Before Slate lost Mr. Swansburg, the site laid off Jack Shafer, Timothy Noah, June Thomas, and Juliet Lapidos. But Mr. Swansburg escaped the layoffs, leaving voluntarily for newyorker.com where he became the site's first online culture editor in September, according to WWD. Mr. Swansburg had been with Slate since 2007, and it seems that, after four years, he couldn't stand being anywhere else (even the New Yorker).

"I'm not sure how the author got our October Omniture numbers, but a one-month snapshot showing a decline in UUs is meaningless," Mr. Weisberg wrote today. "Our traffic is up across the board this year."

One month is indeed a snapshot, so here is a fuller picture. Slate's uniques for September 2010 were 8.0 million, down 10 percent from 2009 and down 35 percent from 2008. Slate's uniques for August 2010 were 10.6 million, down 7 percent from 2009 and up 8 percent from 2008. That's not a site with huge traffic momentum.

It's true that Slate's pageviews are up this year, as I noted in the piece. The issue is that they're not up much, while sites like Gawker and Huffington Post are posting huge gains. Here are some numbers that show Slate has up months, down months, and an overall trajectory that is good, but not gangbusters. Pageviews were 78.6 million in April (up 12 percent year-on-year), 73.2 million in May (up 9 percent), 76.4 million in June (up 9 percent), 82.7 in July (flat), 88.2 million in August (up 14 percent), and 82.6 million in September (up 16 percent). 

Mr. Weisberg also writes in his memo: "I talked to the author extensively about our new tech team, Slate Labs, our breakthroughs with long-form journalism on the web, the Frescas, the Hives, predictive polling, the excellence of our Twitter feed, and how we finally cracked the case on commenting."

Here is that quote again, but with my recollection noted in brackets on each point. "I talked to the author extensively about our new tech team [I mentioned it in the piece], Slate Labs [I didn't write about this—and should have], our breakthroughs with long-form journalism on the web, the Frescas [I called these efforts a "runaway success"], the Hives [we did not discuss this], predictive polling [we did not discuss this], the excellence of our Twitter feed [we did not discuss this], and how we finally cracked the case on commenting [we did not discuss this]." If Mr. Weisberg did mention those latter topics, it was so briefly that I did not record it in my notes.

Mr. Weisberg views my thesis as "that Slate's doing badly and that the Internet is passing us by." I disagree somewhat. I wrote that Slate produces fantastic editorial content, and that there is concern among staffers, amply documented, that Slate is falling behind.

nsummers [at] observer.com | @nicksumm

The full memo, courtesy Romenesko, is below.

You may have seen the story about Slate that’s up on the New York Observer website today. I wanted to take a minute to respond, because while the facts in the article are mostly accurate, the thesis – that Slate's doing badly and that the Internet is passing us by – couldn't be farther off the mark. It is true, of course, that I'm gayer than Andrew Sullivan.

First, on the business side, we are going gangbusters. September was record revenue month for us. October looks to have been another. Slate is up 25% so far versus last year. With results like that, the Observer might have been able to keep Simon Doonan.

Second, on traffic, I’m not sure how the author got our October Omniture numbers, but a one-month snapshot showing a decline in UUs is meaningless. Our traffic is up across the board this year. I admire aspects of what the Huffpost and Gawker do, but we’re not trying to be them. We don’t chase cheap clicks with celebrity gossip, cheesecake photos, or aggregation --which is why our site is so much more valuable to readers and advertisers. The kind of real traffic David has focused on – users who return to Slate daily or multiple times a week – has grown 20 percent this year. As have our search and social referrals. As for FP, it's up something like 20x since we relaunched the site less than two years ago.

What was most wrong with the piece was the notion that we're not focused on what works on the Internet in the way our younger competitors are. I talked to the author extensively about our new tech team, Slate Labs, our breakthroughs with long-form journalism on the web, the Frescas, the Hives, predictive polling, the excellence of our Twitter feed, and how we finally cracked the case on commenting. I'm afraid the nice young man had no idea what I was talking about. I told him that new competition is pushing us to innovate more quickly than we did in the years when we had a category largely to ourselves. He ignored all that, using our candor about past weaknesses against us and portraying us as not caring about SEO, aggregation, etc.

