Web Magazines Break the Cookie-Cutter

Whatever their economic difficulties, small new Web publications are reinventing journalism in a way that stretches, and sometimes shatters, the conceptual boundaries. Among other things, Web technology allows editors like Steven Johnson and Stefanie Syman of Feed magazine to track which articles readers are clicking on most frequently and how many pages (or screenfuls) they look at before surfing off in other directions. It’s like being hard-wired into the customers’ brains in some kind of futuristic focus group.

The Web offers a rare opportunity “to do a magazine that’s not celebrity-driven and market-driven to death,” says David Talbot, editor of Salon, a successful Webzine that specializes in the arts, media and politics. “That’s why every [print] magazine is like every other magazine these days; it’s the same cookie-cutter formula over and over again. Intelligence is the next growth market,” he says, waxing optimistic about the prospect of catering to smart readers.

One thing the Webzines steer away from is old-fashioned reporting. “It’s very expensive to cover news,” says Josh Quittner, who runs Time’s Netly News site. “News isn’t something you can do out of your garage.” Some sites, he says, substitute “lots of whiny, nattering, self-referential stuff.”

The smaller Webzines pulsate with a young, ironic, smart-alecky, postmodern tone. One essay in Suck (https://www.suck.com) ridiculed reporters for rushing to interpret the significance of innocuous remarks by a Federal Reserve official. “Bottle-fed on cynicism, journalists have become so anxious to divine the subtext, the coded messages in every official pronouncement, that they’ve long since stopped noticing the plain old text,” it said.

The magazines are also filled with frank talk about race, class and sex--especially sex. Salon (https://www.salon1999.com) has an Unzipped columnist, Courtney Weaver, who opines on such topics as “Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down” and “My Friend Retires Her Diaphragm.” Suck, which like Salon is based in San Francisco, recently asked: “Is My Neighbor Living With a Sex Doll?”--not exactly New York Times Magazine material.

Salon also boasts a popular Table Talk section where readers chew the cultural fat. One recent posting: “The ‘media’ in this country is nothing more than a monolithic collection of corporately addled lost causes. Just travel across the country and try to find any kind of diversity in daily newspapers--they’re almost all the same!”

Slate (https://www.slate.com) has specialized in online “dialogues” between warring experts, not all of them household names: Susan Faludi versus Karen Lehrman on revisionist feminism. Mickey Kaus versus Peter Edelman on welfare reform. Susan Estrich versus Stuart Taylor on the Paula Jones case. “At their best, they have that quality of e-mail that combines the immediacy of talking with the reflectiveness of writing, yet it’s not ‘Crossfire,’ ” Kinsley says.

But the dialogues also underscore the self-indulgent quality of the Web: They go on and on, like bar stool arguments, in a way that would be too costly for any magazine that had to pay for the paper. The danger, as Faludi warned her rival in one missive: “You’ll call me a name, then I’ll call you one, and soon they can bill this exchange ‘Microsoft Female Mud Wrestling.’ ”

Building communities is the Holy Grail for some Web entrepreneurs. The Electric Minds discussion site, launched by Internet pioneer Howard Rheingold, got more than 5 million hits during the Garry Kasparov-Deep Blue chess match. “The caliber of the discourse was astonishingly high,” he says. But Rheingold recently ran out of money and laid off most of his staff. “Everyone is scrambling for a business model that works,” he says.

At Feed (https://www.feedmag.com), Johnson and Syman are experimenting with “hypertext” links, those blue highlighted words that, with a click, instantly transport the reader to a related site or document. Feed provides clues on whether it’s worth the trip. “Our mission is as much about using hypertext in innovative ways as covering stories from a certain angle,” Johnson says.

Feed has begun using what it calls “metalinks”--little boxes that pop up alongside the text with a quote or definition without forcing the reader to abandon the story. Other links carry the undercurrent of commercialism. In a Syman piece on high-definition TV, a reference to Joel Brinkley’s book on the subject links to a Barnes & Noble ad for the book. Feed’s advertising deal with Barnes & Noble requires that it provide 10 such links each month.