I may be the first ever Slate diarist to be pre-empted in “The Fray,” the magazine’s reader-discussion area. A while ago, a few Fraysters decided to write my “Diary” for me. There was much discussion over whether one of the entries was tasteless and offensive: It was but still made me laugh a lot. (“Thursday: Took 3 Valiums … am now ready to go into Ballot Box. Friday: I think I’ll call in sick today.”) It is a hard standard to live up to, but I’ll try.
I’m the Fray editor at Slate. It’s my job to run the board, to encourage good debate and maintain order, and to find the best posts and promote them into the magazine. It’s been a particularly busy few days, because Slate launched a major redesign on Thursday. There were big changes in the magazine’s layout, but this was unimportant to Fray posters whose big question was “WHY CAN’T I POST?” There were some, um, teething troubles, the main one being that any post with an apostrophe in it failed to make it. I got a couple of polite e-mails saying, “The error message says I have to debug, but I don’t really know how to”—no, no, we don’t expect Fraysters to do it themselves. That particular problem is, I hope, solved now, but there are still a few bumps in the road being worked on.
Even if I didn’t know all this, I would guess there was something up, because of the amount of e-mail from readers in my Fray editor account. A normal week might produce 150 e-mails. Last week I was getting 100 a day, and there are an accumulated 100 in my mailbox now. I read every e-mail I receive from readers and answer about 85 percent of them. Some of it is urgent, some of it waits till I have an answering session once a week. What constitutes a Fray Emergency? Well, this does: A reader who innocently thought she was sending a private problem directly to Prudie, Slate’s advice columnist, but was actually posting it on the Fray, to be read by the whole world, complete with her full name, e-mail address, and the words “of course, my husband knows nothing of this.” I worked pretty fast to remove that for her.
My job corresponds roughly with being letters editor at a print magazine or newspaper except that a big city newspaper might get 1,200 letters a month. Slate can get that many in an hour and in recent times has been getting more than 60,000 reader postings a week (100,000 in the week of Sept. 11). So, no, I don’t read them all. That’s the first question people ask me. The second is: “So how do you get to be a Fray star?” The answer: Make great posts, make a lot of posts, and—as the star, once awarded, is added automatically to posts—don’t write stuff I wouldn’t like to see a star next to. (Obviously the person who offered Producers tickets for a gold star was only joking, and if he wasn’t then plainly this would be corruption of a despicable nature, and if he wants to contact me directly, I will of course tell him so.) The stars are part of our two-tier Fray. Some people want the full, unfiltered, unadorned Fray: wild talk, weird posts and all. Others have less time and want a little sifting done for them, and they can click “Fray Editor’s Picks” to pull up a list of checked posts (ones I’ve read and recommend) and posts from the stars.
In my first job as a journalist, with the BBC in
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Slate diarists (understandably) vary in how much Fray interaction they’re up for, but this week I can promise you full and frank exchanges. Ask me a good question and I’ll try to answer it here, and I’ll include or link to some good comments.