Slate

Slate is a daily magazine set up in 1996. It is owned by The Washington Post Company and describes itself as a "general-interest publication" covering politics, science, technology, business and that perennial modern favourite, lifestyle.

Like any contemporary publication aimed at the average reader, Slate is a combination of the serious and trivial. At the time of writing, the first thing that greets you on the homepage is the Taxi Driven headline "You Talkin' To Me?" This is a link to a Christopher Hitchens article on Barack Obama and the possibility of dialogue with Iran. Surrounding this article are links to pieces on:

a) The mystery of Joaquin Phoenix's appearance on David Letterman.
b) What I learned when I asked my ex-boyfriends why they dumped me.
c) The sexual life of the squid.

We like our life tabloid, we want plenty of celebrities involved and - of course - as we have long since decided that "news" should be no more than unvarnished opinion and regurgitated PR, we fully expect, when we click on to Slate's "News & Politics" channel, to find headlines such as: What to do about teens and their dumb naked photos of themselves.

But the "story" which best sums Slate is: "How to speak Obama: Zadie Smith's two cents on how 44 mesmerizes." Smith's "two cents" were part of a lecture on voice and language that she gave in December 2008 to the New York Public Library. This was published by the New York Review of Books. A Slate reader spotted it and brought it to the attention of Jack Shaffer, who turned it into an article. And there you have modern journalism. The hook is the famous writer; the famous writer's lecture is mere "two cents," thus cementing the notion that that is all journalism or critical thought can ever aspire to being; and the consensus on Obama is once more ratified. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.