

Mondo Times editors    Boulder Colorado USA

Posted at 1:29pm on Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009

December 22, 2009: Slate's Jack Shafer says that electronic tablets and apps won't save journalism:

"As someone who earns his living blasting targets with words, I can't help but applaud the rush of the magazine and newspaper industry to save itself exploiting a new publishing platform. But all the hoopla reminds me of the hype that greeted previous electronic publishing technologies, chronicled so well by Pablo J. Boczkowski in his 2005 book Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers.

Publishers spent hundreds of millions of dollars shoveling print content into videotex, audiotex, fax, CD-ROM technologies, and such proprietary online services as America Online, Prodigy, CompuServe, and Ziff Interchange.

The CD-ROM and its fellow technologies flopped for a variety of reasons. Too expensive, too cumbersome, too wedded to a propriety platform, and not much fun."

The full story:
http://www.slate.com/id/2239557/

Mondo Times editors    Boulder Colorado USA

Posted at 9:56am on Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

December 2, 2009: Jack Shafer of Slate explains why stories about Tiger Woods (and the Salahis) are "as irresistible as an open bag of Doritos":

"Our obsession with the Woods story is easily decoded. In a 1997 GQ profile of Woods, Charles P. Pierce documented that the 21-year-old phenom was as normal off the golf course as he was exceptional on it. He liked scoring with the ladies. Back then, Woods had a reputation as a "chaser" and a "hound."

There's absolutely nothing wrong with a sportsman being a chaser or a hound, of course. I don't know of any well-adjusted, young heterosexual man who would have conducted himself differently than the bachelor Woods allegedly did. Like it or not, lots of woman find famous athletes attractive.

But for business reasons—Buick, Nike, Gatorade, Gillette, EA Sports, and Accenture being among them—Woods decided to exfoliate from his public image of all things base, carnal, and even personal.

Given how desperately we want to believe in a human god, it didn't take much peddling from Team Tiger for us to accept Woods as a modern deity.

So now that the "real" Woods has been revealed as a wild bone-daddy who behaves more like your out-of-work, alcoholic brother-in-law than an object of worship, we feel cheated.

And we'll keep consuming Woods news until our picture of him more closely conforms with reality.

We love to crown kings and cultivate messiahs. And then kill them."

The full story:
http://www.slate.com/id/2237247/

Mondo Times editors    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 1:58pm on Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

Slate is doing away with "Today's Papers" and introducing a new "news aggregator" called "The Slatest," editor David Plotz announced on August 24, 2009:

"After 12 years, and almost 4,400 editions, we are ending "Today's Papers." We are also ending "In Other Magazines." This is like unplugging grandpa from the ventilator: excruciating but necessary. We believe that "The Slatest" preserves what is best about "Today's Papers" and "In Other Magazines" but is faster and more relevant.

So what is "The Slatest"? The heart of "The Slatest" is the Slate Dozen: A list of the 12 most important news stories, blog entries, magazine features, and Web videos of the moment. The Slate Dozen is published three times a day during the week: at 7 a.m., at noon, and at 5 p.m. This three-times-a-day pace is perhaps the most important element of "The Slatest," and it grew out of an insight from Slate "Pressbox" columnist Jack Shafer. In an editorial meeting one day, Jack pointed out that the news cycle is no longer daily but neither is it continuous. Rather, it has three parts.

Overnight, newspapers launch the news. They publish stories clarifying the events of yesterday; they break their own investigative stories; they print zeitgeist-defining feature articles and op-eds. The morning brings Phase 2, when Web media reacts to the news. Bloggers and other sites respond to the news that broke overnight, and newsmakers push back against or try to exploit these stories. Phase 3, the buildup, comes in the afternoon, as the events of the day unfold—congressional action, a presidential gaffe, turmoil in Asia. The media break this news, and analyze how it fits together with yesterday's top stories. Opinion makers try to shape how the day's events will play on the night's cable shows and in tomorrow's newspapers. The next morning, it all starts over again."

The full story:
http://slate.com/id/2225909/