Slashdot Mirror
Red Herring Magazine Shuts Down
Makarand writes "Red Herring Magazine
is closing its doors and joining the ranks of
magazines that rode the dot-com wave and then crashed.
Red Herring's March issue delivered to subscribers two weeks ago
will be the magazine's final issue.
The technology meltdown evaporated the magazine's
advertising revenue forcing it to
lay off most of its staff and finally close doors."
Isn't Slate owned by Microsoft? They'll be around as long as Microsoft wants the prestige.
Slate started out as a subscription only service. Their sugar daddy, Microsoft, has since allowed them to subsist as a free, ad-supported venture. It's now a part of MSN. I'm not sure how well that marraige is working.
Salon started out as an ad-supported service, but now is very difficult to enjoy without a subscription.
To compare SHI(f)T to Red Herring is laughable. Red Herring was far and away a superior publication in every respect. The only comparison is that they are now both out of business.
I'm not one to be repetitive, but since you brought it up, this bears repeating:
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NOTE: Posted on behalf of a Slashdot reader (but not a member).
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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.
Tony Perkins, the editor-in-chief of Red Herring, or I guess, it's former editor-in-chief now, posted his position and thoughts on AlwaysOn.
New Architect (was Web Techniques until very recently) shut down last month. Fast Company can't be far behind. Their issues are getting smaller and smaller every month.