The Washington Post Co said on Wednesday that it is launching a new unit that will develop and manage a family of Web-based magazines.

The Slate Group plans to get into other new media ventures that it develops on its own or through acquisitions, the company said in a statement.

“The rationale is that you can build an audience beyond Slate’s existing audience in certain vertical or demographic categories,” the group’s editor-in-chief, Jacob Weisberg, said in an interview on Wednesday.

“I think it’s sort of the logic by which Time magazine gave birth to Sports Illustrated and People, and it’s the idea that you can incubate a magazine within another magazine,” said Weisberg, who was editor of Slate magazine before being named editor-in-chief of the Slate Group.