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

re: Red Herring shuts down

[Reservoir Penguin]

Yeah, but did they have a 400k/month office in downtown SF?

Next to go - Business 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

Next to go - Business 2.0

Anyone want to set up a betting pool?

What we are left with?

[Alien54]

And what we are left with? the usual typical shallow tripe.

by way of example

• On February 14, a Florida Appeals court ruled there is absolutely nothing illegal about lying, concealing or distorting information by a major press organization. The court reversed the $425,000 jury verdict in favor of journalist Jane Akre who charged she was pressured by Fox Television management and lawyers to air what she knew and documented to be false information. The ruling basically declares it is technically not against any law, rule, or regulation to deliberately lie or distort the news on a television broadcast.

Not that I watch all that much TV or anything.

I interviewed there...

[Anonymous Coward]

After the last editor quit (he went to Wired, somewhat ironically) I interviewed for the job, knowing full well it was an out-of-the-frying-pan situation, but even a temporary job is still a job... Anyway, the mgmt told me, "We're looking to hire someone that will make the market say, 'Wow! Why'd they hire that person!? What's that person going to do with this ship?'" Create your own punchline.

In other news, my RH subscription doesn't expire until 2006. Who's got my check?

Re:Magazines without advertising

[foonie]

Red Herring claimed 300,000 subscribers. At $35/subscriber/year, that's $10.5 million annually., or $338,000 in annual revenue for each of its 31 employees. From subscriptions alone!

275,000 was the quoted circulation number. That number probably includes complimentary or otherwise heavily discounted subscriptions in order to inflate the circ number, which in turn is supposed to attract advertisers. I currently receive several magazines for free, and I'm pretty sure the magazines aren't making money off my unpaid subscriptions themselves.

This is a loss. The Red Herring was useful.

[Animats]

The Red Herring was originally a trade magazine for people involved with the Silicon Valley venture capital community. Turning it into a mainstream publication with wide distribution was typical dot-com hubris.

The editors of the Red Herring did correctly predict the collapse of the dot-com bubble. Their book, The Internet Bubble, which came out in late 1999, made it clear what was going to happen. I ran into the authors at Kepler's Books in 1999, and that's what convinced me to get out of the market, do Downside and pick losers.

The Industry Standard was also a good magazine. Upside, though, was pure hype.

Wired ought to have gone under by now, too. But they were bought by Lycos, which was bought by Terra Networks, which went down from 140 to 5 on the NASDAQ. Maybe they'll sell Wired off to Sharper Image as an additional catalog line.

I read Red Herring once.

[jdfox]

They sent me a free issue a while back, along with a psychedelic marketing wrapper covered with a breathless 48-point screed about "Steve Case, CEO of Apple! and Steve Jobs, CEO of AOL!". Oh dear.

But it was free, so I read a few articles: it was all the same sort of ludicrous "New Economy! Balance Sheets and ROI are things of the past! Paradigm Shift!" horseshit that Wired and a dozen others were spewing out. Straight into the bin.