Slate's 10th Anniversary

Online Media and the Future of Journalism

A forum celebrating the 10th anniversary of Slate at the New York Public Library.

On Thursday, June 22, please help us celebrate Slate’s 10th anniversary with a discussion titled “Online Media and the Future of Journalism” at the New York Public Library. Slate Founding Editor Michael Kinsley will moderate a conversation on the subject with Malcolm Gladwell, Arianna Huffington, Norm Pearlstine, and Jacob Weisberg at 6:30 p.m. in the NYPL’s Celeste Bartos Forum.

When Slate launched in June 1996, online media was little more than a novelty. Today it has become a driving force in journalism. Most news now breaks first on the Web, and Internet news sites are primary sources of information for young (and not-so-young) readers. Blogs and online magazines like Slate shape political debate. Out of financial necessity, print newspapers and magazines are being reborn online and creating exciting new journalistic forms in the process. Podcasts, Webcasts, texting, RSS feeds, and technologies we can’t even dream of yet are continuing to change what journalism is and how we consume it.

In this discussion, experienced practitioners of online journalism and observers of it from more traditional media will wrestle with what may be the most profound changes to face their profession in a century. Has online journalism weakened reporting and ethical standards? Has the news cycle gotten too fast for its own good? Can investigative and in-depth reporting thrive in an age of instant online analysis? How much longer will the New York Times be delivered to your door? And what might Slatelook like at 20?

This event is co-sponsored by Slate, Live from the NYPL, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

Get tickets at www.smarttix.com or by calling 212-868-4444. $15 general admission; $10 for library donors, seniors, and students with valid identification.

About the Participants

Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer for TheNew Yorker since 1996. From 1987 to 1996, he was a reporter for the Washington Post, where he covered business and science and then served as the newspaper’s New York City bureau chief. He is the author of two books, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference and Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.

Arianna Huffington is a nationally syndicated columnist, author of 10 books, and co-founder and editor of HuffingtonPost.com. She is also co-host of Left, Right & Center, public radio’s popular political round-table program. Her weekly commentary is syndicated in newspapers across the country by Tribune Media Services. Her many books include The Woman Behind the Legend, Picasso: Creator and Destroyer, Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption Are Undermining America, and Fanatics and Fools: The Game Plan for Winning Back America.

Michael Kinsley is the founding editor of Slate. He currently writes a column for both Slate and the Washington Post. He founded Slate in 1995 and was its editor for six years. For two decades he was associated with the New Republic, as its editor and as author of its “TRB From Washington” column. He was editor in chief of Harper’s, editorial and opinion editor of the Los Angeles Times, editor of the American Survey department at the Economist, and managing editor of the Washington Monthly. He co-hosted CNN’s Crossfire for six years and also moderated William F. Buckley’s Firing Line debates. Kinsley has written regular columns for the New Republic, Time, the Wall Street Journal, and the Times of London.

Norman Pearlstine was editor-in-chief of Time Inc., the world’s largest magazine publisher, from 1995 until the end of 2005. Mr. Pearlstine oversaw the editorial content of Time, Life, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, People, InStyle, Money, and Entertainment Weekly, to name a few titles. In 2004, the American Society of Magazine Editors gave him its lifetime achievement award and inducted him into the Magazine Editors’ Hall of Fame. Prior to joining Time Inc., Mr. Pearlstine worked with Dow Jones Company, except for a two-year period when he was an executive editor at Forbes magazine. He was also managing and then executive editor of the Wall Street Journal. He is currently a senior adviser to Time Inc. and is working on a book, Off the Record: The Use and Misuse of Anonymous Sources, to be published in 2007.

Jacob Weisberg is editor of Slate and the author of a weekly political column for Slate that also appears in the Financial Times. Before joining Slate in 1996, he wrote about politics for magazines including the New Republic, Newsweek, and New York and has written as well for Vanity Fair and the New York Times Magazine. He is the co-author, with Robert E. Rubin, of In an Uncertain World. He is also the author of In Defense of Government, the 2000 eBook The Road to Chadville, and the Bushisms series.