Feed Magazine

» see feedmag.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

feed's peak years overlap with my earliest years online, but not with my orbit. i started dial-up in ankara in 1998 when the magazine was three years in. the english-language webzine culture around wired and its offspring was a scene i could read about but not really participate in. by the time i went back looking at the archived feed columns as a computer engineering student, most of the writers had already moved on to book contracts or to salon.

stefanie syman and steven berlin johnson launched feed in may 1995 out of new york, back when the "web magazine" as a form was maybe six months old. the pitch was serious essays on media and ideas, written for a reader who did not need the newspaper prose scaffolding stripped away. hotwired had launched about a year earlier and was the closest cousin. suck.com launched three months after feed and became the sardonic sibling.

the writing bench was strong for a shoestring shop. sam lipsyte was in there as an editor before he was a novelist. steven johnson kept writing feed columns while working on his early books. by the late 90s the byline list read like a scouting report for the next decade of us media. still, feed never had a business plan the way condé nast properties did. it ran on venture cash and ad revenue plus the assumption that both would keep growing.

~ the record ~

~ what it was ~

the format was one long essay per day or a themed dialogue between two writers, both of which were unusual on the 1996 web. hotwired had short news items and suck had the 200-pixel column. feed took a magazine essay of two or three thousand words and put it in a browser window without asking whether anyone would read that far. for whatever reason, a lot of people did.

the coverage was ideas-forward, not gadget-forward. one week on the media panic of the year, the next on a book about complexity theory, the next on a filmmaker or a novelist worth taking seriously. it built the reader that "long-form" meant to describe fifteen years later, before that word had a job.

~ the merger ~

by 1999 the ad revenue that had been carrying the whole webzine class of 1995 was slowing down. suck was inside lycos and losing money. feed was independent and losing money. in july 2000 the two teams merged into a holding company called automatic media, with the plan of pooling back-end infrastructure and launching plastic.com as a community-edited link feed. it was a survival move dressed up as a strategy.

the merger closed just as the nasdaq was cracking and the ad market for boutique english-language webzines was going from bad to worse. anyway, automatic media raised nothing on top of what the two magazines already had. eleven months of runway carried it through spring 2001.

~ the day it ended ~

in early june 2001 automatic media told its staff there was no more money. suck.com posted the "gone fishin'" notice on june 8 and stopped publishing. feed put up a farewell letter around the same window and let its archive settle. plastic.com survived because carl steadman personally bought it for thirty thousand dollars and kept it going on volunteer editors for another decade.

the reason feed is worth remembering is not the death, which was the same one every 1995 webzine had. the reason is that its writers went on to define the next decade of the media web. steven johnson wrote the books that put pop-tech nonfiction on best-seller lists. ana marie cox went to wonkette and became one of the founding faces of the political-blog era. feed did not survive the dot-com bust, but the byline list survived and just kept publishing under other flags. the essay web of 1998 became the book market of 2005.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »