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Recently in Salon Technology

Technology: View from the top
Vote naked in the privacy of your own home!
While Arizona Democrats cast online ballots in the primary, Election.com CEO Joe Mohen patrolled the virtual booths for illegal hanky-panky.
By Lydia Lee
[03/20/00]

Column
Give my regards to broadband
High-speed access is great -- but it doesn't turn the Internet back into TV.
By Scott Rosenberg
[03/17/00]

The Net as canvas
Web art is being included in this year's Whitney Biennial, but will the museum's validation make it any easier to buy, sell or even define Internet art?
By Janelle Brown
[03/15/00]

Why I'm still scribbling for a living
When a stock trade cost me my job writing about Silicon Valley, everyone assumed I would join a dot-com and get rich. But I'm a newspaper journalist.
By Chris Nolan
[03/14/00]

Technology: View from the top
The privacy police?
TRUSTe CEO Bob Lewin explains how even sites selling personal data can get the nonprofit's privacy seal of approval.
By Lydia Lee
[03/13/00]

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Take Scott Rafer, CEO of Fresher, a venture-backed Silicon Valley start-up. As he settles into his seat on a business flight, he hauls a foot-high stack of bloated biz magazines out of his back-straining carry-on bag. "I drive the aircraft people nuts with all the torn pages scattered about the seats," Rafer confides.

Just keeping up on all the print glossies that cover how the Net is changing business could itself be a full-time gig. A short-list includes the Industry Standard, Business 2.0, the Red Herring, Wired and Upside. Soon jumping on the Net biz bandwagon will be eCompany Now, a monthly from Time Inc., debuting in May. Even the business mag granddaddies like Fortune, Forbes and Business Week as well as nouveau business handbook Fast Company (where I used to work) are looking more and more dot-commified with every issue. And there are the scads of online tech news sites like CNet's News.com and Wired News, plus a bevy of more specialized trade pubs like InfoWorld and PCWeek to wade through, as well.

It's not the sheer number of titles that's overwhelming to readers like Rafer, who is something of a magazine junkie. It's the staggering volume of the individual issues themselves, which have page counts like paperback potboilers. The March issue of the Red Herring is 440 pages -- it weighs in at 1 pound, 12.5 ounces. But that's nothing, the current issue of Business 2.0 has a similar page count, 448, but weighs a staggering 2 pounds, 5.3 ounces according to my postal scale. And if you add together the four March issues of the weekly Industry Standard, you get 1,096 pages.

"If they can get to books that thick, I'm not going to tell you they're doing anything wrong," says Rafer, ever the business guy. "They're just making hay while the sun shines. But that doesn't make these magazines useful information tools. I'm having to get more and more efficient about reading them. I used to be able to glance through an issue with fair thoroughness over a couple of cups of coffee, but now I have to tear through it. I'm sure I miss stuff that I wouldn't have before."

Jim Rose, CEO of Accompany, a group discount shopping site, isn't worried about missing anything; but then, he has a reader on staff. "If there's stuff that I need to see, it will end up in my in box or on my desk," he says confidently. Rose's reader doesn't scan magazines full time, but if the publications keep ballooning, look forward to this job title: business magazine reader. It was only a matter of time until even reading became a business function that could be delegated or outsourced.

Why is there so much to read? Because there are so many more ad dollars being spent. Magazines guarantee advertisers a fixed ratio of content to ads (often around 45 percent editorial to 55 percent advertising); as advertisers targeting Net-savvy business people buy more space, the pubs bulge with both more editorial and ad pages.

But now potential advertisers have to wonder who's hearing them in the din. "We feel pretty much like we need to run a focus group to figure out whether anyone reads the darn things anymore," says Rafer, who just raised $20 million and is hesitant to spend Fresher's ad dollars in the business press.

Just how many stories can even the most self-involved Internet executives, entrepreneurs and wannabes read about themselves and their businesses? It was a question that raised eyebrows a year-and-a-half ago when Business 2.0 and the Industry Standard launched within a few months of each other. With even the more established technology and business magazines restyling themselves to focus increasingly on dot-com businesses, the prospect of two new publications devoted to nothing but the Net looked at best me-too-ish, and at worst a recipe for cannibalization. People wondered how all of them could succeed.

But, today if you tried to smuggle the March 2000 offerings from Business 2.0, the Red Herring, the Industry Standard, Wired, Upside and Fast Company onto a cross-country flight, a vigilant flight attendant would likely frown and ask you to gate check your carry-on. The combined heft of this month's issues weighs in at 12 pounds, 6.3 ounces, heavier and certainly bulkier than even the most cumbersome laptop.

Ned Desmond, the president and editor of eCompany Now, is aware of the problem: "The first issue will weigh at least 500 pounds," he deadpans, "and we're planning to supply a little cart with each one, with its own set of wheels, so readers can roll it through the airport."

But forget about just carrying these magazines around. What if you actually wanted to read them all? The combined number of March pages: 2,884. That's like reading Tolstoy's "War and Peace." Twice.

Next page | How do you fill so many pages? Well, you can always recycle old stories