Prince BoondockSaint wrote:
How often do you read your articles on Slate and then click their cites? Do they even have cites?
Well, they're a news magazine rather than a newspaper, so most of their articles are opinion pieces or general discussion of a topic, rather than breaking-news reporting. They do give cites, linked and otherwise, but moreso for informing the reader than out of a "cite everything" research paper regimen.
A main difference between their content and an obituary, is that obituaries are probably written by a low-level employee, who doesn't get a byline. Less accountability when your name isn't publicly attached to it. A lot of the Slate people are long-time veteran reporters. And when they do publish a digging-up-dirt, reporting story, they have a lot of sources I assume they find through LexisNexis, not Wikipedia.