| |||
|
Arts & Entertainment Books Comics Health & Body Media Mothers Who Think News People Politics2000  Technology- Free Software Project Travel & Food  Columnists
Current Click here to read the latest stories from the wires. - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - View From the Top - - - - - - - - - - - - Also Today For a full list of today's Salon Technology stories, go to the
Technology home page. - - - - - - - - - - - - Search Salon - - - - - - - - - - - - Recently in Salon Technology Technology: View from the top Column Technology: View from the top Complete archives for Technology - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
My dot-com business mags have fallen on me and I can't get up! | page 1, 2, 3
Web companies spent more than $700 million on magazine advertising alone last year. That's 348 percent more than they did in 1998, according to Competitive Media Reporting. Plus, with almost $25 billion flowing from venture capitalists into Net companies in 1999, 66 percent more than the previous year, there's a lot of business-to-business advertisers itching to reach the newly cash-rich dot-commies who need to quickly find somewhere to put all that capital to work. "There's a lot of money flowing into these companies and they don't know what to do with it," says David Bunnell, editor of Upside. "And the easiest way to spend money is to advertise. There are so many dot-coms out there I can't keep them straight, and neither can anyone else." Simply put, these journalists are riding the boom that they're covering. And in some cases they're experiencing the same kinds of talent crunch as the start-ups they write about. When Business 2.0, which last week was named a finalist for a National Magazine Award, launched in July 1998, 10 editorial staffers put out a 128-page magazine; now an editorial team of 26 puts out issues like the recent 448-pager. So, doesn't the quality of the articles being published suffer with all that copy that has to be churned out? Well, not if you simply rerun articles that have appeared before. The March issue of Business 2.0 contains 10 stories that have run in their entirety in previous issues of the magazine, reprinted word for word. The 95-page "special section" entitled "10 Driving Principles of the New Economy" may attempt to explain the "new" economy, but the stories themselves are not so new. The original publication dates do run just under the story titles in the section's mini table of contents, but it's not immediately apparent that the articles are reruns -- although there's a hint in the fact that the stories frequently cite supporting examples circa 1995 or 1997. Why recycle material from the archives of a magazine that's less than two years old? "A lot of people who subscribed recently probably haven't seen these stories," explains Editor-in-Chief Jim Daly, earnestly. "We just got so much amazing response when we ran those articles. They crystallized a lot of thinking for people. We really wanted to put them all together again." And really who can blame him for finding unorthodox ways to fill pages, even if it means recycling not just topics or sources or ideas but whole articles right down to the art? Ironically, these merrily bloated magazines' financial success makes it harder for readers to actually page through a single issue, much less wade through the relentless onslaught that quickly piles up. These same magazines that trumpet the ever-accelerating pace of business ask their time-starved audience to spend more and more time pondering it in their pages. "I get all of those magazines. Reading them is another matter," says Oliver Muoto, the co-founder of dot-com start-up Epicentric, who's frequently been written about and quoted in many of them. Remember how much people complained about how hard it is to navigate and find the information that you're looking for on a Web site. Well what about in a magazine ballooning with ads? "They're so thick, you think 'gee, there must be some gem hidden in all those pages.'" Muoto says. "But there are so many ads, it's become difficult to read them." Sara Frankel, CEO of BestSelf, an early stage Net company, still reads them all but says that "it's gotten out of control. They're all incredibly fat. The screen the magazines are using to filter information is getting increasingly less discriminating. They're basically reprinting press releases, in a lot of cases ... In the Industry Standard and Business 2.0, it's hard to tell the industry hype and excitement from the legitimate trends and companies they're covering." She brings an extra shoulder bag on plane trips to lug on board many as 30 issues that have piled up. She takes the extra bag home empty, sure to find her mailbox stuffed with the next go-round. Not that the magazines themselves aren't aware of the problem. Their own letters to the editor tell the comical story of their absurd growth. A letter printed in the current issue of Business 2.0 from a Swedish reader complains that every time a new monthly installment arrives, he gets a paper slip from the post office in his mailbox, instead of a magazine. The mail carriers won't deliver it, because it's too heavy. How ironic that a reader must wait in line "for about half an hour" at an old-fashioned snail mail post office to receive the magazine's latest insights into how the Internet is reinventing business. A letter in the December issue of the Industry Standard criticizes the magazine for doubling in size and running 13 pages of ads before the first page of content. "It seems that you have sold out and become an advertising vehicle to the Internet crowd," the letter writers carp, quipping: "If I just wanted ads, I would buy Cosmopolitan." | ||
 |
 |
 |
 |
Next page |