Writing that’s native to the web is different in ways that are crucial but subtle enough that you can miss them if you conceive of your audience as reading a printed product. The tone of good web writing grows out of email. It’s more direct, personal, colloquial, urgent, witty, efficient. It doesn’t waste your time. It reflects that engagement, responsiveness and haste of web surfers, as opposed to the more general passivity of print readers. It integrates the use of links into the creative and intellectual process as opposed to tacking them on afterwards. And it uses multimedia in an organic rather than an ornamental way.
Bio: Jacob Weisberg joined Slate in 1996, starting as chief political correspondent and in 2002 succeeding Michael Kinsley to become editor. Weisberg handed the editorship over to David Plotz when he was appointed chairman and editor-in-chief of the Slate Group in 2008.