Michael Kinsley

Founder of Slate

• Born: March 9, 1951
• Place of Birth: Detroit, Michigan

Primary Company/Organization:Slate

Introduction

Michael Kinsley, an American political journalist and pundit, founded Slate, an online magazine that was originally part of Microsoft's Internet presence. Kinsley was twice editor of The New Republicand he served as editor of Harper'sand the Washington Monthlyand American editor of The Economist. For six years, he was cohost of CNN's Crossfireand earlier was a regular with William Buckley, Jr., on PBS's Firing Line. A longtime contributing writer for Timemagazine, Kinsley has also written columns for The Wall Street Journaland the Timesof London. He has been a regular columnist for PoliticoandBloomberg Viewand is author or coauthor of half a dozen books.

Early Life

Michael Kinsley was born in Detroit, Michigan, on March 9, 1951, the son of George Kinsley, a surgeon, and Lillian (Margolis) Kinsley. He grew up in Birmingham, a suburb of the city, with one sister, Susan. He graduated from the Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, a private, college preparatory school about ten miles outside Detroit. He attended Harvard University, where he had the reputation of being a nonconformist. An excellent student, he was editor of The Harvard Crimson. He received his bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1972, and then he spent two years at Magdalen College, Oxford University, as a Rhodes scholar. In 1974, he returned to the United States and entered law school at Harvard.

Toward the end of his first year in law school, Kinsley went to work for the Washington Monthly, eventually becoming the magazine's managing editor. By the fall of 1976, he had decided that journalism rather than law was the career he should pursue. Martin Peretz, editor in chief and owner of The New Republic, offered the third-year law student the job of managing editor if he could begin immediately. After negotiating with Harvard Law to allow him to complete law school at George Washington University Law Center, which offered evening classes, Kinsley took the job at The New Republic. In 1977, he received his doctorate in jurisprudence from Harvard Law School. He was managing editor of The New Republic from 1976 until 1979, when he became editor.

Life's Work

In 1981, Kinsley moved to New York to become editor of Harper's, a job he held for twenty months. During his time there, Harper's received a National Magazine Award for general excellence. In 1982, he first appeared as cohost and questioner on the PBS television show Firing Line, hosted by William Buckley, Jr. Kinsley returned to Washington and The New Republic in 1983. He wrote the TRB column for the magazine and was named editor again in 1985. He took a leave of absence in 1989 to serve for six months as American Survey editor of The Economist. From 1989 to 1995, Kinsley served as the representative of the political left, opposite conservative Pat Buchanan (later Robert Novak and John Sununu), on CNN's weekly political debate show Crossfire. Kinsley's association with The New Republic continued during his time at Crossfire. He wrote approximately one article per month for the magazine and contributed ten essays per year to Time.

Kinsley was ready for a change in 1995. He talked with Time Warner about a new magazine and later proposed the idea of a web magazine, but the company moved slowly. Kinsley read that Bill Gates was looking for a “big-name editor” for a new news division at Microsoft Network and contacted Microsoft. The information was wrong, but Microsoft had just decided that the network needed a new emphasis on Internet content and was interested in talking to Kinsley. In August 1995, Kinsley paid a secret visit to Microsoft.

In many ways, he was ill suited for the company. At forty-five, he was eleven years older than the average employee of the company. He was older than all but one of the executives. The Microsoft people had some concerns about the effect of Kinsley's leftist politics on the magazine. Kinsley was adamant that he have full editorial freedom and warned that trouble was a by-product of liveliness—they all agreed they wanted a “lively” magazine. Ultimately they agreed on a weekly news and current affairs magazine that would run about twenty-five thousand words (as compared to The New Republic's forty thousand). In November, Kinsley announced, to general shock, that he was leaving Washington, D.C., to edit an online magazine in Seattle.

The move occurred on Christmas Day, 1995; his first day on the job was January 2, 1996. The name Slate, Kinsley's idea, was chosen because it was short and easy to remember and carried a connotation of toughness.

