Slashdot Mirror
Shift Calls it Quits
MCS writes "Shift Magazine announced that it is closing down after 10 years. Biggest reason is that within this 10 year period they only turned profit on one issue. I remember at one point that they even had their own TV show -- the magazine was different then it competitors (Wired) as it focused more on the impact of technology and the social generation of those who lived in it. This can be seen in such issues as 'The Simpson Generation' and 'Seven Days without Tech'. Many of these articles are available online at their website Shift.com "
Why is it that all of the really well written indie mags (both online and on paper) are slowly dying off?
This has been a pretty fine magazine; albeit a bit hit-and-miss at times. Where Wired and its ilk focused on being the People magazine for a tech generation, Shift found a voice in showing the practical effects of technology on how most of us live. It's a damn shame....
CrazyLegs
"Pork!!" said the Fish, and we all laughed.
I've never even heard of them...
This story seems kinda shifty to me...better go read the article... :-)
I must be a youngster, since this is the first time I've heard of the magazine. Any long time subscribers wanna fill me in?
And the masses cried out, "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0!"
No, this isn't a troll. I can't say that I've ever seen this mag. I've never seen it referenced anywhere. I've just plain never heard of it.
Sorry to hear they couldn't make it.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Boy, I bet they love being Slashdotted, now that they're out of operating budget...
....is 'Shift' is "downshifting"... ? .....i know....lame
I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.
Before anyone bleats that this is "the economy" just think for a second.
10 YEARS and only ONE ISSUE turned a profit. This was a cash sink before
Maybe the "sad" reason is really simple....
Do you know anyone who _ever_ paid money for it ?
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Ctrl Daily and The Alt Reporter?
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
One of those things that is so obscure that no one knows it exists until its death is announced.
You'd think they'd announce its death right when they STARTED publishing, so at least they would have some publicity during the time the magazine is actualyl on sale.
Another net mag closing its doors... where is micropayment that works and could help these alternative publications to survive?
pass the popcorn, please.
Could have been it's Canadian heritage. While Candian's are inundated with American media, it's a river that tends to flow only one way.
While I was a huge fan of Shift from its inception, when it tried to branch off into the American market (1997?) I knew it was heading for hard times. It never took off in the States, and had too much investment to make it feasible in the smaller Canadian market. I for one think it's a terrible shame to see this thoughtful magazine lifted from shelves.
"different then it competitors". Wow. Even Taco hasn't managed that level of screw up yet.
Before filing Chapter 11, send a line to Slashdot!
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
...and good riddance...no wait!...I mean, you'll be missed....well shit, there goes my karma.
I'm sorry, but I dont recall ever have heard of this magazine, and I consider myself quite net savy.
Maybe it is no wonder that it shut down?
Who's the magazine that's smooth with the ladies? I'm only talkin' about...
uh, what? Oh, sorry.
I'm sorry, but, focusing on the social impact of technology made them different? I thought that was the whole point of Wired!
Of course, I stopped reading Wired years ago when I realized that I was apparently too old to appreciate the crazy page layouts they used.
Clear, Dark Skies
Mononoke's post combined with this one brings it all together-
I've never even heard of this magazine...
so no, I don't know anyone who paid for it. And without any recognition, how do they expect to sell?
Seriously, I find it amazing that this magazine is being compared to wired- simply because even when I didn't want to I was constantly having wired shoved down my throat- a friend had it on his coffee table, some one sent me a link to one of their stories, I google William Gibson and I get his articles for wired.
Shift.....?
Good lord, how did they last 10 years!?
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Doesn't it make you feel all warm and fuzzy?
Too bad they couldn't forsee their immienent doom.I'm a lawyer, but not yours. I wouldn't represent someone who thinks taking legal advice from Slashdot is a good idea.
For a sec there, I thought Shaft was calling it quits. And then WHO would bring on the badness, I ask WHO?
How nice of us to give them a "good-bye" slashdotting...
But then how the fsck are we supposed to get to the '@' symbol?? The future of email is doomed!!!
oh, wait, you meant the magazine that hardly anyone read because most of us didnt know it existed.
