One of the top online magazines (it is listed as such on under the links section of this blog), Slate.com, has been sold by Microsoft to The Washington Post Company, so sayeth Taegan Goddard. First, Howie Kurtz's coverage in The Post:

The Washington Post Co. said today it is buying Slate in an effort to boost the newspaper company's online traffic but does not plan any editorial changes at the eight-year-old Web magazine.

In announcing a deal to buy Slate from Microsoft Corp. for an undisclosed sum, said to be in the millions of dollars, Post executives said they would keep Jacob Weisberg as editor and most of the 30-person staff. Cliff Sloan, general counsel of Washington Post Newsweek Interactive, will also become publisher of the money-losing magazine when the deal takes effect next month.

Weisberg pronounced himself "delighted" with the move. "Microsoft has been a great place for us for the last 8-1/2 years," he said, but "it was a tough place to develop our business because it wasn't a media company and doesn't want to be a media company. They're really big and we're really small. The joke was always that we're almost a rounding error, but a rounding error probably exaggerated our status."

Weisberg also pens a piece on the subject:

I am confident that we have found the right buyer for Slate. The Washington Post Co. is known for supporting high-quality publications, for taking editorial integrity seriously, and for being as good as its word. Don G., as we shall now call him, recognized early on the journalistic potential of the Web, making a significant long-term investment in Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive (WPNI), the Post's online wing. Don wants Slate to become consistently profitable, but he is a patient man and prepared for this to take a while. Like the other people we've met at the Post Co., Don is almost suspiciously nice and appears to have some kind of personal relationship with each of the approximately 30,000 employees at his company. Another of these disturbingly nice Posties, Cliff Sloan, has agreed to become Slate's new publisher.

Slate is a great publication, and I'm glad to see that it will be well-funded in the future by an organization like the Post Company which has shown a propensity to deliver good, solid news coverage.