salon vs. slate vs. atlantic

if slate can't break even what good is it to wapo?

i dont read any of these and thought the atlantic was a 'magazine'

well wapo cant break even either

yeah i guess slate is prob a better long term bet than a newspaper

Every time I visit Slate they have some challopsy article featured, like "Why Beer is Better Warm than Cold"

― President Keyes, Thursday, March 8, 2012 4:23 PM (3 hours ago)

ha!

Until looking at this poll I am p sure I thought slate and salon were the same thing. Same looking websites! Same looking name!

Like thank god slate is not on trial and I'm not an eyewitness testimony.

even their stupid favicons are borderline indistinguishable

i think the commenters on slate are marginally saner than the ones on salon

Greenwald, Pareene, Seitz, duh

Seitz has moved to the Vulture, which brings Salon down in my estimation greatly. Still, I'll vote for it because they occasionally have some good articles, I don't read the Atlantic very often, and Slate's Cultural Gabfest is so terrible and annoying I wind up listening to at least 15 minutes every week before I go nuts and want to scream and then i go back to it just because I can't believe how awful they are.

though if I'm honest - now that Seitz is gone - I only ever read these when they're linked by someone on Twitter/fb/here.

from an older thread abt salon:

worst part of salon: the articles that say "i wondered and wondered about whether i was a bad parent for reasons x, y, and z and then realized how wrong conventional wisdom is because i am really a great parent, though i am not perfect because part of good writing is laying out your imperfections." aaaaaarrrgh.
― Maria (Maria), Sunday, July 3, 2005 2:16 PM (6 years ago)

I don't know enough about the Atlantic, but Salon and Slate both suffer from that middle-class "am I ethical enough?" bullshit. They sometimes come off as a parody of what the cliché "Guardian readers" are in the UK. That's why the Slate Culture Gabfest is so goddamn infuriating. There are so many things they treat as "ooh, I know it looks kind of stupid and I can't believe I'm saying it but I really like x".

When I was in college I had the vague notion of wanting to be a magazine journalist, and my family referred me to a friend who was a moderately successful magazine journalist, and I remember him being like "you should contact this guy Will Saletan, he's doing this thing called Slate on *the internet*" etc. I had never heard of it at the time, and I was so fucking green and dumb that I just e-mailed Will Saletan and basically said "Hi C____ S_____ said I should e-mail you about an internship can I have one?" and didn't attach a resume or anything.

http://www.movieprop.com/tvandmovie/reviews/slidingdoors.jpg

atlantic is more thinking smart thoughts abt the world by inhuman people who have been to lots of college and twitter but not the actual world

― lag∞n, Thursday, March 8, 2012 5:36 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

atlantic has maybe 3 writers i read, slate has 2, salon has 1, so atlantic.

I was thinking that you could make a really great site by combining writers from these 3 and you could also make the worst site on the internet

what if there were one stop shop for greenwald, megan mcardle and slate cultural criticism. wouldn't that be your homepage too?

how about a daily back and forth with joan walsh and katie roiphe?

Slate, easily. A bunch of my favourite online writers, incl John Dickerson, Dana Stevens, Jody Rosen, and very enjoyable podcasts. Don't understand the hate for their arts coverage at all.

Used to read Salon pre-subscription experiment but I don't visit it unless someone links to it on Twitter - usually a Greenwald or Pareene piece - or I'm scanning Metacritic for film reviews and I remember I like O'Hehir.

yeah i like dana stevens a lot, dahlia lithwick too.

I really really dislike their television critic. Worst writer ever.

troy paterson?? really?? i dig him a lot

i have a kneejerk contempt of all tv criticism. idk why.

yeah me too I realize it's irrational

theres a lot of bad tv criticism out there but i think paterson is pretty good

TV criticism, hardly worth the effort

Vulture is an NYmag thing, yes?

I was thinking that you could make a really great site by combining writers from these 3 and you could also make the worst site on the internet

what if there were one stop shop for greenwald, megan mcardle and slate cultural criticism. wouldn't that be your homepage too?

― iatee, Friday, 9 March 2012 17:05 (2 hours ago) Permalink

I actually think this kind of internet media could really benefit from more consolidation -- there are too many sites to check right now and I wind up checking none.

it seems so pointless. it seems most disconnected from the relationship between program and audience.

xp hurting, get yourself some rss!

troy paterson?? really?? i dig him a lot

i don't know how this is possible. i've never read anything by him that i felt was well-written or insightful about the subject matter. and plenty of embarrassing pieces that read like creative writing assignments

well the consolidation is happening on a certain level, like there are more aggregation type sites. I feel like the place where an article came from matters less and less.

xp

does that really annoying mommy blog lady still write for salon? ayelet waldman?

Mrs. Michael Chabon iirc!

When David Edelstein wrote for Slate in the early '00s, he was probably my favorite film critic. Then he decamped for New York in the days when its website wasn't as culturally prevalent as it is now, and I stopped reading him. Dana Stevens is generally pretty likeable, though.

voted for Slate, mostly for the podcasts which are usually pretty good

Also enjoy the Slate "Explainer" stuff.

yeah i dont know i think TP is a good writer. dunno about the creative writing pieces.

dont know goole means about audience

I actually think this kind of internet media could really benefit from more consolidation -- there are too many sites to check right now and I wind up checking none.

