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| <nettime> TELEPOLIS: Web Dreams Deferred |
Dieser TELEPOLIS Artikel wurde Ihnen von <dead letter office> gesandt. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- read the original with all links (still) active. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Web Dreams Deferred David Hudson 13.06.2001 Publications on the Web dwindle. So do publications about it You know the old curse. May you live in interesting times. Well, for anyone working in what was supposed to have been the new economy, these are pretty damn interesting times. For Owen Thomas, for example, the guy behind the daily must-read Ditherati [0], wherein "the digerati dither, daily," you could say that last week was very, very interesting indeed. Particularly Thursday. That afternoon, Time Inc. announced that the magazine Thomas writes for, eCompany Now [1], would "subsume" Business 2.0 [2], as an Inside.com report [3] put it, and take on its title. Then, Thursday evening, he found himself talking to Suck [4] editor Tim Cavanaugh about the demise of Automatic Media [5], the company formed by Suck, where Thomas once worked [6] as a copy editor, Feed [7] and Altculture [8]. For countless Web veterans, the loss of Suck and Feed, both founded in mid-1995, isn't just the story of the week; if symbols were dollars, Feed being put on ice [9] and Suck going on vacation [10] would be the story of the year. But symbols aren't dollars, and money-wise, the merger of the two magazines is the bigger story, so let's knock out those numbers and have done with it. Time Inc., a subsidiary of the largest media conglomerate in the world, AOL Time Warner, is essentially forking over $68 million for a circulation list and a brand name [11]. Even so, that's just under a fifth of what Gruner + Jahr USA paid to acquire Fast Company and, perhaps even more telling, about half of the price that had been on the table when Time first talked to Future Network PLC, the British owners of Business 2.0, about buying the magazine just half a year ago. So not only is there one less "new economy magazine" on the rack, but the prices being paid for them as their ad revenues rapidly dwindle is going down. Way down and fast. The trend commented on here [12] two months ago continues apace. In fact, the Industry Standard [13] at least would really prefer you not think of it as a "new economy magazine" anymore. The weekly has changed [14] its tagline from "The Newsmagazine of the Internet Economy" to "Intelligence for the Information Economy". Oh, and laid off [15] 20 more employees this month. Owen Thomas knows from new economy magazines. Before returning to San Francisco to join the eCompany team in time for its launch a year ago, he'd done a stint in New York for Time Digital, and before that, it was Red Herring. But it was his editor at what was then just Time Warner, Josh Quittner, who wrote the definitive eulogy for Suck though he probably didn't realize it at the time. The title of article Quittner wrote for Wired says it all: Web Dreams [16]. Writing for the November 1996 issue of the flagship magazine for the company that had just bought Suck, Quittner has a lot of self-referential fun in the piece, but the basic story line goes like this: These two guys, Carl Steadman and Joey Anuff, have scored classic mid-90s dream jobs at Hotwired [17], but it's not enough. They've got their own ideas about how publishing works on the Web. Working for Hotwired by day, they slave away by night at their Web dream. It launches, the hits (as they called them back then) come in, multiply, and they sell out. Tellingly, at the end of the piece, Quittner takes the self-referentiality to its logical conclusion, turning down an offer for a job at Hotwired in favor of another to pursue his own Web dream with Time Warner backing. Netly News would come, then go. Quittner, though, would stick with the company that could afford such trials and errors and is still pulling down a salary. Meanwhile, once it became a Wired property, Suck was able to expand its payroll. "On my resume," says Thomas, "my Suck employment dates from August 1996 (right before the failed Wired IPO) to March 1997 (two months after the disastrous private-equity deal that sealed Wired's fate). I never vested any of my options." To cut to the chase, the Wired empire unraveled, and Suck, like the rest of Wired Digital, wound up a Lycos property, bought itself back and formed Automatic Media with Feed with financing from Lycos and Advance Publications. As Greg Lindsey notes on Inside.com (itself recently merged with Steven Brill's weird empirelet, but that's another story), "At least for the moment, Suck and Feed will take their places alongside Word.com as cult sites that knew they couldn't make it on their own but, oddly enough, didn't hit the rocks until they hooked up with a supposedly more business-savvy partner." There's little point here in lauding Suck and Feed for all they've meant to the medium. Scott Rosenberg has already done that [18] as admirably and succinctly as anyone could hope on the Web pages of another endangered title, Salon. And if it's sheer volume of ranting and wailing you're after, turn to Plastic [19], the community weblog launched by Automatic Media in January where the topic "Is Plastic Dead Meat?" [20] has probably chalked up more comments than any other story in Plastic's short history. It's in that topic, actually, that Feed co-founder Steven Johnson shares "a few graphs" [21] from his original 8-page proposal for Feed. Those graphs serve as an interesting reminder that both Feed and Suck evolved away from their original concepts, which were polar opposites, and wound up meeting somewhere in the middle. Suck ended up dropping the "onslaught of mixed-metaphor allusions" and pained syntax Johnson bemoans in his justly praised book Interface Culture but also the link-as-editorial-comment feature that made Suck an only-online publishing phenomenon. Meanwhile, over six long years, Feed experimented less and less with odd interfaces, multimedia possibilities, pop-up footnotes and the like to eventually end up publishing shortish daily essays on pretty much the same topics Suck addressed once it gave up critiquing Web sites: pop culture, politics and, well, just about anything everybody else was already talking about, too. By the turn of the millennium and all that, with consolidation the rule of the day, it seemed to make sense for Suck and Feed to join forces. "Automatic Media was meant to be an advertising network, first and foremost," says Thomas, "letting Suck and Feed share salespeople and tech resources. The ineluctable conclusion I draw from this is that online advertising -- even more than offline advertising -- is a scale business. Automatic Media drew a similar conclusion, but they may have been off by an order of magnitude or so." Indeed, if there are lessons to be drawn... but wait. Perhaps Netslaves co-author Steve Baldwin approaches this angle best: "I'm frankly sick of lessons - this business sucks [22]." Links [0] http://www.ditherati.com [1] http://www.ecompany.com [2] http://www.business2.com [3] http://www.inside.com/jcs/Story?article_id=32578&pod_id=7 [4] http://www.suck.com [5] http://www.automatic-media.com [6] http://www.suck.com/daily/98/06/03/3.html [7] http://www.feedmag.com [8] http://www.altculture.com [9] http://www.feedmag.com/templates/default.php3?a_id=1723 [10] http://www.suck.com/daily/2001/06/08/ [11] http://www.inside.com/jcs/Story?article_id=32701&pod_id=7 [12] http://www.heise.de/tp/english/inhalt/co/7360/1.html [13] http://www.thestandard.com [14] http://www.nydailynews.com/2001-06-08/News_and_Views/Media_and_Business/ a-114124.asp [15] http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2001/06/08/BU114802.DTL [16] http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.11/web_dreams.html [17] http://www.hotwired.com [18] http://www.salon.com/tech/col/rose/2001/06/09/suck_feed/index.html [19] http://www.heise.de/tp/english/inhalt/on/4693/1.html [20] http://www.plastic.com/article.pl?sid=01/06/08/1743239 [21] http://www.plastic.com/comments.pl?sid=01/06/08/1743239&threshold=0&; commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=111 [22] http://www.netslaves.com/comments/992046803.shtml Artikel-URL: http://www.telepolis.de/english/inhalt/on/7884/1.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright © 1996-2001 All Rights Reserved. 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