In other news that doesnt change your life, Borka-Morka.com shut down 7 years ago and I spilt some milk this morning.
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
Because they don't appeal to the large amount of people.
I've never seen Shift, and it sounds like it was a pretty boring rag to begin with [and maybe deserved to die], but if they were trying to target a geek audience, they faced one big hurdle that is damned near insurmountable: People with really high IQs populate only the very far end of the bell curve, i.e., for all intents and purposes, PEOPLE WITH REALLY HIGH IQs DON'T EXIST!!!
The overwhelming majority of people are of very average intelligence [clustered beneath the zenith of the bell curve], and are entertained by a very average quality of entertainment. The critical mass just isn't there to do much beyond that. [And besides, anyone who is smart enough to entertain really intelligent people ought to be doing something more productive with his life than masquerading as a glorified court jester.]
I wonder if there is actually a Borka-Morka.com?
I have a feeling there isnt, but with my luck if I tried to find it at work it'd be kiddy goat pr0n or something... hehehe
(I believe it was Dilbert who said:)
Shift happens...
...glad to see that the Slashdot tradition of incredibly poor grammar and spelling is being upheld!
That was classic intercourse!
The reason there is no good micropayment system is that the interest in it is microscopic. Face it, it is not even as popular as Flooz.
Shift was a faily good read, but it always felt like they were either trying to be like Wired, or trying not to be like Wired. It is too bad that they could not reach critical mass. I think they could have done some interesting things.
"I didn't see it coming at all," said a shocked associate editor Jose Lourenco. "Things were going great ... ad sales were picking up and we were planning ahead to expand certain things."
But if you can't make a profit, then things aren't going great, you shouldn't be expanding, and you should foresee yourself out of a job.
Perhaps 10 years of somehow avoiding death made them feel a bit too immortal.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
I've never ever heard of this site and I consider myself pretty geek literate. How many others have never heard of it?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
jobs supporting legacy End Of Life systems. Learn mainframe internals, learn ADA, and get a security clearance.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Shift was apparently a Canadian version of Wired. I couldn't tell from their website, of course, because it was already slashdotted, but the article about the failure and the comments so far seem to point in that direction.
Of course, Wired's been a huge money sink for most of it's existence - and that's with the much larger US market to work with and bigger circulation numbers. Shift never seems to have made any real run south of the border, never was profitable, and appealed to a small segment of a small market in a small country.
I think it's amazing they survived this long, quite frankly. It's been tough enough for media companies to thrive anyway, especially one as limited as they seem to have been. There's a number of Canadian magazines that I'm aware of - some I even read occasionally. I never heard of Shift, though. That may say a little something about what their chances were right there. But at 10 years, they predated the dotcom boom and bust alike. Not many other media properties would have been allowed to lose money that long.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
It's not hard, people. Use "than" for comparisons, and "then" to denote sequence.
Sorry, but I'm dancing on Shift magazine's grave. It stood for all of the bullshit artifice, me-too ass-kissing, and vacuous intellect that has plagued the technology/culture mag niche.
Shift magazine never had a shining moment, save for the plastic wrapping.
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
'Seven Days without Tech'
I dont know why but at first I read 'Seven Days without Sex', and I was like 'piece of cake'... I must have problems.
i saw this coming - any Canadian involved in publishing did. i worked for a magazine (called Vice) that was next to Shift as part of a dot com publication/shopping scenario that predictably flopped (started by the infamous Richard Szalwinski). at one time their marketing guy (nobody) was making $190, 000 U.S. - for a magazine that never turned a profit, that's not a recipe for profitability. even if they did smarten up later, they were over their head from the start. Vice, on the other hand, is now profitable and expanding due to their tight firsts when it comes to letting go of money.
print is dead. and not in the irrelevant way; its just not as viable anymore, especially with delivery mediums like the, ahem, internet cropping up everywhere.
