Microsoft has just put money into an upmarket new webzine. It's called Slate, as in "How's your latest project coming along?" "'s' late." Slate is an American political/current affairs magazine edited by Michael Kinsley, a leading liberal journalist and former editor of the New Republic. The true webzine exists only on the world wide web (on www.slate. com.), and that's the case with this one-up to a point. You can, if you wish, download it and print it on to boring old paper, or download it to your hard disk and read it at your leisure. You can also give them your e-mail address and get it that way.
Kinsley has brought in a whole raft of distinguished writers, courtesy of the Gates shilling. He insists that they have full editorial independence and believes that it will not be long before Slate's 22-strong staff becomes financially independent. "If the web can make serious journalism more easily self-supporting, that is a great gift from technology to democracy," he says in his opening editorial of 2,000-plus words. But Prospect need not worry; the average length of article is about 700 words, which Kinsley believes is about the maximum length for reading on screen.
Only in the on-line world could an editor declare, as Kinsley does, that Slate is "basically weekly... But there will be something new to read almost every day."
Bob Shrum will be running a weekly column which deconstructs the main television political advertising of the presidential election. On the web, he is able to show us the advertisements he chooses to write about. In the first edition it was that rather dull one from Robert Dole reminding the US electorate that Bill Clinton had not only put up taxes on petrol, but he had also apologised for doing so. In a touchingly practical demonstration of web awareness you are warned before you click that, with a 14.4k modem, it takes 14 minutes to download the video of the (30 second) ad. You are given the option of only listening to the soundtrack, which arrives more or less instantaneously.
Slate is rather classy. Every issue will have a new poem read aloud by the poet (Seamus Heaney featured in the launch issue). Slate even has its own anthem. You can listen to it by hitting the link: it's called "You meet the nicest people in your dreams" by Fats Waller. Will Slate catch on? Who knows? But there will certainly be many such magazines to come, as the operation of the net speeds up and access times become virtually instantaneous (as they already can be with ISDNs or kilostreams).
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sad news. any thoughts I might have entertained about a career in the British army have been dashed. Attracted by the publicity surrounding the military's latest recruiting wheeze, I went to visit their new web site at http://army.mod.uk where, to test my aptitude, I was invited to lead a mission. In Norway we had to reach base camp by nightfall but one of my men twisted his ankle badly. What was I to do? I radioed for help. This was the wrong answer and I was sent back to think again. I protest. It seemed to me a perfectly logical thing to do. I was only told that there was a bad blizzard closing in after I had made my choice.
On manoeuvres in the Americas one of my men was shot and I flunked again when I rushed to give him first aid instead of killing all my enemies first. It's a rough old world. I could have been a contender.
There's an awful lot of military material out there on the web. Yahoo brought back 108 references. I wandered into Fort Sill in Oklahoma, headquarters of field artillery (http://sill.www.army.mil/). Their mission, they tell us, is to "destroy, neutralise or suppress the enemy by cannon, rocket and missile fire." Nothing about trying to understand the enemy's point of view, or empathising-only destroying, neutralising and suppressing. In case you'd forgotten what that means, you are greeted on the opening page by an armoured rocket launcher in full fury, spitting its deadly arrows in a huge, fiery explosion. If such pictures attract you, then I'm sure you ought not to be allowed to don a uniform.
Rather comically you are warned as you enter the site that it is "monitored at all times" and that "unauthorised access is prohibited by Public Law 99-474 (The Computer Frauds and Abuse Act, 1986)." Was mine an "unauthorised access"? I don't know, but if my column does not appear in the next edition, fear the worst; and if you are ever in Oklahoma, visit me.
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i have often thought about and felt sorry for the guys who refused to give the Beatles a recording contract at the beginning of the 1960s. And what about the Leeds United scout who turned down a young George Best? Tim Berners-Lee has to be added to this doleful list. A Brit working in Switzerland, he created the programme which was to become the world wide web. Step forward a young American, Marc Andreessen, who co-founded Netscape on the back of Tim's work. Netscape was floated on the New York stock exchange last year and at one point it was valued at $2.7 billion. How much did Tim get out of this? Zilch. He had given away his programme to anyone and everyone, more or less as soon as he had devised it. But things were different then. Way back-in 1991. n
John Carr
