Double X and Slate: A Mutual Love Fest

Like Hanna, I accept Ann Friedman's welcome challenge. Yes, please! We want to influence the national conversation, and send our writers and editors out to go forth and prosper in plenty of other pastures. We're not interested in roping ourselves off into a pink ghetto. I understand the fear that other people will do the roping off for us. When we first started talking about the idea of a separate site early last summer, several of the veteran women of Slate said, hey, we've spent years getting strong women's voices into the magazine. We've succeeded. Now you're taking us out and putting us somewhere else? The answer we all settled on, in the end, was no. Dahlia, Meghan, me, Emily Yoffe, all the women who write regularly for Slate are still doing that. We're just adding more in a new space, as well.

Why not add more content written by women into Slate? It's a matter of home page real estate. The coveted slots on the home page of every site, the ones that get a lot of eyeballs, are limited. Slate has increased the number of those spots in all kinds of creative ways—with multiple covers, sliding panels, and other clever attractions. But we can't expand limitlessly. At some point, if we want to put up more articles and blog posts and slideshows and video, and give them their due, we need more home pages. And so we've begun collectively to sprout them. It’s an exchange: The best content from the sister sites feeds and strengthens the Slate home page. You see that every day, when Slate promotes our pieces, and pieces by The Big Money, The Root, and Slate V. And we pick up the Slate content that we think is most relevant to our readers. It’'s a work in progress, and an experiment. But if it works, we’ll have the best of both worlds: A women’'s magazine that has its own space, but lives in a beloved older magazine, too.