David Plotz, the editor-in-chief of Slate, is stepping down after six years. His deputy editor, Julia Turner, takes over the online magazine today.

Slate is resurrecting its paid membership program. Among the many perks available: “Slate Plus members will automatically get single-page articles throughout the site.” Price: $50/year.

Slate editor David Plotz explores a crucial technological puzzle in an article today: What happens when you befriend hundreds of strangers on Facebook, then lie to them and say it's your birthday? Turns out they wish you happy birthday, which proves the internet is destroying us all.

Jacob Weisberg is stepping aside as the editor of Slate... OR IS HE? Technically, sure, he's ceding the reins after six years to deputy David Plotz, but if Slate has taught us anything, it is to question blatantly-obvious facts just for the hell of it. And if one does that, one discovers Weisberg isn't stepping down at all, he's stepping up, to run something terrifying called the Slate Group, which will be in charge of Slate and various spinoffs, including a new business site called The Big Money. Weisberg compares Slate Group to Time Inc., which of course has not only the flagship newsmagazines but also celebrity, business and sports titles, as well. It might seem natural for these new spinoffs to be, say, blogs, but of course Slate Group isn't using that word, because it's too popular. Instead the site is looking at launching "tools or news aggregators." [Times]

• Esquire's editor-in-chief David Granger says he never got a call from Bill Clinton, as the former president suggested in his comments last night when he was asked to respond to the incendiary Vanity Fair story by Todd Purdum. Turns out it was a measly staff editor who emailed. [Politico]

We're going to go for one more bite of the apple on that 9/11 photo story. It's been previously established that Thomas Hoepker took a photo of Brooklyn hipsters acting in a potentially douchebaggy way on the day of the terrorist attacks. Frank Rich weighed in at the NYT, saying that they weren't callous, just American. David Plotz of Slate disagreed, declaring them not douchebags but citizens engaged in discussion. One of the photo subjects, a Brooklyn artist, popped up to say that, yeah, that's exactly what they were doing, and had Hoepker looked a little more closely, he would have realized that. Now Hoepker himself emerges, rather articulately discussing the ambiguity of the photo itself. At this point we're inclined to believe that the person who comes off the worst in this scenario is Frank Rich, who used the image to promote his political agenda, but our view may change when Slate publishes the next few installments in the series ("I Published That 9/11 Photo," "I Wrote That New York Times Column," "I Flew That Plane Into The Tower," etc.). We'll keep you posted.

Yesterday we asked you whether the young hipsters in the "taboo" 9/11 photo above were callous douchebags or concerned citizens; a slight majority of you opted for douchebags. As it turns out, one of the subjects got in touch with Slate. Walter Sipser, a Brooklyn artist (because, you know, of course) disputes both the "callous" characterization and the accusation of youth (dude's 45). You can read his statement here and decide for yourself; we're just going to say that, looking at those frames, we've decided that our original dichotomy may have unnecessarily suggested that the two options were mutually exclusive.

The story so far: