Slate | The Slatest
Slate’s news blog, The Slatest, is bringing tighter focus and more editorial voice to its aggregation of daily news. “Starting Monday,” innovations editor Katherine Goldstein writes, “The Slatest has a new tagline: ‘Your News Companion.’ Rather than offering comprehensive aggregation, the new Slatest will highlight the excellent writing and keen editorial voice of Josh Voorhees, who’ll be bringing you definitive insight into the day’s events.”
Slatest’s last relaunch in April 2011 was aimed at “quickening its pace,” and as editor David Plotz explained to CJR, being “a very smart, entertaining brief on the most interesting stories of the day.” The Slatest arrived in 2009, as a re-invention of the site’s popular feature born 12 years earlier, “Today’s Papers.” In its first iteration, the Slatest was updated three times a day to reflect what then-Slate media critic Jack Shafer described as the three phases of the news cycle.
Voorhees explains today’s shift in his own blog post:
While the old Slatest cast the net far and wide to aggregate the day’s most important and most interesting stories, this new blog version will be more selective and more varied. We’ll still jump on major breaking news (often with all-in live blogging), but we’ll also take a half-step back when we can to debunk some nugget of faux-news that is setting Twitter atwitter, or to answer a factual question that may arise from the current news cycle.
We’ll also be flagging those items from around the Web that you shouldn’t miss, whether it’s the latest super PAC ad aimed at shaking up the campaign or a must-read article that offers a unique, or simply complete, take on one of the day’s top stories. In short—and as our new tagline suggests—we’re hoping to serve as your companion through the day’s news cycle(s), and we think this new format will allow us to better accomplish that.
The change signals yet another filtering technique: With so much aggregation out there, it’s less important to chase everything and more important to focus on bringing a distinct style to a few things.
Earlier: The aggregator’s dilemma: How do you fairly serve your readers & the sources (Poynter) | The journalistic value of aggregation creates the business value (Poynter) | The seven steps to a successful aggregation strategy for your news organization (Poynter)
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