Internet Magazine

» see internet-magazine.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The first issue, October 1994, listed every publicly available website on the World Wide Web. There were 55 of them. The masthead just said INTERNET, the strapline underneath said the practical guide to what's on and where to go, the price was 2.95 pounds, and the cover promised twelve business users telling you how they took the plunge. Alongside the web list it indexed what was reachable over FTP and Gopher, because in 1994 those were still the parts with the content on them.

It came out of Emap Computing in London, spun off from a networking monthly called Datacom. Datacom's deputy editor Neil Ellul proposed it to the publisher Roger Green and then edited the first issue himself. Within five years the dot-com boom had taken the magazine from 52 pages to more than 200, and the regular features had drifted from protocol explainers toward the kind of thing a consumer monthly runs: a column asking famous people for their bookmarks, which is how Uri Geller and Terry Pratchett ended up recommending websites to the British public. From 2000 the magazine ran a Movers and Shakers event naming fifty people it considered the biggest names in the industry, and the first one had Bob Geldof in the room on the strength of a travel site he had started.

Then the thing it sold stopped being scarce. Emap Automotive announced the closure on 29 April 2004 after circulation fell 26 percent to just over 14,000. The associate editor Scott Parker, who had joined in 1997 as the magazine's web editor, told dotJournalism the market was simply shrinking: people knew how to use the internet for news now. He also said the title had never made a loss, which is the part worth sitting with. It was closed for being a small profitable magazine inside a company that wanted to concentrate on lifestyle and music.

~ the case file ~

~ what it actually printed ~

For about three years this was a reference work. If you had just gotten a modem and a dial-up account, the magazine's job was to hand you a list of destinations, because there was no habit yet of typing something into a box and getting an answer. Reviews of websites, with a page number, in print, arriving once a month.

The format had a ceiling built into it and everyone could see where it was. Each year the web got bigger and the proportion of it a monthly could index got smaller, so the listings became samples instead of a survey, and a sampled directory competes directly with a search engine that samples better. By 2004 circulation had fallen a quarter in a single year.

~ the part I missed ~

My first dial-up account came four years after that first issue, on a Turkish line running at 33.6k, by which point the magazine had already hired a web editor of its own. By then finding somewhere to go was a thing you did badly and by yourself, following links and typing guesses at domain names. A monthly on a British newsagent's shelf was not going to solve that for anybody in Ankara, and the readers here who would have bought the local equivalent got a search box instead.

~ what was left behind ~

The website was kept alive only until the last edition finished its run and went off around the end of June 2004. Emap had no plans to republish the archive, which held everything the magazine had printed since 1999 and had been free to read. Emap Digital, the group's online arm, had already been shut down in September 2001, and Parker's verdict on it was two words: total disaster.

The staff registered a domain called im-memoriam.com and talked about running forums and a newsletter there for the people who had made the magazine and the people who had read it. Both that domain and internet-magazine.com are unresolvable today. A magazine that spent ten years telling British readers which addresses were worth visiting did not manage to keep two of its own.

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