The fact that most of those in-the-media-know here think Michael Kinsley is wrong suggests that maybe, just maybe, he’s right.
Kinsley, 44, a journalistic wunderkind-turned-middle-aged provocateur, is making a seemingly abrupt turn: departing the capital for the Internet.
Well, what he’s actually doing is quitting a cushy gig as a co-combatant on CNN’s evening “Crossfire” barkathon and a more soul-enriching senior editorship at the New Republic, selling his house and splitting for Microsoft’s headquarters outside Seattle.
There, he’ll attempt to conceive and produce a general interest, mid- to-high-brow on-line magazine “for normal people, not cyberjunkies,” as he characterized it to me last week.
“Hah! He’s nuts. Nobody will ever read a magazine on their computer,” some journalistic cognoscenti declare, alternately exhibiting condescension and, it seems, downright envy.
“Bill Gates is probably giving him a zillion bucks, but it ain’t going to work,” goes one line, referring to the billionaire Microsoft founder.
Those doubting Thomases within the media know, surely better than the average reader, the Kinsley saga up to this point.
A Rhodes scholar and brainy graduate of Harvard and Harvard Law School, he’s been editor in chief of New Republic and Harper’s. He left the U.S. briefly at one point to write for the London-based Economist news weekly and for several years has written columns for Time.
As an editor, he gained a reputation for being very tightly focused, terrific with writers (especially younger ones) and given to contrarian positions with a witty, at times flip, style. Some even claim that the panache with which he infused the now-snoozy New Republic in the 1980s was aped by other hotshot magazines.
Indeed, Chicago labor attorney Tom Geoghegan, a Harvard chum and New Republic contributor, contends that his celebrity as a writer-commentator has overshadowed a formidable record in guiding younger writers who passed through New Republic and went on to bigger careers.
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Then came CNN and the nightly intellectual Ping-Pong match that even some old friends of his always felt was a waste of his talents.
It’s a reflection of the deeply centrist tenor of Washington debate that Kinsley, a generally pragmatic left-leaning moderate, would be deemed apropos for the “liberal” end of CNN’s “Crossfire.”
But he was, and carried off the role with aplomb.
“I’ve said this before,” Kinsley said last week. “In a democracy, political debate takes place in many different forms and levels. It might be nice if everybody reached their political conclusions by reading the New Republic. But that’s not how it works.
“There’s nothing ignoble about engaging in politics at a level and in a forum that engages a larger number of people. The kind of arguments you make on a show like that are not the same you make in a magazine like New Republic. But you are limiting yourself if you refuse to partake (in the other forum).”
“One of the things that made him real good is that he’s a generalist, from politics to pop culture, from movies to sports,” said Rick Davis, the CNN executive who oversees the show. “He is a natural debater. Very unyielding and with a good sense of humor.”
And, for sure, it’s been lucrative. Taking a pure guess, I’d figure he was taking in around $300,000 from CNN and perhaps another $200,000 or so from other dealings, including speeches. (Kinsley unabashedly defends taking money from special interests, at once displaying intellectual candor and ethical myopia.)
And, now, he heads to Microsoft for less money than CNN pays. “They’re paying me well, but not as well as television.”
“No one came to me. I came to them. I thought that somebody might create a good magazine on the Web and somebody might back me.”
He contacted the boss of the new Microsoft Network, drafted a long memo and engaged in “endless talking, endless back and forth.”
“The offer was to create an online magazine based roughly on the memo I sent them. It won’t be Time or Newsweek, since we don’t have those resources, but will draw (for inspiration) on The Economist, New Yorker, New Republic, Time, Newsweek, all those models.”
He will not be overseeing an elaborate enterprise. The budget will probably be closer to that of New Republic than the New Yorker, he said, meaning more in the $1 million to $2 million range than $10 million to $20 million.
“This is not Bill Gates’ plaything,” he said about the man he has not met. He emphasized that it will be “a business, part of a large corporation, and a “small experiment on their part.”
Kinsley, who is not a computer whiz (“I surf the Web but not relentlessly”), is not thinking in terms of a small, niche audience like at New Republic or Harper’s. He would love to produce something that lots and lots of folks want to see.
But will people read a magazine on-line?
“I have absolutely no idea,” he said. “I think there’s a chance or I wouldn’t be doing this.
“But I have no doubt that somebody will be ultimately successful in developing an online magazine with huge circulation and advertising and that is very profitable. In the same way that print magazines have come along and done that.
“Whether this one will be like that is iffier. But someone will do it. Whether it’s me or not, I don’t know. “
He believes that the economics of an on-line publication are better than for a print one. It will simply be cheaper to produce and distribute. And since the Microsoft Network is affixed to Windows 95, association with the network will at least bring a hefty potential audience.
“One of the challenges here is to figure out what is inherently different about a magazine on-line,” said Kinsley whose mandate is to have the magazine going in 1996. “How long can the articles be? Can you feed an 8,000-word article on-line?
“I will start with the assumption that the differences may not be as great as people assume–that you can give people serious stuff without a lot of bells and whistles.”
Kinsley regularly reads New Republic, Nation, the new Weekly Standard, the New York Review of Books, Time, Newsweek, Atlantic Monthly, the Spectator, Private Eye, Economist, Vanity Fair, Conde Nast Traveler and the New Yorker, among others. Inevitably, what he produces will reflect that range of interest.
“But I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about a niche. I assume people are interested in what I am interested in.”
He put his house on the block last week (“Want to buy it?” he asked me) and knows he will miss Washington. But even though he wasn’t at all sure this would necessitate moving to Seattle, Microsoft said he had to. So he will, asserting that “life should be an adventure.”
For sure, there’s one winner here: Bill Gates.
He’s gained initial credibility for this venture with a big-name hire. He’s got someone who can think through the possibilities and discern if maybe, just maybe, you can bypass traditional magazines and find a huge audience.
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Driving for dough
Oh, there’s more on the oh-so-clean Democrats inviting special interests to the Phoenician Resort in Scottsdale, Ariz., for golf Dec. 2-3.
There will be time for a practice round “to work on your golf stroke” and it looks like there will be “10-12 members of the Democrat Caucus joining us on what will be a great event.”
Remember, now the “requested contribution for the golf tournament is $2,000 in personal dollars, $2,500 in PAC funds.” Call 202-485-3417.
Oh, somehow the letter from Reps. Ed Pastor of Arizona and Martin Frost of Texas again omits the scrumptious irony that the resort was built by convicted savings and loan swindler Charles Keating.