58ANNALS OF COMMUNICATIONSTHE EDUCATION OF MICHAELKINSLEYWhat's been going on since the Beltway contrarian and the corporate cyber whizzes in Seattle got togetherto create a new kind of electronic magazine? Some very interesting ideas about journalism.KEN AULETTAWHEN Michael Kinsley announced, last November, that he was leaving Washington, D.C., to edit an on-linemagazine in Seattle, colieagues and friends reacted as if he were moving to another planet. And, in a sense, he was. InWashington, Kinsley was celebrated as an editor and writer, and he had won fame and large lecture fees as the co-host of CNN's"Crossfire.~ Telephones rang; attention was paid.On Kinsley's new plane~Microsoft's corporate headquarters, in Redmond, just outside Seattle the phones rarely ring. Thereare nearly nine thousand employees on this college-like campus, and they converse, silently, by E-mail. Ties and jackets areshunned, jeans and uncombed hair are "cool," and the denizens speak a language of their own. A person might say, for instance,that he needed to locate the "owner" (person in charge) and then "drill down" (learn more) in order to "achieve granularity"grasp the complexities) and then get to "2.0" (the next level) while avoiding "a bandwidth problem" (an overloaded schedule)or a communications disconnect."Kinsley has always thought of himself as a contrarian, an impression he fostered as the editor of The New Republic and as thewriter of the magazine's "TRB" column. At Microsoft, he maintains that role because he has become the observantanthropologist. The Microsoft natives "have their own inside-the-Beltway culture here, too," Kinsley says. "They're notfollowing primaries. They're following the new release of Netscape." The young men and women who work in each of the thirtyMicrosoft buildings receive the same free sodas and coffee, eat the same subsidized meals, and inhabit the same one- ortwo-"module" windowed offices. "Corporate socialism," he marvels. He also notes, "I'm the oldest person I run into all day." Atforty-five, he is elevenyears older than the average employee, and is older than every senior executive but one at Microsoft.Even Kinsley's appearance sets him apart. He wears L. L. Bean chinos and cotton shirts, white socks, and the round clear-plastic-framed eyeglasses he first purchased from England's National Health Service the kind of austere "war-criminal glasses,"as he calls them, that were worn by former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. But, since few of his new colleagues areconcerned with appearances, he blends in. "Someone said to me that going from CNN to here is like going from a companywhere men wear makeup to a place where women don't," he says.The relevant question about Kinsley, though, is not sartorial; it is whether the electronic magazine he is conceiving will bereal. He is, metaphorically, jumping off a bridge when he doesn't know whether water or cement awaits below. He does,however, know this: more than a third of all American households have computers, according to the national research firmOdyssey, and a rapidly expanding quarter of these households are connected to the Internet. Kinsley also knows that an onlinemagazine is dirt cheap, since there are no costs for paper, printing, or postage. And he knows a larger truth: traditionalmiddlemen-the Post Office; billing services; travel agents; department stores; video, record, or book stores; movie theatres; orbank tellers~are threatened by new delivery systems, from cyberspace to wireless technology. Those middlemen-who getbetween the product and the customer will become "roadkill" on the information superhighway, in the phrase of Microsoft'stechnology guru, group vice-president Nathan Mylrvold. Myhrvold, a thirty-six-year-old Ph.D., writes lively, term-paper-lengthmissives every couple of weeks, and circulates them among fellow-executives. Myhrvold believes that cyberspace is to Americain the late twentieth century what Frederick Jackson Turner said the frontier was to America in the nineteenth century: the engine driving aneconomic democracy. A Mybivold memo from September of 1993 declared:One of the most general and dramatic aspects of the information highway is to virtualize space and time. Put another way, thehighway will break the tyranny of geography, the stranglehold of location, access and transportation that has governed humansocieties from their inception. . . . Assuming that the network is there, a person in Redmond or Manhattan or nearly anywhereelse will have equal access to goods and services presented on the networkBut this is stargazing. Back on planet Earth, none of the hundreds of electronic magazines started in the past year or s~ notHotWired, or Word, or Salon, or Feed, or Mr. Showbiz, to name a few-have satisfactorily solved the puzzle of how to bill andcollect from subscribers, or how to justify rates for advertisers. As for the audience, emerging technologies could make lots ofinformation available, but it is not clear how aggressive and invasive-these electronic publications are prepared to be. NielsenMedia Research can't even agree with itself about the number of people using the Internet: it reported last October that therewere twenty-two million adult users and this April that there were just over nineteen million. One of the most widely traffickedentertainment magazines on the Internet is the year-old Mr. Showbiz, but its mixture of entertainment-industry reporting andgossip attracts only twenty-three thousand daily visitors, according to its deputy editor, Jim Albrecht. "Like every other site onthe Internet, it's a money loser," Albrecht, who is twenty-eight and is based in Seattle, says. "I've never heard of a site thatmakes money. The gamble is that this is going to be a big advertising industry." Build it, and they will come.What Kinsley has set out to build is a weekly public-affairs magazine somewhat to the left of The New Republic but muchquirkier than the pigeonhole he found himself imprisoned in as the "liberal" on "Crossfire." The new weekly magazine, whichwill be called Slate, will run to about twenty-five thousand words (The New Republic runs to about forty thousand words), andthe most optimistic goal, according to Russell Sieglman. who until recently was the general