Recently departed Salon.com CEO Richard Gingras tells Russell Adams he thinks it's difficult for a news site with a professional staff to turn a profit with fewer than 10 million monthly unique visitors. In July, Slate drew 6.5 million unique visitors in the U.S., down about 6 percent from a year earlier. It says year-to-date, its traffic is up from 2010. Adams writes:

Slate has maintained higher cost-per-page view rates than many of its competitors, industry executives say. The site has also flouted industry axioms with initiatives like a program that requires writers to take four to six weeks off to work on a long-form project.

Slate says it plans to continue this initiative. It also says profitability doesn't necessarily require a bigger audience.

Jeff Jarvis tweeted this morning: "WSJ says Slate signals flaws in 'web model.' No, I'd say it's weakness is the content model."

Why was he let go? “It was a decision made for financial and editorial future reasons,” says Slate editor David Plotz. “Jack is obviously a brilliant journalist.” Eric Wemple writes:Plotz says that Shafer has been a “great colleague and great friend over many years” but clams up when probed for something more. And Shafer says that he was “happy for David to be my boss, and he’s been a good boss” but clams up when probed for something more.

Neither is much for sentimentality. Perhaps that explains why there won’t be one of those “so long” pieces when Shafer finishes up at Slate on Sept. 2. “Farewell columns are bush league,” he says.

American Journalism Review editor Rem Rieder, who put a Shafer profile just before the Slate layoffs were announced, wonders why the online publication axed "someone who is performing at such a high level? .... This is a truly befuddling and disappointing decision." || Earlier stories:
> Shafer says he gets up at 2 a.m. to read front pages of major papers
> Why Shafer once considered changing the name of his column to "Litter Box"
> Shafer discovers NYT plagiarism while hunting for "Stupidest Drug Story"

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.

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.

The Slate_Explainer twitter feed -- not authorized by David Plotz & Co. -- is described by its founder as a place for all the questions Slate doesn't get to publish. ("If they need more room, why don't they just make the debt ceiling a dome?") I sent an email to the "fake Explainer" and asked if he'd out himself and explain why he started the feed. His response:

My name is Etan Bednarsh (@ebednarsh) I am a comedian in New York City and I have also written for the Huffington Post and Mediaite.

I started this because I am an avid news and media follower. At the same time, I am somewhat obsessed with the idea of people who just completely miss the point of things. I think the Slate Explainer piece that put me over the edge recently was "Why Does Dominique Strauss-Kahn Have White Hair and Black Eyebrows?" Someone out there took all the complexities of that story and funneled it down into that question.

Haven't heard yet from the actual Slate Explainers. I can only hope one of my ridiculous suggestions eventually matches up with one of their articles.

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.