Old-timers will recall the hue and cry with which self-styled web veterans greeted the appearance of Michael Kinsley's webzine Slate back in 1996. I don't, because back in those halcyon days I had never even sent an email, let alone seen the web, but if I've got my secondhand information right, On the Left I'm Michael Kinsley invited the opprobrium with some high-handed comments about civilizing the web, and with the magazine's odd air of Ivy League, New Republic staidness.

Hipsters be damned, of course (anybody who considers himself a web hipster at this late date is pretty much doomed anyway). Slate, laughable though it can occasionally be, has proven to be a generally interesting publication - if you consider it on its own terms, as a magazine (with low resolution clips from the movies it reviews).

Now though, having settled into his new digs, Kinsley is reviving one of the ideas that made Slate so unpopular in the first place - the one about making you pay for it. While I support all efforts to make money through writing, on line and off, it's pretty clear that Slate has as much working against it now as it did eighteen months ago.

The first and most obvious drawback could be explained by Slate's in-house economist Paul Krugman: The more abundant a commodity is, the cheaper it becomes. Kinsley explained his latest effort at charging for subscription by citing the examples of the Wall Street Journal, Business Week and The Economist, all of which charge for access to their web sites. They get away with it because they have something to charge for: the Journal and Business Week provide consistently excellent business and financial reporting, rare commodities for which there will always be great demand (as long as you can get your employer to pay for it, which I suspect is how most of these subscriptions happen). The Economist provides little beyond snooty English generalizations (remember their "Survey of Islam" from a couple years ago?), much of it cribbed from hard-to-find specialist publications, but they have convinced enough suckers that such stuff is valuable to justify a high price for both the magazine and its web site.

On the other hand, what does Slate offer? The current issue finds "Reply All," an epistolary novel told through reprinted emails - a concept that Man About the Web Carl Steadman exploited years ago with his email romance Two Solitudes (and that one had the added charm of being delivered to your inbox at random times, making you feel like a true eavesdropper). Looking further, we find Pundit Links, a collection of links to pundits online, which is basically identical to Matt Drudge's front page. And of course, we find lots of assessments, synopses, reviews and jeremiads - opinion, in other words, which is already, um, available in abundance elsewhere on the web.

You can argue that none of this is any different from The New Republic, Kinsley's old home. And people are willing to pay for that. Indeed, The New Republic, with its attacks on such broad targets as Newt Gingrich and Jude Wanniski and Marty Peretz's feeble and ill-informed Arab-bashing, is demonstrably inferior to Slate. But with a New Republic subscription, you get an actual bound magazine, suitable for storage and for reading anywhere - most crucially, of course, in the john.

Actually, that physical magazine presence may occasionally be a drawback. I object to clutter, especially the clutter of periodicals, and would no more buy the Sunday New York Times, for example, than I would keep a hairy, shedding dog in my apartment. Indeed, it is a unique advantage of online publications that they do the storage for you - just call up their archives and you have access to all their old issues. But this advantage too is lost with subscription. If at some point you decide to cancel your Slate subscription, you lose the use of the site, and access to all issues - including the ones you've already paid for.

Finally, there's an issue that, between having to pay your ISP and outfit yourself with a computer, a phone line and a modem, Slate isn't free even now. Granted, Kinsley isn't collecting any of those fees, which is tough luck for him; but at least he has the richest man in the solar system to help defray his costs.

My motives here are of course not pure. Back when I was writing for free weeklies like the Manhattan Spirit, it was a special indignity to know that my writing was not deemed worth paying for. That has been largely erased on the web, where virtually all the content is free (though the ignominy of having to write for the web at all remains intact). If Kinsley can pull off his payment scheme - worse yet, if he can get others to follow his lead - it's back to the ghetto for me. The day you have to start paying for simpleton is the day I get elected Pope.

So while I do have some secret favorites among Slate's content offerings, I consider a fair price for all of it to be $0.00. I will remain a loyal fan of Kinsley's publication for as long as I don't have to pay for it, and I wish him all the luck in the world in his efforts to attract advertisers, so long as his interests do not conflict with mine. But for me, the payment side of the Slate will remain empty. I hope everybody else feels the same way.