... there is a realness to it, an ingrained sense of accomplishment. something that humans have not yet developed for a sterile medium such as the internet. although we can recognize accomplishments in these new digital mediums, it has not yet garnered that "coziness" that makes people sit under reading lamps, excitedly turning pages in a worn out copy of The Dharma Bumbs. nobody who curls up next to a fireplace with an e-Book on your Palm can deny that it is a wholly different experience even though the text is identical.
:)
i am a print designer. i own TONS (if stacked and weighed) of LPs. I love the feel of magazines and books and the album jackets and small stapled indie mags
so there's the dilema. print has been made unreasonable in terms of cost vs. distribution capability - it is now a luxury, one supported by twice the contents' length in advertisements. but we just don't want to let print, in all its kinky and enticing forms, go.
if you don't believe me, ask joe somebody whether they want a printed computer manual or a manual stored in the OS via Help, etc. Even though the digitized version would be easier to update, with audio and video descriptions or tutorials, a highly integrated/linked system, etc. - most average people will tell you they want a nice big indexed print copy.
its going to be a while before this is bred out of us
crap, man! who's next - pop?
The wise follow a damned path, for to know is to be forsaken.
Before filing Chapter 11, send a line to Slashdot!
"Chapter 11" is a US filing, this was a Canadian company.
Trolling is a art,
Even in Canada, the magazine was never as important or well-read as Wired, or Business 2.0, so why the closing of this magazine rates a story on Slashdot is beyond me.
Jon Katz was an occasionally contributor to the magazine. I always thought the mag was pretty stupid, and this was confirmed once by him having his name hilighted in big letters on the front page for some dumbass "internet generation geek gen x blah blah blah" story.
Ah, here it is:
The Rise and Fall of the Geek
He also has some other articles about being a "rock star" on the net (right...) and even about Slashdot.
I'm into technology.. (see, I'm reading /. ) but I have honestly never heard of this SHIFT magazine. Maybe they had problems with market share or marketing..
nevermind.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I guess that's why I haven't received any of my issues since I subscribed in November.
Is it new? Why do we care? I've been employed in the IT industry for 15 years and have never heard of it. It must be a small petty thing..
I've seen this magazine only twice - in an airport. I believe it was London-Heathrow both times. Certainly wasn't in the States. Probably why they never turned a profit...
Good airplane reading though. I would have bought more if I saw it anywhere.
if(!toilet_paper) roll.replace(new roll);
I have subscribed to Shift for three years. I am a Canadian, and though they tried very hard to gain popularity; their numbers tell the story.
This is hands-down the most insightful technology magazine on the newstands. Their articles were well written and engaging. They addressed the issues of culture, sex and how it all tied in with technology. They were the subculture for the geeks (like you, the slashdotter). I suggest you go out and buy their last issue.
It is unfortunate that slashdotters never found out about this mag, until its demise. Shift loved Slashdot, they covered it many many times. Check out:
http://www.shift.com/content/web/142/1.html
http://www.shift.com/content/web/109/1.html
I will miss reading Shift. Though, after their first shutdown two years ago, I count myself lucky to have been blessed with another two years of outstanding reading.
G
Toronto, Ontario
Anyone know when programming jobs are going to become easier to get and higher paying?
Someone a coupla days ago told me it would be this coming Tuesday...
i posted this story when it broke on Tuesday or Wednesday, and it was rejected :(
geeks are cats who dig a certain kind of cool
May I cite the PATRIOT Act, the DMCA, and the drug war which has heavy restrictions on sedating or depressant drugs yet we have over 20 forms of legal speed available at the grocery store under the guise of dietary supplement, cold medicine and caffeine tablets? This is the new form of the fascist state that now is growing in the States?
May I direct you here, specifically to the article written by Jackson Mayhem. May I also remind you of the protests that happened months ago where the D.C. police force had buses and plastic ties waiting to arrest certain protesters. Remember fascism doesn't happen over night, but if you look at who's in power you would imagine it already has.
