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Day 1: December 1, 2014

Stories:

 

  1. Actually, Blacks Do Care About Black Crime

  2. Get Ready For Some Law Schools to Close

  3. U.N. Cuts Food Aid to Nearly 2 Million Syrian Refugees Due to Lack of Donor Funds

  4. Longevity and Marriage: I Do, Later

  5. Superb Second Novel: A Sex Comedy That Relentlessly Pursues a Single Dirty Joke: 

  6. What the “Mormon Moment” Actually Accomplished: 

  7. Mike Is Back In Our First Substantive Peek at Better Call Saul: 

8. Girls Scouts Policy Allowing Online Cookie Sales Teaches Valuable Life Lesson ..In Ecommerce: 1

9. Charles MingusWanted to Toilet Train Your Cat

10. Bill Cosby Resigns From Temple Board of Trustees

GRADE: 26% F

Day 2: December 2, 2014

Who owns them?

Slate Magazine was originally owned Microsoft but has been part of Slate Group since June 2009. The Slate Group is owned by the Graham Holdings Company, formerly known The Washington Post Company. Donald Graham is the current Chairman and CEO of the company.  

 

How many are owned by the same parent company? Are any owned by independent sources?

Slate Magazine falls under the umbrella of The Slate Group.  Other outlets belonging to The Slate Group are: Slate V, theRoot, and Foreign Policy.  The Slate Group is owned by the Graham Holdings Company.  

 

 

What is their annual revenue? Where do they get their

revenue from? 

According to Josh Sternberg’s article “The Evolution of Slate”, more than 90 percent of ad revenue is from directly sold ads, and it uses Google AdExchange to backfill its inventory. It has a sales and marketing team of about 20, with offices in New York City, the Midwest, California and London” (Sternberg, 2014).

 

What’s their reader/viewer share?

 

 

 

 

 

Is there a particular story that “made” this news venue particularly popular?

There is no particular story that "made this news venue particularly poplular.

 

Was there a story that this news venue is particular well known for scooping? How does the news site frame itself? How is it perceived (conservative/liberal/moderate/completely unreliable/well-respected for fairness/etc)? 

Though Slate is seen as a left-slanted, the magazine takes a pose that it isn't and insists that is “contrarian”.

In an interview with Nieman Lab, former Slate editor David Plotz stated that: “Our job is not necessarily to build Slate into a magazine that has 100 million readers. It’s to make sure we have 2 million or 5 million or 8 million of the right readers — readers who are the smartest, most engaged, most influential, most media-literate people around” (Garber, 2010).

 

Stories:

 

  1. The Missing Men

  2. Congress Wants Medicare to Stop Paying for Penis Pumps. This is Cruel.

  3. This Brutal History of Cotton Debunks the Most Popular Myths About Capitalism

  4. How the Homeland Security Secretary Is Stoking Republican Hatred of Obama's Immigration Policy

  5. Computers Could Make Healthy Eating More Palatable

  6. We Want Our Daughter to Love the Sciences. Should We Keep Her Away From Princesses?

  7. Robin Williams Bares His Heart, Discusses 2020 in This Lovely Animated Interview

  8. Jared Leto and Will Smith Lead a Superstar Suicide Squad Cast

  9. Writer Meghan Daun Almost Died and Learned Nothing From the Experience

  10. South Korea Plans to Put Up a Christmas Tree: North Korea Has Threatened to Bomb it

(Slate, 2014)

GRADE: 25.7% F

GRADE: 29.4% F

Stories:

 

  1. Of Course It Happened Again

  2. Broken Windows Policing Doesn't Work

  3. If It Happened There: Courts Sanction Killings by U.S. Security Forces

  4. Scenes From New York City Protests Over Eric Garner Grand Jury Decision

  5. The Best Defense

  6. Watch Top Podcasters Collaborate For Slate’s First Triple-Threat Gabfest

  7. Why Beards Have Always Been and Always Will Be Funny

  8. How Jackie Chan Brilliantly Combines Action and Comedy

  9. When Did Smiling Become Socially Acceptable In Portraits?

  10. How To Interpret Party Dress Codes Like “Yuletide Chic” and “Grown and Sexy”

Day 3: December 3, 2014

Slate Magazine recieved the lowest grades of the three news sources, all within the 20% range. It had 10 core and 20 peripheral stories which was shocking. It was predicted that Buzzfeed would certainly have the most peripheral stories, as that is part of its reputation, but Slate has twice as many peripheral stories as core stories. Perhaps this was the reason the news source received such poor grades. 

 

The site's front page often repeated its stories as can be seen in all three days screeshots. For instance, the above image from December 3rd repeats the article "Scenes From NYC Protests Over the Eric Garner Grand Jury Decision" appears twice; one story is enlarged with a photo to draw attention while another link to the article sits on the right side of the page. That isn't the only article that is repeated on this day; what appears to be two articles about beards is actually one under two different names, sizes, and placement on the page. This repetition makes it seem that Slate perhaps didn't have enough stories to fill its page or makes it clear what stories they believe are most important for its viewers to read. However, the additional room taken up by repeated stories takes up space for articles that may be just as important, but are masked by breaking news. This masking was a common thread linking all the online news sources. Each site had the same or similar topics each day but with different views, which is concerning considering the absence diversity in news from different sources.

 

Slate Magazine, Buzzbeed, and The Huffington Post all used links to other articles and websites as sources. Many of Slate's most controversial and highest-scoring stories were actually from other news sources linked to Slate's front page. This is a convenient option for news sources who perhaps were unable to get a citation or quote they needed but another source did. It also makes it easy for a reader to access the exact source that was used but it can also cause a circle of links that never actually leads to a credible source; simply several other news outlets that may have the same misinformation.

 

Slate included a few articles, such as "The Missing Men", that investigated the credibility of other news sources' articles. Benedikt and Rosin wrote about what was missing from Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s article about gang rape: 

"What the piece is missing is one small thing: that single, standard sentence explaining that the alleged perpetrators of the crime deny it, or don’t deny it, or even that they could not be reached for comment. It’s often a boring sentence, one that comes off as boilerplate to readers, but it’s absolutely necessary, because it tells readers you tried your best to get the other side of the story. You notice when it isn’t there" (Benedikt, 2014). 

The addition of these stories exemplify the effort Slate makes to enforce the ethics of journalism and that adds to Slate Magazine's credibility.

Analysis

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