The piece is a good example of a kind of bad journalism we thankfully seldom see at Slate, which starts with a premise and ignores any evidence that doesn’t support it. Please continue to prove it wrong.

Gaily,

Jake

"The problem, in a nutshell, is that the site is not pointed toward profitability on a fast enough timetable," they wrote. "We've struggled to grow the site’s traffic to carry enough ad inventory to run a profitable business. There are some specific reasons for this slow growth which relate primarily to the category rather than to the quality of the magazine."

The market for business news online has been especially cutthroat in recent months. David Bradley's attempt to launch a business site for The Atlantic never got off the ground, and Forbes adopted radically different editorial practices when it took over True/Slant and brought on Lewis D'Vorkin earlier this summer. Others sites are growing: The New York Times' Dealbook has been beefing up its staff since June, and Heny Blodget's Business Insider announced a second round of capital this week.

The Big Money launched in September 2008, the same week as Lehman Brothers collapsed.

(via Romenesko)

Ramandan is also controversial because his grandfather, Hassan al-Banna, was the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, a political group outlawed from taking part in Egyptian politics. Al-Banna was known for his relationship with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, a leading collaborator with Nazi Germany during World War II. Ramadan has always tip-toed around his grandfather's anti-Semitism and has never taken a clear stance on the issue.

During the panel, Packer asked Ramadan if he condemns what his grandfather did, and the professor responded that, at the time, all Arabs were against the creation of the state of Israel and said history needs to be contextualized. Packer firmly stated: "I don't like to contextualize a long-term alliance with a leading Nazi propagandist and collaborator." A round of applause from the audience was quickly silenced with Weisberg's index finger.

After the panel was over,  both Weisberg and Parker told The Observer that Ramadan's arrival is an important event, but both had reservations about his politics.

"To me his appearance is partly an affirmation of freedom of expression, freedom to speak, freedom to write," Weisberg said. "I think the issue is less his right to speak and more our right to hear from him." He said it's important for Ramadan to be challenged and thought Packer successfully pressed him on difficult issues.

"There are foundations to his ideas that I find worrisome," Packer said, while noting that the Swiss Professor is put in a difficult situation: "He cannot condemn his grandfather," Packer said. "It would be such a loss of his own credibility."

Ramadan needs to begin to "chip away at it, to begin to invite and seriously answer hard questions about the origins of the Brotherhood, its flirtations with Nazism and its anti-Semitism," said Packer.

Since The Observer had the opportunity, we asked the two what they are going to be up to in the near future. Weisberg said some of Slate's upcoming projects include a new commenting platform allowing better audience integration and expanding an existing partnership with the New America foundation. He also plans on expanding Gabfest, Slate's weekly political podcasts

As for Packer … he hopes to have a book out in the next couple of years about, "the Obama administration and Washington. … I can't write them as fast as Tariq Ramadan."

Held in the Grand Hyatt New York and the Time & Life building, the conference spanned two business days, from Wednesday, Oct. 14, to Thursday, Oct. 15. Wednesday focused on General Sessions and was geared toward industry leaders and magazine executives and editors. Sessions carried apocalyptic titles such as “The Future of Content” and “The End of the Media World as We Know It.”

In an effort to avoid the apocalypse, the Observer attended only the second day of panels, which were divided into three parts: Consumer Marketing, Ad Sales Marketing and Editorial. The Observer sat in on the second half of the Editorial panels.

The Observer joined the conference during Billboard editorial director Bill Werde’s lecture, titled “Interstitial: What Happened to the Record Album and Why It Matters to Magazines.” More Jerry Seinfeld than Rupert Murdoch, Mr. Werde charmed the audience of disgruntled magazine editors, opening with the disclaimer, “Yes, I am a journalist whose last name is Werde [pronounced wordy]; you’d be surprised how much publicists love that.” Illustrated by a powerpoint of line graphs that looked more like the outlines of multicolored mountain ranges than the demise of the music industry, Mr. Werde drew a correlation between the record industry and the magazine industry. “We can learn from this!” he announced both imperatively and with excitement. “I feel like the ghost of Christmas future.”