If what you are reading sounds funny, or sarcastic, lame, or stupid
it is because it is supposed to be. just laugh
"Which is precisely the point. Slashdot's arrival in 1997 wasn't just another high-tech community; it was the future of newsgathering."
The future of newscasting, huh? No editorial oversight. Grammer,spelling mistakes galore. More trolls than a bridge. A population that in general thinks it's an expert on everything, and ususally demonstrates it knows even less than the experts.
A moderation system that's fundamentally broken. More biasis than a tube amp. Good stories get rejected, bad or mediocre stories get posted. With the occasional good story escaping into the wild.
The slashdot effect is as useful as all the passengers on a plane suddenly moving to one side or the other, and with all our blinders on, renders advertisement moot.
A thousand eyeballs and we're still more times than not, a day late, and a dollar short. Good thing we don't sell bread.
I don't see newscasting disappearing in the face of competition like that, anytime soon.
Plus... they frequently hired Jon Katz. I'm just putting that on the table. ;)
Bye bye, Silent F. Hope the slashdot-spanking doesn't melt that last server.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
I always thought of Wired as a "digital culture" magazine, but its credibility was based on having at least some intelligent technology coverage (more application- than tech-centric), and by employing good writers (and influential people from the industry who could also write).
When Conde Nast bought them, CN turned Wired into pure culture -- a pretty-pictures magazine like Conde Nast Traveler and all their other publications. They slimmed it down, changed to cheaper paper, and quit carrying intelligent commentary in favor of "this is the new cool thing, it costs $n,000 and can be bought at x." When Nicholas Negroponte quit writing his back-page column, I stopped buying Wired, and I've barely looked at it since.
Anyone know when programming jobs are going to become easier to get and higher paying? Any good guesses? I have a nice job now, just looking for more money.
If I had mod points, I'd definitely give this a +1 Funny!
I subscribed to this a couple years ago when they were saying it was the premier issue (I guess just a states version of it if it was primarily in canada). I even got a ski hat with their logo for subscribing. Anyhow, I got like two issues and then a notice they were ceasing publication. If I would have known they were still up and running in canada I would have hit them up for my money back! Apparently they just used us in the states for a quick cash infusion for the motherland. Anybody else have this happen to them?
The last phrase is also interesting, what does it mean? Those who lived in what, the technology, the magazine?
it could easily have been written as:
It was only a matter of time after the "Windows" keys were introduced on keyboards that the "Shift" keys were doomed to oblivion. With all those keys, it becomes too hard to hit the previously quite accessible shift keys.
The demise of the "Shift" key can be witnessed on Usenet, where less and less capitalization occurs. Since capitalization is crucial to the IT industry, Microsoft must be held responsible for the current desastrous state of the economy.
Not ahead-of-the-curve enough to be groundbreaking, too trend-spotting for Joe Average. Articles about web sites/pop culture trends everyone in their target demographic had already known about for six months previously. Writers that were too fascinated with their own opinions. Not a lot of depth/analysis. Pretentious layout and cover design. Its death was inevitable, and long overdue. I hope the folks responsible are able to find success doing something more worthwhile, and that actually serves a purpose.
(And I cant believe this warrants a Slashdot article, since I didn't think anyone outside of Canada had ever heard of the magazine!)
"He'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once." - Steve Jobs on Bill Gates
I have been a Shift subscriber for around 8 years -- almost since the very beginning. I have also hated the magazine all along. Why keep renewing and reading it? I guess the attraction was similar to other people's fascination with camp. I was continually fascinated by how bad the magazine was, and how adored it was by the left.
If anyone has a pile of Shift magazines, flip through them and find how many times they complained about the fact that the Atari 2600 version of PacMan sucked. Seriously -- it's been covered more than once. The writing seemed to be stuck in some kind of time-loop, like they were always looking back to the 1980s from around 1994. And smug? Don't get me started.
Anyway, I often mused about creating a parody publication called "Shitf", but now I guess I'll just let it go.