― the prurient pinterest (Hurting 2), Friday, March 9, 2012 2:25 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

its called twitter dawg

what if there were one stop shop for greenwald, megan mcardle and slate cultural criticism. wouldn't that be your homepage too?

― iatee, Friday, March 9, 2012 12:05 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

to poop on

atlantic has occasional actual longform reporting. i'll probably read more nonsense on salon though, which has some very good writers but also a fair amounts of huffpo-itis. haven't thought about slate in years except when i see the occasional link to some music thing there or remember fondly this article: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/vice/2001/06/monkeyfishing.html

criticism of music and movies seems to be inserted more directly into the 'conversation' about those things, because (pre d/l) there is a purchase-decision angle to weigh in on. the 'buyer's guide' aspect of criticism is subject to a lot of debate, sure, but it is part of the deal. there are also specific subculture/genre relationships and narratives to track between producers, products, and audiences. i'm kind of struggling here but the aspect of leaving your home for both music and movies gives each a kind of public life that renders critical work about it more potent? idk

tv is something that people just have in their house turn on. what is there even to criticize? pointless is maybe the wrong word, how about... ineffectual?

i guess in a dvr era tv is a bit more similar to downloaded music and streamed movies, and tv series post-hbo have become more cinematic -- so maybe we are entering into an era when writing about tv will start to have a similar function and relationship as other criticisms

my problem is there is really so little of that cinematic tv that's 'worth criticizing' that it just ends up w/ people talking about the wire again and again

like even in the neu-era of tv there really are not that many 'ps this is clearly meant to be a work of art' shows

a lot of criticism about tv -- say in the NYer though in a lot of places online too -- comes a few seasons in. so its less buyers guide (though theres a "recommendation" aspect to it) than it is like. i dont know. "actual criticism" or something. see for example emily nussbaums essay about the good wife, now in the middle of its 3rd season, in last weeks NYer

i thought nussbaum's recent piece about good children's television was excellent

i haven't read the nyer in a long time, i probably have bad memories of the franklin regime

hey should i start a thread about that AWAKE show? i think it's kinda good

i also like troy patterson but i feel like he's been "off" for a while idk. i haven't been able to read dana stevens for years and i used to be a fan back in her blog days so i mean it's probably me. dahlia lithwick is easily the best and most consistent writer at slate.

x-post i only like tv criticism that realizes its own pointlessness from the start and hopefully 1) lols ensue 2) you learn something about tv shows you would never want to know. nb i hate tv.

an occasional essay about an entire genre of television is fine. A piece on a single show is almost always bad, unless it's one of a handful of really great shows, in which case it's already been written about enough. The worst are those new-season-of-tv roundups where you watch the critic contort himself to find the better and worse among a bunch of completely shitty shows.

lots of times you get these tv-diaries episode by episode recap things where it really ends up being sort of like a group discussion with a moderator, so the author is just talking about what they did or didn't enjoy in the episode and in the comments everyone else chimes in and you get theories about if sawyer was the horse or who is going to sleep with who or whatever. so basically like a more formal version of our rolling ilx threads. and folks read and participate for the same reason -- because its more fun to consume this or that media if you have people to talk about it and argue about it with.

arguably this is not what people consider "criticism." also, arguably, this is more like what criticism used to be in a historical sense until it took a weird detour roughly coinciding with the time of modernism.

i have a hard time believing that tv writing is bad because of tv

OHHHHH wait are you guys all talking about "recaps"? thats not really "tv criticism" as sterling points out

There's a difference between recaps and reviews, even on a weekly, episode-by-episode basis.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FcaV2e6XoAE5le0?format=jpg&name=large

They should have gone with Vox. The Atlantic is home to like 9,000,000 alarmist essays about campus cancel culture

https://slate.com/culture/2022/12/white-lotus-finale-hbo-sex-scene-nudity.html

damn Ed Yong!

Jonathan Chait’s move this week from his perch at New York Magazine to The Atlantic was hardly a shock for those who have paid attention to the latter’s trajectory. Over the last several years, the D.C.-based magazine has sharpened its centrist editorial brand, focusing heavily on the drift of the Republican party into pro-Trump authoritarianism and backlash to left-wing campus culture, which have helped push the magazine to over a million subscribers and profitability. Chait, a liberal who often disagrees with Democrats, fits neatly into that vision.

But not everyone in the magazine’s orbit were pleased: We’re told that health journalist Ed Yong, whose COVID reporting for The Atlantic won a Pulitzer Prize in 2021, shared posts on his private Instagram stories this week expressing outrage at the move, and what it suggested about the editorial direction of the magazine. Yong described Chait as a “fucking putz,” expressed frustration at The Atlantic’s skeptical coverage of trans issues and employment of the writer Helen Lewis. Yong also expressed disappointment at the publication’s occasional defense of Israel’s war in Gaza, and suggested that his friends should unsubscribe. (Yong left the magazine last summer.)

In a statement to Semafor, Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg defended the publication’s staff. “Jonathan Chait, Helen Lewis, and their colleagues are excellent journalists, and we’re proud of their work,” he said.

brb going to sharpen my centrist brand

Nice that we have Chait and Amanda Palmer revives at the same time

Few artists are more deserving of a profile in the Atlantic than Nick Cave. (That's not a compliment.)