Slate is retiring “Today’s Papers,” one of the original aggregators of the Web, 12 years after it started its beloved once-a-day summary of the nation’s news pages.
In its place comes a new recap of the news, one that acknowledges that the news cycle has, well, sped up quite considerably since “Today’s Papers” started in 1997. That is why the “Slatest,” the name of the new feature that comes online Monday morning, will collect the world’s news three times a day.
David Plotz, editor of the online magazine Slate, very superlatively calls it a “very fast, very intelligent, very witty news aggregation feature.”
The new feature will succeed both “Today’s Papers” and its companion, “Other Magazines.” In an interview, Mr. Plotz said that when “Today’s Papers” was introduced in the early days of the Web, it met a need “our readers hadn’t even known they had.”
The editors would collect front pages of newspapers and summarize them for readers each morning. Back then, Slate did not call what it was doing aggregation; instead, it termed it “meta-news.” Terminology aside, it quickly became one of Slate’s most popular features.
But as the news cycle sped up, “Today’s Papers” stuck to its format. Slate, owned by The Washington Post Company, started to talk about a change in its strategy almost a year ago.
In an editorial meeting, Jack Shafer, the media columnist for Slate, observed that the news cycle had three distinct parts: an overnight shift led by newspapers, a daytime phase when other news media entities react to the overnight news, and an afternoon phase when, as Mr. Plotz put it, “the day’s news events break and are digested.”
The Slatest will be updated three times a day to try to capture that. It will also include an even more frequently updated Twitter stream.
“The major newspapers still drive the news agenda,” Mr. Plotz said, but the Slatest recognizes “that the daily newspaper is only one part of the news universe. That’s why we’re expanding our aggregation efforts so aggressively.” BRIAN STELTER
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