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
Even venture capital runs out, eventally.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
I actually remember the first time I had heard of Shift was about three years ago when they had an article on Michael Stipe and his film company. From then on I became an avid reader and follower of their site. I think it was well written and really diverse in their scope. I saw them at Comdex Toronto last year and should have pretty much known then. I wonder if anyone did a study on the profitablity of companies who attended Comdex in the last few years?
For some reason, my girlfriend received Shift for free for about 2 years. It was mildly entertaining, but rather like Wired Lite without any of the insight.
They also suffered from the usual fate of an internet magazine- print's always half a year behind.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
If you didn't care about the social aspects of tech, you wouldn't be reading Slashdot or (especially) posting!
Computer folks, like all specialists, possess their own culture. We do indeed like to read about it and discuss it.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Shift did a story on my MP3 software Andromeda>. Derek Martin, the reporter, spent a huge amount of time back-and-forthing with me via email. Nice guys, too bad...
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
According to his biography on IMDB, Wayne Newton was born in Roanoke, Virginia. I'm pretty sure that this makes him an citizen of the United States, not Canada. With respect to the original post, it's really strange to see this type of ignorance from an American :P
Many of these articles are available online at their website Shift.com
actually, if there's anything you want off their site, you might want to get it sooner rather than later. i wrote one piece online there, and the online editor Mark Moyes recently emailed me the following:
I'm not sure how long the site will remain online after this Friday or in what form, so I encourage you all to print off any pieces you want to keep for your portfolio.
so get it while it lasts.
I liked the one issue I ever got. Then I think they dropped off my radar because they weren't available regularly and I quit looking. Too bad, I coulda been reading them all this time. I think their problem was lack of distribution and marketing. And to think, I've got the entire run of Wired in boxes in my closet.
"Even with a working micropayments solution, "a well written & prosperous indy magazine" is an oxymoron, or at least a very unstable phenomenon. If they started raking money, they would probably change their writing to please more people and rake more money, eventually ending as Yet Another Barely Readable Magazine Trying To Please Everyone."
Thank God, Slashdot doesn't have that problem.
....and will be sad to see Shift go.
Is there any word on whether an infucion of investment (even from the South) - might be in the works?
To have ambition was my ambition.
I actually subscribed to Shift, but never received all the issues I paid for... no answer from several emails I sent to them. This was about 2 years ago -- I thought they had folded then.... The magazine (I thought) was similar to Wired, but with a different perspective... kind of along the lines of Mental Floss, which is another magazine that nobody seems to read....
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
Maxim and Gear are "read" by the same audience and those two mags include same dopey articles, reviews and rants. Oh, and don't forget tons of pr0n.
Wired, that piece of garbage, is next!
I'm sorry to be contrarian, but as a reader of both "Shift" and "Wired" (all the way back to issue #1), I couldn't help but laugh at your characterization of "Shift" as "like Wired Lite without any of the insight...".
l ogy-diefication.
In the opinion of this random bloke, Shift would be more fairly characterized as Wired-sans-pretension-sans-narcissism-sans-techno
In my opinion, Wired's steadfast embrace of the Whig view of history- that the new is inherently better than the old, was always it's Achilles heel.
To wit, Shift never made so bold (and idiotic) a proclamation as Wired's infamous " Kiss Your Browser Goodbye! exhortation, which predicted the imminent death of the web browser and the pending future domination of luminary upstarts like "Pointcast" (dead), "Marimba" (seriously hurting), "Backweb" (reinvented).
I'll miss Shift. And one day I'm sure I'll miss Wired, too, for very different reasons.
Actually, it wasn't strictly the "big business" articles in Wired that bothered me.
For the first few years, I appreciated Wired magazine because it seemed like they explored new technology-related ideas in depth, often before they became realized in a commercial product. They also generally began featuring one really good interview with a C.E.O. or other "bigwig" of a tech-related company that produced products or services we all use. Unlike a Newsweek style interview, though, they'd ask the questions that the "geek crowd" really wanted to know the answers to.
IMHO, Wired's big failing was getting caught up in "techno-lust", to the point where every overpriced gadget was featured - whether it had real value or not. They tried too hard to be "cool" with the techno-savvy crowd, and wasted too much effort on strange cover art and layouts, rather than dispensing useful information.
