The Back Pages

August 28, 1997
Web posted at: 8:25 a.m. EDT (1225 GMT)

by David Cassel

     Internet Underground. The Net. Websight. CyberSurfer. NetGuide. Online Access. Virtual City.

     Gone.

     Print magazines dedicated to the Net are becoming an endangered species, it seems. Netly's Internet-magazine Death Pool cashed in this summer as four of the brightest offline contenders vacated the racks. If your newsstand were keeping a scorecard, it might look like this:

Websight	CyberSurfer	NetGuide
Online Access	Virtual City	Internet Underground
The Net	Blender	The Web

By October, it will look like this:

Gone	Gone	Gone
Online Access Gone	Virtual City Gone	Gone
Gone	Gone	The Web

     Contrary to published reports, Internet Underground is coming back, says Greg Jarboe, the director of public relations for publisher Ziff-Davis. "We're not publishing it this year," he told The Netly News, "but stay tuned, watch this space, film at 11 next year."

     The Net says the same thing. "We're definitely going to come back," publisher Stephanie Dale told us Monday, also noting inaccurate reports of the magazine's demise. Indeed, the last issue of The Net still carried subscription cards ("YES! Start my subscription to The Net immediately!"), but Dale says you'll have to wait until 1998 to receive your first copy.

     It's reminiscent of the dead parrot skit from Monty Python's "And Now For Something Completely Different." It's not dead, just... resting.

     So should we look for a rebirth of Virtual City? "No, it's completely dead," says Newsweek's communications associate Bridget McKinley.

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     Online Access? "That's the magazine that merged with NetGuide magazine," CMP's corporation communications spokesman Steve Rubel told us. So where's NetGuide? "NetGuide's last issue was the August 1997 issue." It was in turn absorbed by Windows magazine.

     OK, how about CyberSurfer? "Well, it does not exist any longer," a chatty receptionist told us -- though we couldn't reach any executives to confirm it. And the web site? It returns a Not Found message.

     What's going on? "There's been this ongoing debate in the industry as to whether an Internet consumer needs a printed guide," said Dale, publisher of The Net. "We were sort of in the position of educating our readership not to read the magazine. After 12 issues of the magazine they knew enough about the Net so they could get most of what they needed online."

     The general-interest model may have been flawed too, notes Ziff Davis' Jarboe. "The Internet is not a single market. The right strategy is to deal with a segment of this Internet market."

     Which may explain the popularity of corporate propaganda rags such as Fast Company. "Specialized publications focusing on discrete segments of what we view as 'the Internet' can succeed in print," said Robert Seidman, who was editor at large for CMP's NetGuide. "The advertising market, as well as the speed at which the Internet operates, make it hard for general purpose Internet publications to have any real success."

     Prognosticians have always said that the Web would one day make print magazines obsolete. Paradoxically, the first magazines to manifest the prophecies are the ones that cover the online world. The trouble, in part, is the speed at which the Internet operates -- nearly instantaneous publication vs. what is often two months' or more lag time in a print publication. Facts that "make it hard for general purpose Internet publications to have any real success," said Seidman.

     "A copy of The Web magazine is pretty useless after three months," concedes Steve Fox, the magazine's editor. "The web sites just go out of date." He's facing the same crisis as The Net. "If it turned out that renewals suck, we're going to have to really look at the business plan." (We're told that the first round was promising...) "It's always a crapshoot. But at this point, one year in, everyone's happy with the way it's going."

     Truth be told, we're mourning the absence of our offline brethren because they'd showed such pluck. In one episode, Internet Underground publisher Steve Harris received angry mail -- the magazine's only hard-copy complaint -- from a reader named G. A. Deady. He complained about the magazine's plastic wrapping and extraneous Yanni-bashing, and that "the main content of the magazine offered little, if anything, that could not be found elsewhere... I give the magazine SIX MONTHS." [emphasis added]

    "He became someone to rally against," the editors wrote in issue 10. "Despite the droves of encouraging letters we've gotten... Deady's is the only one thumb-tacked to our wall."

     Internet Underground inaugurated the Deady Watch on their letters page -- and on the magazine's first-year anniversary, Deady recanted. "I'm glad to see your magazine made it past six months," he wrote. "I'd hate to see anybody go belly up." But privately, he sensed they were on shaky ground. He told The Netly News that when he saw it on the newsstand two months ago, "I was surprised it was still around." Even Deady, a retired facilities manager, felt the need for targeting: "They weren't aiming at my age group or my computer mentality." Two issues later, it was all over.

     While we wait for some new Net-savvy ragstock to hit the stands, we'll entertain ourselves with the CD-ROM from last November's issue of The Net. We're also left with a stack of old Internet magazines touting their now-defunct URLs -- Websight, CyberSurfer, Online Access, Virtual City. The editor's letter in one of the final issues of Websight captured our sentiments: "What's it all coming to? I don't know. But it's sure fun to watch."

     Mr. Deady's predictions? He's still using his dot matrix printer, and "we read a lot of newspapers...."

Freelance writer Dave Cassel sold his first story to The Net, and also wrote for Internet Underground.

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