Adweek.com | American Journalism Review
"We have made some editorial changes, including a small reduction in our full time staff and our contractors,” says Slate editor David Plotz. "Press Box" columnist Jack Shafer confirms in an email to Adweek's Dylan Byers that he was laid off, but says he'll continue as a contributor. Plotz tells Byers:

The industry we’re in changes very quickly. This was a decision that made sense both financially and editorially. It was a painful decision for us. But it was a decision that we think—coupled with some new editorial and technological investments that we’re going to make—will pay off in the long run.

In a just-posted American Journalism Review profile of Shafer, Erik Wemple calls the Slate veteran "utterly uncorrupted by friendship, money, power, anything. He is ruthless with people he doesn't know, but what is impressive is how ruthless he can be with the people he knows."

Times executive editor Bill Keller is a fan:

I admire Shafer for taking his subject seriously enough to do his homework and think things through. He's working in a field that sometimes seems to have been overrun by the snarkoleptics, who blow raspberries for a living. He's fun to read, but there's usually an actual idea in his pieces, and some reporting, and some sense of history.

Slate.com
"If you look at our comments section, we're basically troll-free," David Plotz tells Simon Dumenco. "They're not there to just say stupid crap, they're there because they feel part of this intellectual community and they feel communion with our writers." || The Slate editor on a guest lecture he recently gave at Loyola University in Baltimore:

A lot of the kids I was speaking to were communications and PR majors who, I think, are not deeply concerned about the issues that I'm concerned about. But for the kids who are going into journalism, what I was trying to outline was: Here's the shape of the media landscape you're going into, which is heavily dominated by new jobs that require a lot of speed and a lot of quasi-journalistic skills that are high-adrenaline, and they can be really fun jobs, but they're missing certain things.

> Read the interview

Sparksheet.com
"If there’s a story that we want to do just because we want to, we go ahead and do it," says Slate editor David Plotz. "But when we’ve done it, we look to figure out what people are searching around this topic, what they are going to be searching for, and how we can ensure our menu lines and the various things that search engines pay attention to reflect how readers are actually searching. Sometimes we see that people are looking for such and such topic on the Web, and if someone has a great angle on it, we decide how to do the story."