With the dot-com boom, you could practically track Wired's downward spiral into the mess. Every month, they were telling me about some multi-thousand dollar new watch I "had to have", or some imported set of loudspeakers shaped like rare art that some Finnish or German engineer swore made music sound more "life-like" than anything else on the market. Whatever.....
That's when I quit renewing or reading....
that's the truth, genocide of islam. go america!! americans are bastards.
Never heard of it.
If only the quality of articles and quantity of advertising would return to the same level, I might start buying it again.
The reading comfort level and the portability of a book is also a bonus.
As far as print being dead... check the amount of gaming manuals printed these days: cheats, tips, tricks, several gaming mags. Where one venue seems to be closing, other print outlets are opening up due to the technological revolution.
Poor Shift though, I only discovered them by following a link from their site to my store so I'll have to agree with the other posters that they really didn't make too much of an impact on the geek scene.
~Fricka
OffLineTshirts.com
... are hard to come by. I have been getting the mag erratically (on their part, not mine) for the past 3 years. At least three major makeovers, including an attempt to break into the US put the financial viability of the rag in question.
I really liked the social focus on technology. Early years helped look deeper than the "IT jobs are impossibly sexy and profitable" attitude many rags ran in the late '99, early '00.
Liked to look at the burnout rate and stress level as an indicator before big business ever could.
I first read Clive Thompson in Shift and loved his casual yet persistent writing style.
Haven't even got my last issue.
Don't imagine I'll see it or the rest of my subscription.
Rob.
NOTE: Posted on behalf of a Slashdot reader (but not a member).
= = =
SHI(f)T - An Inside History
SHI(f)T started out as a make-work project for idle rich kids and a tax shelter for their parents.
It began its life as a wannabe literary magazine for "young writers", accepting the rejects from respected literary magazines with a mandate to discover new writers and fiction and aiming to, "Kick in the teeth of the literary establishment." Instead the literary establishment kicked SHI(f)Ts teeth in so far that they were coming out the other end.
Meeting no financial success, after 3 issues the magazine rebranded itself "the voice of an unsettled generation," still focusing on disaffected artists under 35.
With losses mounting, a few issues later they changed the focus of the magazine to "New Media and Culture" writing about the new technology of CD-ROMs, wrapped up in Doug Coupland fever, Generation-X hype and breaking their ban on coverage of anyone over 35.
With the magazine failing in its infancy and the parents of SHI(f)T's founders no longer willing to indefinitely pour unlimited funds into the fiscal black hole the project had become, the magazine looked south and decided to again relaunch and rebrand itself as Canada's version of Wired (that's actually how they promoted it). The magazine then boosted circulation by more than 500%, losing even more money, with an eye to being acquired based on high circulation numbers. The printing spree was funded by last-ditch investments from family and government artistic grants.
The parents/investors used their business connections with entertainment lawyer Michael Levine (called the Michael Ovitz of Canada) and the president of one of Canada's oldest and largest publishers, Maclean-Hunter (which was looking for new properties aimed at young people) to engineer a minority investment stake, using Wired as a benchmark to value the magazine. Insiders reported that the magazine used false subscriber numbers that were at least double the real number to garner the deal.
A year later the deal was dead, with Maclean-Hunter ceasing support for the still-floundering magazine.
Enter white knight and multi-millionaire Richard Szalwinski, founder of digital film, video and animation software company Discreet Logic (now the Discreet division of CAD/CAM software giant Autodesk).
With money to burn and a newly acquired publishing company looking for media properties, Szalwinski bought the magazine and made the founders instant millionaires.
Internal politics went crazy and the new general manager of the magazine brought in by Szalwinski cleaned house, getting rid of the good (such as new editor Laas Turnbull) along with the bad. Among the ousted was the co-founder of the magazine.
