In this week's Sunday Calendar: Reviewing WashPost's new black web mag

IT'S only fitting that the Root, the new online black news, opinion and ancestry magazine launched by the Washington Post Co. almost two weeks ago, is still figuring out its identity. The small publication, created in 2 1/2 months, operates out of a borrowed conference room at the Washington offices of sister e-mag Slate.com. It has only four employees, including its editor, Henry Louis Gates Jr., whose day job is being a famous professor at Harvard, which is not in Washington.

No, the Root is not exactly grassroots. It's the brainchild of Post Co. Chairman Donald E. Graham, who served on the Pulitzer committee with Gates and got him interested more than a year ago. Financially, the Root represents "a very, very small" outlay for the Post Co., Graham said in an interview. Still, the new site is clearly part of a strategy to offset the company's declining newspaper revenue by expanding its family of independent but commercially symbiotic websites: Slate, washingtonpost.com, Newsweek.com and the green-focused sprig.com.

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