Entry 4:  

Hot news for keen Diary readers. This morning I got an e-mail with the title “Would a BMW do?” Someone very important at BMW North America (it’s a make of car that I clearly recall liking very much) reads Slate and the Fray and doesn’t understand why I would even want a Mercedes (see Tuesday ’s entry). I don’t see any vehicle out front yet (he may have been joking), but my new friend sounds a splendid chap.

As if that wasn’t enough to brighten my morning, when I opened the Diaries Fray I was charmed to see half a page of posts from people who had tailored their names and post titles to suit yesterday ’s rules. I was particularly glad to see Carol Maudie May Darling, the Satanism Ph.D., posting some helpful hints.

That was the good news: The bad was that the More By This User feature had gone slightly crazy, and a number of posts had been deleted in solving that problem, and then the Fray had crashed for a couple of hours. I hate it when readers are disappointed and frustrated in this way. I’m also sorry that there are still problems (other than getting used to a new system) with the redesign for some users, particularly those on Netscape. The technical staff are trying to sort this out. One reader (look down below in the box) thinks I must be secretly furiously angry about all this and am just pretending to be insouciant. While I wouldn’t say this has been the happiest week I’ve spent on the Fray, and I have been on the frontline for readers’ dismay, there is no one for me to get angry with. We just all want it to work.

In answer to more questions: The Fray is very important to Slate. It attracts and keeps a lot of readers and generates a large number of page views. It helps create the magazine’s unique feel. It should be an enormous benefit to the writers—Android says, “The instant reader feedback … keeps authors honest.” For instance, any factual error will be spotted immediately by the Fray and can be corrected onsite very quickly. Believers in the Fray—and I am one of them—think that the writers should enter into more of a dialogue with readers, really use the unique interaction. But I have to stress what a big change it is from other media, where if you as a writer got five letters a week you’d be surprised. Two might be fan letters, two might take you to task over something or argue a point, and one might be from someone who seemed to be insane. You would assume that all the other people who read or heard your piece and didn’t write in—well, probably they quite liked it. Getting 5,000 messages on one article, many of them unpleasant, can be a shock to the system, and we’re still all getting used to it.

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After work I had two children bouncing off the walls waiting to go trick-or-treating. Some people asked if it was more worrying this year, but mine are young enough that we’re with them all the time—it may be different for those with older kids—and I couldn’t quite think what to be scared of anyway. In fact, the first Halloween after we moved here from England was much worse, because we have no such tradition, and I found it terribly embarrassing to go traipsing round the neighbors begging. (The children had no such scruples, and the neighbors made it easy.) The bunch-of-grapes costume survived—thanks to the Fray readers for their tips on that one. Link was repeatedly mistaken for Robin Hood, but the candy seemed to make up for that.

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After yesterday’s entry appeared I realized that my knowledge of Slate office life is confined solely to Redmond. For all I know, N.Y. and D.C. are volcanoes of active life, resembling in every detail old movies about journalism. Jodi Kantor, the New York editor (who, by the way, says “thank you” to the Fray for prodding me with questions, as it saves her from having to do it), may be even now perched on the edge of her desk, wearing a cocktail hat, wisecracking with Jacob Weisberg. And D.C. always did sound like it was the party office—I can imagine a certain amount of raucous repartee there, perhaps even unhealthy lifestyle activities. Perhaps a D.C./N.Y. Slate person would care to post in the Fray to clarify?