True/Slant

» see trueslant.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

true/slant is a moment i missed. in 2009-2010 i was finishing engineering coursework in ankara and reading english-language tech blogs mostly through hacker news and reddit rather than direct subscription. a dedicated us news-contributor experiment with 300 part-time bylines was outside the loop i was in. the whole product arc from launch to shutdown finished before i could have noticed.

lewis dvorkin launched it in alpha in april 2009, beta in june. dvorkin had come out of aol most recently, with earlier stops at forbes and the new york times, and the pitch was that individual journalists should own their own homepages inside a larger publication, with the audience and part of the ad revenue attached to their page rather than to the section. the initial roster was about 65 journalists. by april 2010 it was over 300 part-time contributors. matt taibbi and katty kay were among the bigger names on the platform.

forbes bought true/slant in may 2010 in a deal reportedly worth low single-digit millions. dvorkin moved to forbes as chief product officer. on 29 july 2010 the wind-down was announced. on 31 july the site went offline. the model followed dvorkin into forbes.com and shaped that publication's contributor-network architecture through the 2010s.

~ the record ~

~ what it was ~

the pitch was structural. old-model publications assigned reporters to a topic and put them under a section brand, whether news or business. dvorkin thought that hid the reader-writer relationship that was already forming online. by 2008 or so the individual journalist was the actual node of trust. true/slant gave every contributor a personal page at trueslant.com/theirname and a share of the ad revenue on it, sometimes with equity in the publication as well. contributors were required to reply to comments on their posts.

the contributors kept their outside writing gigs. the model was closer to a group-blog federation than a traditional publication. it did not have a top editor telling reporters what to cover the way the atlantic or the new republic did.

~ the postmortem ~

the numbers were promising for a fifteen-month-old site. traffic climbed steadily and contributor sign-ups outpaced the plan. paidcontent reported a low-single-digit-millions valuation when forbes came calling. but true/slant was burning cash and had not solved the ad-sales problem that would kill every ad-supported news vertical of the next decade. forbes offered an exit and dvorkin accepted. by july the platform had a shutdown notice.

on 29 july 2010 neal ungerleider posted the announcement that the site was winding down operations at the end of the month. on 31 july 2010 the servers came off. the contributor pages that had been the whole point were archived, most of them not indexable through search inside a year.

~ the inheritance ~

dvorkin brought the contributor-network idea to forbes as their chief product officer. by 2012 forbes.com was running the model at scale, thousands of contributors each with a personal page and revenue-share for the top performers, at a much lower per-piece editorial cost than the legacy magazine had. that was the true/slant model surviving under a different brand. it also produced most of the criticism of forbes.com in the following decade around editorial standards.

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