The new zine reality

From...

March 15, 2000
Web posted at: 8:38 a.m. EST (1338 GMT)

by Ted Rose

(IDG) -- When Joey Anuff and Carl Steadman started pulling late nights moonlighting on their HotWired computers in the company's San Francisco office in the summer of 1995, the pair had fairly modest goals. They wanted to create an edgy daily read that poked fun at the self-important Internet gurus of the day. The pair dubbed the effort "Suck," and took pains to hide any connection between their guerrilla operation and their well-known computer hosts at Wired,routing the operation through a server in the Midwest. They spent less than $3,000 to get their site off the ground.

Three months after the launch, several businesses expressed an interest in the audience they had collected. They accepted an offer from Wired, HotWired's parent. "We were very tired and Wired's offer looked really attractive," says Anuff. "We just had to move our desks across the hall."

Suck's story is the archetypal zine launch tale: strong content and elbow grease combine to produce a literary product that finds an audience in the marketplace. All of that business stuff ö marketing, advertising, accounting ö wasn't necessary.

So much for a trip down memory lane; now we face the new reality: Web content has gone corporate. There's no more fitting emblem of that seismic shift than the image of Time Warner (TWX) CEO Gerald Levin tearing off his necktie in front of the world, vowing to push his old-media brands into the brave, new medium.

Given the higher stakes, can a small, independent, underfunded zine get launched in today's increasingly corporate Internet world?

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Before tackling that question, try to name a few other Suck-like zines that feature strong editorial voices and original content, but without the support of old-media money. There's a good chance that the names you came up with ö Feed, Salon and Word, for instance ö were launched more than four years ago. "It's a lot harder to just throw up some HTML," says Feed cofounder Steven Johnson. (Feed and other independent zines may join forces.)

From a technical standpoint, it's still easy to post the code. Many people do that and are able to develop a modest readership for their sites in the process. But building any type of mass audience now requires more resources than ever before. You need a marketing budget to spread the word, and advertising on your site to pay for spreading the word. Then you have to count on laying down cash to secure a catchy URL.

All told, you should plan to have $300,000 to $500,000 in the bank to get a zine running these days, says Johnson, who started Feed with just $60,000. "You need to have somebody thinking about business development ... from the beginning," he says. While Suck has proven that Web-based magazines can operate in the black ö it's been profitable since its third year, according to Anuff ö it also demonstrates that an online publication alone won't make anyone super rich.

That's why the Joey Anuff of today looks something like Michael Colton. Colton, a former writer for Brill's Contentand a Harvard Lampoonalumnus, is creating Modern Humorist, an online humor magazine that will feature smart, biting satire. The site will debut in the spring. Colton proved that his audience exists when he attracted attention last summer with his rollicking online send-up of Talkmagazine, just before the premiere issue hit the newsstands. More recently, he delivered a well-received parody of Jim Romenesko's journalist tab sheet MediaNews.

Like Anuff and Steadman, Colton and partner John Aboud have absolutely no business experience. But, unlike the Sucksters, Colton is not comfortable leaving the impression that he is founding an impoverished online magazine. "What I am starting is more than a Web zine," he wrote in an e-mail message. "It's a media company centralized around an online magazine."

The idea of making the zine a front for a larger corporate entity has roots in electronic publishing. Both the eclectic Word and the staid Slate were borne by corporate entities eager to fund an editorial venture that might add luster to their other properties (Internet access provider Icon and Microsoft (MSFT) , respectively). But Colton's zine is a different beast. For him, the Web magazine is a vehicle to create a brand name that will be used to produce other types of ö and more profitable ö content.

At this point, Colton's corporate headquarters is the living room in the Manhattan apartment he shares with two roommates, but his Brooklyn office space should be ready for occupancy in a week.

"Nothing can top the Web in terms of people [being] able to see your work," he says, but then he is quick to note the zine's limitations. "Since we're giving away content for free," he says, "we can't make that much money." Colton and Co. are already taking steps to move the yet-to-debut brand offline, with a videogame and a book project in the works.

Colton's multimedia strategy hooked Greg Scholl, managing partner of Carlin Ventures in New York. Carlin Ventures forked over the lion's share of the seven-figure investment that will get Modern Humorist and its ancillary projects off the ground. "Good content never loses in a world where there's going to be a lot of distribution," says Scholl.

As bullish as Scholl is about content, he is equally suspicious about funding projects that focus solely on the creation of an advertising-based zine. "There's only so much you can do with a company like that," he says. Instead, multimedia ventures with a Web base, like Modern Humorist, are the ones that get him excited.

Perhaps it's no accident that the one zine that has managed to establish a name for itself in recent years is literary sex site Nerve.com. From the beginning, Nerve has followed precisely that formula of mixing its online editorial offerings with offline projects; it had a book project in the works just two months after the site debuted in 1997.

"There were some purists who thought that was a betrayal," says Rufus Griscom, Nerve's copublisher and CEO. "We love the medium, but the medium is a vehicle." This April, Nerve will roll out a print edition of the magazine, which unlike its Internet-based sibling, has the potential to make money.

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