Five years after the debut of Slate — a landmark that seemingly marked the Internet media’s coming of age — many of the best and most innovative Web content sites are either dead or on life support.

Feed and Suck just gave up the ghost, joining earlier casualties such as Word. Salon, whose debut actually preceded Slate’s by a few months, and which has consistently offered provocative content and original reporting, is running on fumes. Only Slate, the plaything of Microsoft’s Bill Gates, keeps chugging along.

But if no one’s getting rich on Internet media, that hardly means it’s dead. Look around, and you’ll see that the dot-orgs are doing better than ever. The latest example: AlterNet.org, the syndication service of the alternative press, which unveiled a shinier, deeper Web site this week focusing on public-policy issues from a progressive point of view.

A project of the San Francisco–based Independent Media Institute, AlterNet.org has a budget of about $1 million, paid for by foundations such as George Soros’s Open Society Institute, individual backers, and syndication fees, according to executive editor Don Hazen.

“My sense of it is that the Web is most effective for quickly sharing information and for connecting people around that information,” says Hazen. “It’s just not a good environment for selling products.”

AlterNet.org is built around five broad topic areas: the war on drugs, media culture, globalization, environmental health, and human rights. Writers include populist Jim Hightower, humorist Will Durst (not that Hightower isn’t funny, too), and media critic Norman Solomon. Also included are some outside links (suggestion: Al Giordano’s NarcoNews.com site should be added to the “DrugReporter”), as well as AlterNet projects such as WireTap, a magazine for “socially conscious youth,” and the SPIN Project, a media resource for grassroots activists.

And by the way: a Hazen-produced list of “The 13 Scariest White Guys in America” includes turncoat pitcher Roger Clemens. Excellent choice.

As the Globe turns

It’s musical-chairs time for three of the Globe’s more experienced reporters. For local-news junkies, the most significant change is that Kevin Cullen is coming home to join deputy managing editor Ben Bradlee Jr.’s special-projects team after several years in Dublin and, more recently, London.

Taking Cullen’s place in London will be Middle East bureau chief Charles Sennott. And moving to Israel will be Charles Radin, who was the Globe’s Tokyo bureau chief about a decade ago, and who more recently has been attached to the foreign-news staff but has been based in Boston.

The changes will take place toward the end of July, according to editor Matt Storin.

Back to DC

Bernadette Malone Connolly, who’s been editing the Manchester Union Leader’s traditionally vitriolic editorial pages for nearly two years, will step down this summer in order to be with her husband, Michael Connolly, who’s taken a lobbying job in Washington.

For the most part a traditional, unhyphenated conservative, Malone Connolly was nevertheless something of a departure when the Union Leader lured her north from Washington, where she worked for columnist Robert Novak and wrote for conservative publications such as the Weekly Standard. The Union Leader’s late legendary publisher, William Loeb, specialized in the anti-Semitic and the just plain hateful, thus helping to turn New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation presidential primary into something of a media circus (see “Don’t Quote Me,” News and Features, December 10, 1999).

Malone Connolly pronounces her stint to have been “wonderful,” saying the only issue on which she and publisher Joe McQuaid disagreed was the death penalty — he’s for it, she’s against it — and he let her write an opposing view. McQuaid, in turn, praises Malone Connolly for bringing “a great conservative intellect and a fresh perspective” to the position.

Issue Date: June 14 - 21, 2001