Slate Struggles for Relevancy

Slate has been live for 14 years but, as the New York Observer's Nick Summers reports, the unprofitable online magazine is now struggling to remain relevant, increase its traffic, and embrace new technologies. Slate’s “page views for October were up just 6 percent to 83.6 million, and unique visitors were down 21 percent,” according to the Observer, while “over the same time period, Gawker has more than doubled its audience, and the Huffington Post has a global readership roughly three times as large.” Said Slate Editor David Plotz: "If we don't think of this as an urgent problem, we risk not being central to the conversation." Jacob Weisberg, chairman and editor in chief of Slate Group, owned by The Washington Post Company, is optimistic: “I feel really lucky to be in on this revolution. It's why most of us came to Slate in the first place—to invent a new kind of journalism and build a business around it.”