But the final panel of the conference, “The Decline and Rise of Magazine Journalism,” was what the Observer really came for. It was moderated by Slate Group chairman and editor in chief, Jacob Weisberg; members of the panel included Nick Denton of Gawker Media, “Media Guy” columnist Simon Dumenco and New Yorker articles editor Susan Morrison. Mr. Weisberg began the panel with open-ended questions such as “Do readers prize what we do as journalists?” and “Are magazines like newspapers in that a great business has turned into a very bad business?”

Mr. Dumenco volunteered hopefully, “The magazine industry is nowhere near as desperate as the newspaper industry.”

But Mr. Weisberg’s realism was unrelenting. “But what about the surveys that show that 20-somethings are not only going to the Web for newspapers but also for service-related magazines?" he asked. "The real problem with young people is that they aren’t just not reading it now, but they say they will never read a newspaper. Which means there is no hope for future generations.”

“O.K., but here’s the thing,” Ms. Morrison piped up, “the question isn’t do these readers exist, but, do they exist in a way that we can make any money off of them? Because the young people I encounter all read the newspaper; they just have never picked it up in print.”

Mr. Weisberg redirected to a more general query: “But what does the magazine mean right now? Is it a new form?”

Ms. Morrison sighed, “I think we are all kind of experimenting. You know, I’m old, but I don’t want to read a 12,000-word piece online, I want to read it on paper. But that is changing. Like David Grann’s recent article about Cameron Todd Willingham, the executed arsonist in Texas—it is a piece of typically long-form journalism, but we put it up online because we wanted it to create waves, we wanted it to be discussed and shared, and the easiest way to do that was to make it accessible online and email-able. And it was our most emailed story of all time!”

She continued, musing aloud: “One of the reasons John Updike wanted to be a novelist was just about the thingy-ness of the book. And I think that’s true of the magazine. It’s a thing we can go out and buy and hold. Will that be true for a future generation?”

Nick Denton jumped in: “It is also a question of when you tend to read something. You read news on the Web during the work day, you save magazines for the weekends. It’s a different reading mode. So, in that way magazines are better off than newspapers. When I think about launching a new Web site, I go to newsstands and look at how many magazines there are in each category. I don’t look at newspapers.”

This offered an opportunity for Mr. Weisberg to ask Mr. Denton about his Web sites, and whether Gawker Media is going to have to adjust “the digital sweatshop model” that his employees currently work under.

“We pay more than you’d expect!," said Mr. Denton. "And kids want to work for us, and we want them. The average age of our readers is 28, about thirty years younger than the average newspaper reader. It is important that the people writing and editing are of the same generation.”

Mr. Weisberg then asked Mr. Denton about how he monitors and fact-checks the content on his sites.

“We don’t,” Mr. Denton replied flatly. “We aim to get the truth over time. The verification model is post-publication rather than pre-publication. Our readers correct us and we apologize and we change it. We don’t have time to check it all before.”

Towards the end of the panel, Mr. Weisberg returned to Ms. Morrison: “How does The New Yorker stay on top of fact checking and accuracy as they try to enter into the up-to-the-minute online sphere?” he asked

“We try to edit every single thing that goes on the Web site,” said Ms. Morrison.

Mr. Denton was shocked. “Even the Twitter posts!?”

“We have Twitter posts?,” said Ms. Morrison. “I didn’t even know we were doing Twitter posts. Who tweets?”

Weisberg proffered one final comment, more musing than a question demanding an answer. “How do the mobile devices we all carry around with us affect this discussion?”

He touched his pocket as if to check that his own mobile device was still there.

Mr. Spitzer will be sitting down with Matt Lauer on Monday, April 6. Presumably, he'll be talking about the financial crisis, as he has recently for Slate, The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post, and Newsweek.

The release we were just sent doesn't say exactly what he'll be talking about, but it's his first interview on broadcast TV since he resigned as governor in March 2008.

As we wrote last week, "And maybe this is exactly the job Mr. Spitzer wants. To serve as a Sunday-style talk show pundit. An attorney general without the subpoena power, or the political headaches."

It's been working gloriously! Newsweek editor Jon Meacham told us that he always "admired him," and Slate editor David Plotz said, "He’s really invigorated." (Incidentally, Mr. Spitzer was at Mr. Plotz's book party last night at Slate Group editor's Jacob Weisberg and ex-Domino editor's Deborah Needelman's Tribeca loft.) Now let's see what Mr. Lauer thinks as Mr. Spitzer makes by far his biggest splash back into the public's eye.

