Interview: Jacob Weisberg
PR Weekly - 10 Oct 2005
Before blogs, Craigslist, or Google, there was Slate. The web magazine, created in 1996 by Microsoft, has been at the forefront of web publishing and has helped drive the nascent medium's credibility.
Jacob Weisberg is the website's editor, having joined in its inaugural year after working for the New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, and Vanity Fair. He assumed leadership of Slate in 2002, steering the ship recently toward an acquisition by the Washington Post Co.
PRWeek: Blogs are publishing very quickly, and newspapers are publishing slowly. Is the move for successful online companies going toward the middle?
Weisberg: It's a different model of investigation and discovering the truth. A lot of the traditional media feel very threatened by blogs. And the web, in general, and blogs, in particular, raise the price of error for journalists, both online and in print. While an individual blog may be inaccurate, unfair, or dishonest, the collective intelligence of the web and thousands of people picking apart anything they see in print makes journalists more careful. When you make a mistake now, there's almost no chance of it going unnoticed. And when it is noticed, you'll be humiliated in public. Blogs have made entities like The New York Times more accurate and forthcoming about acknowledging errors that occur. ... It's a kind of fact checking that you'd never get from a [media] fact-checking department. Certainly the idea of publishing first and fact checking second makes a lot of people uncomfortable for good reason. It's certainly not the approach that Slate takes. We make every effort to ensure everything we publish is absolutely true, as much as any print publication. I would put our record for accuracy up against just about any publication. I would also put our forthrightness and transparency in acknowledging and correcting errors up against just about any publication. My point is that it's a hobby for a whole group of people to catch the mainstream media out. People love to find mistakes, and we're on the receiving end of that as well. We invite readers to find mistakes in Slate. And when I write something now, I am much more careful than I ever was in my years as a print journalist at double-checking everything and not assuming it's true. You just know now if you try to gloss something over, you'll get caught, and it's going to be embarrassing.
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