Szalwinski lost his shirt in a disastrous attempt to launch the magazine in the USA as a Wired competitor in 1999 and by this time, freelance contributors had not been paid for months. A year later, on the brink of bankruptcy, he sold the magazine back to co-founder Andrew Heintzman who financed it slashing the already-dismal salaries of employees by as much as 1/3 and asked them to pay into an employee ownership plan to help rescue the company. Most of the young, inexperienced, idealistic staffers agreed but some who didn't were laid off or fired "with cause." This still failed to buoy the sinking magazine's fortunes.
Facing bankruptcy, the employees sold the magazine to MultiVision publishing who thought they could leverage the SHI(f)T brand to relaunch the magazine. The new SHI(f)T's redesign was unreadable and the "unified" look they created made it difficult to know what you were looking at when you flipped through it. They recently killed its columns, saying they were "too long" at 800 words, eliminating the only remaining compelling content since the columnists were knowledgeable. And now they have finally decided to put the tired publication out of its misery.
Although some truly excellent writers have come through SHI(f)T, they were great in spite of it, not because of it. The majority were simply horrid. You can find some of both varieties around Slashdot (no names). The only thing that is sad about the death of this magazine is that a number of people who depended on it for part or all of their income will now be unemployed or scrambling to find some way of making up the sudden loss of revenue.
The magazine was a horribly mismanaged ego-trip at almost every stage that could never really decide if it wanted to be an arts, entertainment or technology magazine, and was master of none of these domains. Even staffers and contributors made dismissive, derisive comments about the magazine, its direction and content throughout its life, but as long as they were being paid (and even if they were not) a paycheck is a paycheck.
It proclaimed itself as Canadian but for the majority of its life it focused on American media, entertainment products and personalities, often almost indistinguishable from private label retail catalogs that masquerade as magazines.
It was a pseudo-intellectual, vapid fanboy, hype-machine wank, that preyed on the greed and fed the egos of just about everyone they duped to invest in it.
And, as we have seen time and again, the founders are laughing all the way to the bank.
Obviously the title is wrong.
It was supposed to be SHI(f)T
It's a Friday night. Give me a break.
[quote]the magazine was different then it competitors[/quote]
Their goes the neborhood.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=54618&thresh old=1&commentsort=0&tid=149&mode=thread&pid=535198 9#5358575
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=54618&thresh old=1&commentsort=0&tid=149&mode=thread&pid=535198 9#5358575
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=54618&thresh old=1&commentsort=0&tid=149&mode=thread&pid=535198 9#5358575
Issue 8.5 (June of 2000), Shift Magazine, mint condition, cover story: "Hugh Hefner 2.0," an article on the brainy-porn periodical, "Nerve."
Will trade for shares of Microsoft.... not....
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
... makes you wonder if maybe the next one in the list is Slashdot itself, which doesn't produce content, but just leeches it. No, seriously, think about it... I doubt Slashdot is really a cash cow for VA (I mean, who thinks of making money out of adds when your community knows how to block adds in the first place?) and I'm sure it's a *very visible* line in the networking bill that VA has to pay monthly.
:-E
Mod me up or down, I don't have karma to worry about
--
No! No! No Account!
It might be enough to teach his gunners which end the bullet exits; in the last 450-500 attempts, they've never gotten close. :)
But it's not their fault; Arabia is a primitive society. There, one man tells the people what to do, right or wrong, and keeps out the media.
In America, the president does what *we* want him to, and we get news from wherever we want it. We can open our own stores about as easy as mailing a letter....the police need a judge to ok bashing down our doors, and we frown highly on middle-aged men raping small boys.
But, we must be wrong. I hear it all the time. We're 'international terrorists' and give to the world only death and destruction. (And generally 40% of it's food...much without repayment or even expectation of payment.)
It's tough being such a bad country. Quick- I'm feeling evil- let's go drop some food over Ethoipia again...we'll save some more lives!
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
And the next time you consider complaining that running Lucid Emacs
19.05 via NFS from a remote Linux machine in Paraguay doesn't seem to
get the background colors right, you'll know who to thank.
-- Matt Welsh
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