Here's the release:

ELIOT SPITZER WILL TALK TO MATT LAUER IN HIS FIRST LIVE BROADCAST INTERVIEW SINCE HIS RESIGNATION

Interview to Air Live on "Today," Monday, April 6

NEW YORK - Former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer will sit down live with Matt Lauer, Monday, April 6 on NBC News' "Today."  Spitzer, the
hard-charging New York attorney general who then became the governor of New York, took down titans on Wall Street. Then he had his own
well-documented fall from grace. He will talk to Lauer in his first broadcast interview since he resigned as governor.

Jim Bell is the executive producer of "Today" (Mon. - Fri., 7 a.m. - 11 a.m.)

Members of the media can get more information about NBC Universal and its programming on the NBC Universal Media Village Web
site at www.nbcumv.com.

That just about settles it!

In the interest of fuller disclosure, this writer should note that Mr. Matlin mentions an article from The Observer later in the same piece and that The Observer wrote about The Big Money in September, at which time this writer met Mr. Matlin and interviewed his editor, James Ledbetter, who it should be noted once worked for The Observer. The writer also spoke with Slate Group editor-in-chief Jacob Weisberg on the phone, which was the second time he'd spoken to Mr. Weisberg, the first, briefly, in person in May 2008. Furthermore, this writer has written for Slate on two occasions and reads the site every day. He has also spent time socially with a former Slate writer as recently as last night whom he considers a friend, though not a "best" friend, but, if pushed to use some sort of modifier to signify the level of his friendship might go with "old" or "close" or, in a pinch, "dear."

The colon in Mr. Matlin's headline was added by this writer. He also didn't read Mr. Matlin's whole piece before posting this.

The piece is a little dated—references to John Sununu and the invasion of Panama are unlikely to ring bells with younger readers—but it definitely sheds some light on Mr. Kristol, who is now a New York Times columnist who writes spectacularly pro-Sarah Palin columns for the paper and shows his fondness for the Republican vice presidential nominee in his magazine, The Weekly Standard, and during TV appearances.

Here's what Mr. Weisberg wrote back in 1990:

This time around, the public seems to have been first level, with the Republican Party holding steady at second. (The White House is entirely dependent on voters.) As Mr. Kristol wrote in The Times on September 7th with Governor Palin's Republican National Convention speech fresh in his mind, "A Wasilla Wal-Mart Mom a heartbeat away? I suspect most voters will say, No problem. And some — perhaps a decisive number — will say, It’s about time."

Then there's this:

That neatly echoes what Mr. Kristol thought about Governor Palin on October 6th when he wrote, "As for the campaign, Palin made clear — without being willing to flat out say so — that she regretted allowing herself to be overly handled and constrained after the Republican convention. She described the debate on Thursday night as 'liberating,' and she emphasized how much she now looked forward to being out there, 'getting to speak directly to the folks.'"

In his tee-up to Mr. Weisberg's archival piece, Mr. Orr wrote, "there's little reason to imagine that Kristol would want to give up any of his lucrative media gigs. But if you believe the people Scott Horton has been talking to, he sees Palin as a blank slate, a charismatic but unformed political figure who could be an effective messenger for the tenets of neoconservatism, just as soon as she's been taught them. "

Will Mr. Kristol get a chance to be another vice president's brain? That depends on whether voters recall the words of Mr. Kristol's original vessel who once said of... well, something,"The question is whether we're gonna go forward to tomorrow, or past to the back?"

This is the first new site from The Slate Group, which was created in June and is overseen by Jacob Weisberg, the former editor of Slate. It encompasses the flagship site (which, amazingly, is on its second owner, third editor, and fourth presidential election since it was founded by Michael Kinsley for Microsoft in 1996), the video site Slate V, and The Root, a general-interest Web site aimed at African-American readers.

The sites occasionally share content, but function independently. Maybe they're not spinoffs after all: They're more like branches of Dick Wolf's Law & Order franchise.

