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."

Comments

Tony Perkins was spot-on

[Ars-Fartsica]

Not all of the staff of Red Herring were dot-com pumpers. Tony Perkins was way ahead of the crowd with very harsh and insightful criticism of the dot-com bubble. His book on the subject is still worth reading, and if you read it and acted on it when it was published you would have escaped with your money intact.

I don't blame the Red Herring for bulking up and covering the dot-com era - everyone was taking money, and if they didn't, then Fast Company or Business 2.0 or Upside or The Standard would have. Out of all of these rags the Herring had the best commentary, often far more crtical than you would expect from a venture rag.

I hope to see Perkins and some of the other talented writers from the Herring show up in another publication soon.

RH wasn't a bad magazine...

[callipygian-showsyst]

..I used to enjoy reading it.

I think what hurt them the most is that people in this post-dotcom era, would be embarrassed if they were caught reading it! It was too "1999". Having a copy of it makes the statement "I didn't know the dotcom boom was over."

Re:RH wasn't a bad magazine...

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a definate anti-dotcom blacklash.

For example, I saw this interesting article a few days ago that urged people not to hire anyone with a dotcom job on his resume!

No lessons from Slate?

[megazoid81]

They should have taken some lessons from Slate, another media/content provider who is currently struggling. Okay, they may be struggling but at least they are afloat (so far...). Perhaps RH could have offered alternative diversified content, or adopted a more aggressive (read obtrusive) advertising model. Is this just a case of there not being enough will to save it?

perpetuating myths

[fermion]

I never understood these magazines like Red Herring, Wired and the like(not to mention forbes, et al). I bought a few copies over the years, just for grins, but never saw what the fuss was about. The main points seemed to be that the world had changed, past models were no longer valid, and everyone could be rich without doing much work.

Which of course was silly. Most of us saw it then, and everyone knows it now. New technology does make a few very rich, a few more somewhat rich, but leaves most people about the same or worse off. That is history. I think I benefitted from the bubble, but I didn't take advantage of it or treat it a genie to grant all my wishes. I worked as hard when I was doing .com work as I did when I was doing other work, and did not get paid that much more. That is the way it should be.

Of course it is important to remember that it wasn't just the technology sector that was in an unreality field. All of the Enron finances, one amoung many now defunct or troubled traditional companies, depended on the stock never falling. Many law firms are in trouble because they thought that bankruptcy practices would never again be profitable or needed. Schools districts are cutting staff or days because the tax model assumed that property values would never fall. In other words, good riddance to the media that perpetuated these myths.

Re:perpetuating myths

[odin53]

law firms are in trouble because they thought that bankruptcy practices would never again be profitable or needed.

Where in the world did you hear this? I have never heard this, at least among large firms. It just wouldn't make sense to get rid of an existing bankruptcy practice, which is what you imply. Bankruptcy law existed before, during, and after the bubble; no lawyer I know thought that bankruptcy law would ever be gone.

If you're thinking about firms that don't have bankruptcy practices at all, you misunderstand the nature of bankruptcy. Firms that tend to represent fledgling, highly risky privately-financed companies, like tech firms, for example, really shouldn't have bankruptcy practices because of potential conflicts of interest. While one could envision a strongly "walled-off" bankruptcy practice within such firms, it would be impractical and, yes, a waste of money. But the decision not to have a bankruptcy practice based on the foregoing certainly doesn't evidence that such firms believed that no one would ever go bankrupt again. On the contrary, even during the boom it was very hard for a company to succeed; it's not like these companies stopped facing the prospect of bankruptcy for a few years in the late 90s and early 2000. It was very much a specter.

Finally, if you're thinking specifically about a certain tech law firm that recently went away, and you think it's because of a lack of a bankruptcy practice, you'd be dead wrong, for the reasons I've already stated -- yes, business dropped significantly after the burst, but because of conflicts of interest, the firm would never have made up for it with a bankruptcy practice.

Letsee, Dot Com Flame-Out?

[zentec]

Too bad, I actually liked that magazine. Really too bad that my wife just re-upped my subscription for another year too.

Hmmm. Take money, promise something, fail to deliver and fail to return the money after it's all spent. Yep, sounds like a dot-com flame-out tactic.

Red Herring had to fabricate news to have news ...

[adzoox]

Red Herring was usually the source of every "Apple Computer is finally kicking the bucket" news story.

They often fabricated a story, called it news, or inside reports, so as to get hits in slump periods.

When will people stop with the "9/11 excuse"?

[canter]

"The fallout from the 2001 terrorist attacks and corporate scandals of last year compounded Red Herring's problems, said Tony Perkins, the magazine's founder and a columnist until the end."

Its VERY hard for me to see how 9/11 or Enron could affect a magazine to any great degree. I guess as long as Tony doesn't have to accept any PERSONAL responsibility for the magazine's demise, then he doesn't have to do any serious soul searching about his flawed business plan. The economy was on the way down before 9/11 and Enron. Its obvious he couldn't adjust to the new circumstances.

Why not throw in "the sun was in my eyes" and "my shoes were too tight" while he's at it?

The "Technology Elite"

[ArsSineArtificio]

Who are these 'technology elite'?

They're the ones who renounced the superstitious and hysterical belief in the Users, and thus were eligible to join the Elite of the MCP.

Everyone else who continued to profess this belief received the standard substandard training, which resulted in their eventual elimination in the big dotcom crash.

ASA

Re:What we are left with?

[kfg]

Journalists are not licensed professionals. They're just people like you and me. Even the one's that own TV networks. Journalistic ethics are a *guideline,* not a law.

When a journalist speaks they have the same legal rights to lie and cheat and bend reality that you do. Journalism is simply an expression of first ammendment rights, no more, no less.

But what happens if someone lies to you? You don't sue them, unless there was legally definable fraud involved. What you do is *never believe another word they say.*

KFG