At Slate we operate under the basic assumption that good journalism is good journalism, whether it comes to you via paper or pixels. At the same time, we do try to think hard about new ways to do journalism in this new medium. We're not motivated entirely by a high-minded spirit of experiment.
Commercial calculation plays a role.
The brutal fact is that for nonessential reading, people for some reason still prefer curling up with paper and ink to sitting upright in front of a computer screen. In order to pry them away from traditional magazines, magazine-style journalism on the Web has to offer some compensating advantages. At Slate , simply being better by universal journalistic standards is something we're arrogant enough to aspire to, but not arrogant enough to count on. So the search goes on. One obvious advantage is that we're free.