Microsoft Courts Highbrows With On-Line Magazine With Its Traditional Style, Slate Isn’t The Usual Fare For Jaded ‘Netheads

When plump and prosperous Microsoft Corp. launched its much-anticipated on-line magazine into cyberspace last week, the ubiquitous software developer went a long way toward answering one of the Internet’s most pressing cultural questions:

Just how important is cool?

Called Slate - as in blank, get it? - Microsoft’s toe dab into the waters of on-line content would appear to be the very essence of uncool. After all, Slate (www.slate.com on the World Wide Web) is being edited by Michael Kinsley, ex-editor of The New Republic and onetime co-host of CNN’s “Crossfire.” Brainy and soft-spoken, the 45-year-old Harvard graduate and former Rhodes scholar is no ‘Nethead. He declined to be interviewed for this story, but he has made it clear that he did not move from Washington, D.C., to suburban Seattle to create a digital toy for the quick-read set. “I’m too old to go whoring after twenty-somethings,” he told the New Yorker.

That’s way uncool.

And just look at Slate itself. The background is primarily white, for goodness sake. Much of its content requires ‘Netizens to invest more time than they would in a Ramones song. It makes only moderate use of hyperlinks to other Internet sites. Like a print publication, it numbers its pages. It offers traditional magazine sections: front (columns, etc.), middle (features) and back (reviews, etc.).

“Fundamentally, it’s a reading medium,” says deputy editor Jack Shafer, who, like Kinsley and most of the rest of Slate’s 14 full-time staff members, comes to Microsoft from a print background. “I happen to believe text is the ultimate medium.”

True, Slate offers audio bites and video clips, but do jacked-in computerphiles really want to hear Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney read his stuff? Or watch as former Nixon/Ford economic adviser Herbert Stein moderates an e-mail discussion group - text only, of course - in which they’re not invited to weigh in? “Slate is for the New Republic reader, the New Yorker reader, the person out in Boise, Idaho, who reads the Sunday New York Times,” declares Shafer.

Or, as Kinsley puts it in his first issue: “There is a deadening conformity in the hipness of cyberspace that we don’t intend to participate in. Part of our mission at Slate will be tring to bring cyberspace down to earth.”

That’s way, way uncool.

Nevertheless, Microsoft and Kinsley are betting that there’s an audience in cyberspace for a conventional package of mid- to highbrow commentary on politics and culture that’s about as close to the cutting edge as your mom’s Apple IIe. As Shafer says, Slate is likely to remind you of The New Republic - and The Atlantic Monthly, to boot - including the bylines. Contributors will include The New Republic’s executive editor, Margaret Talbot, and senior editor Robert Wright, as well as The Atlantic Monthly’s Washington editor, James Fallows, and national correspondent Nicholas Lemann.

Microsoft has arrived late on the electronic newsstand, a place where dozens of web ‘zines already exist. They have names like Feed, Suck, Salon, HotWired and Word, and their reaction to the arrival of the muscular newcomer tends to reflect just how much cool they perceive themselves to have.

Take Suck. This irreverent, cynical and compact rant is published by a pack of seven San Francisco wireheads.

“People have been doing these publications for years, and now this guy is getting all this attention for inventing the wheel after people have been driving cars for years,” complains Ana Marie Cox, Suck’s 23-year-old senior editor.

Meanwhile, Slate is poised to go where almost every web ‘zine has feared to tread. On Nov. 1 it will begin to charge an annual subscription fee of $19.95. Considering that a recent Georgia Tech study found that 65 percent of web users say they are unwilling to pay for on-line content - up from 22.6 percent two years ago - this will obviously be Slate’s stiffest economic test.