Publication of the magazine began in June 1996. In addition to Kinsley, the small staff included some respected names, such as foreign-affairs columnist Anne Applebaum, Washington bureau chief Jodie Allen, and culture editor Judith Shulevitz. Communicating via e-mail, the group were able to work together from different geographical locations.

Slate's editor came into the job with definite ideas about what the magazine should be. He thought that the major news magazines, both print and television, were so caught up in reporting breaking events that they had abandoned the journalist's traditional role of telling the news and explaining what was going on in the world. Slate was particularly suited to occupy the abandoned ground because of the unique abilities the web gave the online magazine the ability to link backward to older stories for context and to add charts, graphs, photographs, and other content. Kinsley also was convinced that the magazine should be a weekly and that it should be fee-based.

Kinsley was forced to change some of his ideas. Opposed to the idea of bulletin boards, he was persuaded that they were necessary. Even though Slate launched as a free site, Kinsley, convinced that paid subscriptions was the only way for the magazine to be viewed as serious journalism, had not given up on requiring readers to pay for the privilege. When Slate did move to a subscription rate for about a year ($19.95 for one year), there were just over twenty thousand paying subscribers. The free portions of the site were attracting an audience twenty times that size. Kinsley had no choice but to admit that he was wrong and to return to free content.

Kinsley resigned as editor of Slate in April 2004. He was named editorial and opinion editor of the Los Angeles Times in June. He left with Slate ranked as one of the top fifteen news and information sites on the web, with 2.3 million unique visitors in a single month. He also left with the praise of colleagues and competitors for his contributions in shaping a new journalistic medium.

Kinsley's tenure at the Los Angeles Times was brief, only fourteen months. The next year found him writing a column for The Guardian, but in 2007 he was at Time writing a regular column. He then moved to The Atlantic where he was hired as a columnist. By September 2010, he had signed on with Politico, another news website, as a columnist representing views of the left. In 2011, Bloomberg LP announced that Kinsley had joined the editorial board of Bloomberg View. He rejoined the New Republic as editor-at-large in 2013 and became a columnist at Vanity Fair in 2014, a position he still held as of 2024. Kinsley's frequent moves since leaving Slate may speak of his restlessness, but they also demonstrate that there is no shortage of people eager to add his name and credentials to their rosters. Kinsley published the book Old Age: A Beginner's Guide in 2016.

Personal Life

In 2002, Kinsley married Patty Stonesifer, whom he had met during his secret visit to Microsoft in 1995. Stonesifer, a former Microsoft executive, was cochair and chief executive officer (CEO) of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for eleven years. In 2008, she became senior adviser to the foundation. Kinsley and Stonesifer have homes in Seattle and Washington, DC.

Kinsley announced in 2002 that he had Parkinson's disease. On February 8, 2010, the American Society of Magazine Editors announced the election of Kinsley to the Magazine Editors' Hall of Fame. He was also among thirteen journalists whose names appeared in a list of “150 Who Make a Difference in American Politics,” published in the National Journal in the summer of 1986, and in 1999 he was named Editor of the Year by the Columbia Journalism Review for his work at Slate.

Bibliography

Auletta, Ken. “Jumping off a Bridge: Microsoft and Michael Kinsley Enter Cyberspace.” The New Yorker 13 May 1996. Rpt. In The Highwaymen: Warriors of the Information Superhighway. New York: Random House, 1996. 303-332. Print.

Kinsley, Michael. Please Don't Remain Calm: Provocations and Commentaries. New York: Norton, 2008. Print.

Kinsley, Michael. Preface to Best of Slate: A 10th Anniversary Anthology. Ed. David Plotz. New York: Public Affairs, 2006. Print.

Peters, Jeremy W. “Scarborough and Kinsley Will Write for Politico.” New York Times 9 Sept. 2010: B8. Print.

Stein, Nicholas. “Slate vs. Salon.” Columbia Journalism Review 37.5 (1999): 56–59. Print.