Prodded by last week’s balloon boy hoax, media critic Jack Shafer cautions reporters against being too quick to relay the stories of alleged victims. In his Press Box blog on Slate.com — an article titled “Snookered by Victims. Cynical reporters and…

Chris Christie/AP photo

As the governor’s race in New Jersey enters its final weeks, incumbent Democrat Jon Corzine has introduced the weight of his Republican opponent, Chris Christie, as a campaign issue.

An article on Slate.com by Daniel Engber — “Too Big To Win. Fat…

Jack Shafer, the often-irreverent media critic for Slate.com, offers some theories for why murders at Ivy League schools get so much press coverage.  His column’s headline: “Murder Draped in Ivy. Why the press can’t get enough of Harvard or Yale…

Online news aggregator Slate.com is dropping its once-a-day summary of the nation’s top newspapers and replacing it with a series of three daily newsletters that — according to the New York Times — “acknowledges that the news cycle has, well, sped up…

Slate.com’s technology columnist, Farhad Manjoo, advises President Barack Obama to stop trying to refute those who warn that the health care bill would create “death panels” — end-of-life tribunals.

Manjoo wrote the book “True Enough,” which he says argues that “modern…

You may not be ready to take legal advice from Slate.com, but its “Ask the Explainer” column argues that President Barack Obama would stay in office even if the “birthers” challenging the legality of his presidency are right.

In a column titled…

The people taking part in Slate.com’s Newspapers vs. Web experiment are saying that the Henry Gates arrest is being handled better online than in newspapers. (The experiment, the subject of an Editors’ Desk post yesterday, basically is to see if it’s…

Slate.com is conducting an experiment aimed at answering that question. For three days this week — Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday — Slate has two teams of readers trying to stay abreast of the news through different sources.

On one side:

• Two (mostly) newspaper…

Slate.com’s Jack Shafer writes in his media column that the New York newspaper strike of 1962-63 might offer a glimpse of life without newspapers. Shafer writes:

I avoid making predictions, because very few of my predictions have ever come true. I…

Missouri’s cheap gasoline prices made the list of Slate.com’s 10 most popular stories of the year.

“Cheap gas in Missouri. What keeps pump prices so low in some states?” came in at No. 9. (The most popular Slate article of the year:…