It was created in 1996 by former New Republic editor Michael Kinsley, initially under the ownership of Microsoft as part of MSN.

According to its former editor-in-chief Julia Turner, the magazine is "not fundamentally a breaking news source", but rather aimed at helping readers to "analyze and understand and interpret the world" with witty and entertaining writing.

[3] A French version, slate.fr, was launched in February 2009 by a group of four journalists, including Jean-Marie Colombani, Eric Leser, and economist Jacques Attali.

[4][5] In 2011, slate.fr started a separate site covering African news, Slate Afrique, with a Paris-based editorial staff.

[10][11][12] Slate features regular and semi-regular columns such as Explainer, Moneybox, Spectator, Transport, and Dear Prudence.

"The idea is that every writer and editor on staff has to spend a month or six weeks a year not doing their regular job, but instead working on a long, ambitious project of some sort", Plotz said in an interview.

In the same year, the magazine laid off several high-profile journalists, including co-founder Jack Shafer and Timothy Noah (author of the Chatterbox column).

[3] Since 2006,[8] Slate has been known for publishing contrarian pieces arguing against commonly held views about a subject, giving rise to the #slatepitches Twitter hashtag in 2009.

[9] The Columbia Journalism Review has defined Slate pitches as "an idea that sounds wrong or counterintuitive proposed as though it were the tightest logic ever", and in explaining its success wrote "Readers want to click on Slate Pitches because they want to know what a writer could possibly say that would support their logic".

He suggested that its original worldview, influenced by its founder Kinsley and described by Engber as "feisty, surprising, debate-club centrist-by-default" and "liberal contrarianism", had shifted towards "a more reliable, left-wing slant", whilst still giving space for heterodox opinions, albeit "tempered by other, graver duties".

[22] Its first podcast offering, released on July 15, 2005,[23] featured selected stories from the site read by Andy Bowers, who had joined Slate after leaving NPR in 2003.