It's certainly an interesting time to launch a business site. Phil Gramm may think the U.S. is in a "mental recession," but you don't have to be an economic adviser to a presidential candidate with seven homes to see that the paper is filled with reports of instability (Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac) or that the numbers on the gas pump are rising so high they threaten to roll over to zero like the score in an old Atari game. Isn't launching a site devoted to business in this environment sort of like putting out a level-headed, dispassionate newsletter about fire safety in the middle of a wildfire?

"The contrarian in me loves the idea of launching a business magazine in the middle of economic downtown," Jacob Weisberg told The Observer in a recent interview. Then again, with money, both big (Lehman Brothers) and small (The New York Times reported rising sales of lottery tickets last week) on people's minds, maybe it's not such a wild pitch.

Click image to enlarge.

"I can't remember a time when it had more urgency and relevance," Mr. Weisberg said.

On a recent visit to Newsweek's offices on 57th Street, The Big Money's editor James Ledbetter said that the site had been in the works for about a year. Mr. Ledbetter, a veteran of The Village Voice, where he was the Press Clips columnist in the days when media critics had to walk 10 miles uphill in the snow to get scoops (and they liked it!), and The Industry Standard, the dramatic flame-out of which he chronicled in the book Starving to Death on $200 Million, describes the relationship between The Big Money and its progenitor as "the difference between 'All Things Considered' and 'Marketplace': It's pretty seamless. They sound very much the same. The principle difference is in concentration and depth of coverage. There's only so much business coverage you can run on Slate before it's no longer Slate."

If that sounds a lot less sexy than, say, Portfolio, Condé Nast's business magazine that mixes articles on hand-built luxury cars in with its profiles of Barry Diller, that's entirely intentional.

"I don't think you'll see a lot of CEO fetishization on our site," Mr. Lebetter said. "That's not the approach."

He also cautions readers to look elsewhere for aspirational articles like "How to Polish Your Rolls Royce." (Mr. Ledbetter knows from Rolls Royces: In Starving to Death he writes about being chauffeured to an interview with Maxim founder Felix Dennis in the publisher's black Rolls.)

The Big Money, which was code named 'Slate B' before its launch and the purchase of its URL "for a modest amount," according to Mr. Ledbetter, gets its name from the third book in John Dos Passos' "U.S.A." trilogy. Mr. Ledbetter owns a first-edition copy of the book. (But we got to the reference first! The editors of this paper named the "Manhattan Transfers" real estate column after another Dos Passos novel. It's also worth noting that Mr. Ledbetter once worked for The Observer.)

Among the new site's features, which Mr. Ledbetter and his deputy editor Elinor Shields and staff reporter Chad Matlin previewed for a reporter a few days before launch, was an S.R.I. (Socially Responsible Investing) Stock Screener that allows users to track 500 top companies' commitments to the environment, gay and lesbian rights, labor and human rights, ties to the military, and "vice."

Mr. Ledbetter calls the S.R.I. Stock Screener "a constant background to what we're doing." Ms. Shields says the tool "will crack open data to users who will use it as they will." Despite its progressive criteria, Mr. Ledbetter insists that the tool—as well as The Big Money as a whole—is nonpolitical. "It's not a piece of advocacy. Someone can use this tool to find the least socially responsible and invest in those, which some of them choose to do."

"In general, I guess I would say I don't think that a left-right spectrum is useful way of looking at business journalism," Mr. Ledbetter added.

The Big Money will also feature downloadable PowerPoint spreads ("We Build Your Presentation"), a daily calendar of the day's big business events, a blog devoted to food-related topics called "Daily Bread" and another all about Google called "Feeling Lucky."

Google is something of a touchstone for the site, which launched with a co-bylined piece by Messrs. Ledbetter and Weisberg about the the lifestyle brands they termed "S.A.G.A."—Starbucks, Apple, Google, and Amazon—which Mr. Weisberg says are "four companies that everyone cares about."

"The goal is business journalism in real time," Mr. Weisberg said. "The cycle is so accelerated. There's a big gap on the one hand in the straight reporting and on the other hand, the historical business magazines who often seem outside of the business news cycle."

With The Big Money launching, Mr. Weisberg is spitballing sites with focuses on technology and women's interest, which he describes as fitting in the Slate Group's mode of being "very much pitched at the high end of the market. Not just demograpically, but intellectually." He says he hasn't green-lighted any ideas yet. But: "We're anticipating more. It's a little early to say."