Mr. Showbiz

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

~ the eulogy ~

In 1998 i was a teenager on a dial-up line in Turkey, and American celebrity coverage was not what i spent the minutes on. Mr. Showbiz was three years old by then and already a fixture of a web where an entertainment magazine was a place you went to rather than something that arrived in a feed. i knew the shape of that web without ever going to that particular address.

Starwave was the company Paul Allen set up in Seattle in 1993 to work out what media would look like once it moved onto the internet. It built ESPN.com and ABCNews.com in the same years, and on 1 May 1995 it put up Mr. Showbiz, billed at launch as a daily newspaper crossed with a humor magazine. The staff was not from software. Tom Phillips had published Spy. Susan Mulcahy had written a gossip column at the New York Post.

That hiring is the part worth noticing. In 1995 most of the web was being written by people who had learned HTML, and Mr. Showbiz was being written by people who had learned to hit a deadline. It read like something with an editor. Reviews came with a star rating attached from a named critic, and interviews ran at length instead of being trimmed down to one usable quote.

Disney took a stake in Starwave in 1997 and completed the purchase the following year, merging it with Infoseek. Mr. Showbiz went into the machinery that became the Go Network, a portal Disney built to compete with Yahoo and abandoned inside three years. Nobody buys an entertainment site for its editors. They buy it for the audience, and audiences move.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

The site sold itself on judgment. A movie got a number of stars from a named critic, which sounds unremarkable now and was not obvious in 1995, when a great deal of web writing avoided saying whether a thing was any good. Readers came back for the verdict rather than the listing, and that habit is the whole business model of every entertainment site that followed.

It also ran an interview archive deep enough to be worth searching, at a moment when almost nothing on the web was worth searching. That was Starwave's actual product across all of its sites: a working newsroom pointed at a browser.

~ what got buried with it ~

Go.com was Disney's answer to a question everyone was asking wrong in 1998. Portals were supposed to be the front door of the internet, so Disney assembled a search engine and a stack of content sites behind one brand. On 1 March 2001 Disney converted the tracking stock back into common shares and closed the portal business. What was left of the properties spent the rest of that year being switched off one at a time.

Mr. Showbiz went on 6 November 2001, alongside another round of layoffs at the Disney Internet Group. The notice on the front page said the site had retired after six years as the web's best entertainment site and thanked readers for riding shotgun. Then it forwarded them to ABCNews.com. Six years of reviews and interviews went with it. The archive was not migrated anywhere a reader could reach.

~ the long tail ~

The format did not die with the site. Star-rated reviews under a named critic became standard everywhere, and celebrity news got filed like actual news. By 2005 the audience Mr. Showbiz had assembled was being served by TMZ at a much lower cost per story. Disney had the format first and could not find a reason to keep paying for it.

mrshowbiz.com does not resolve. What survives is scattered through quote sites and press archives, usually credited to a magazine nobody can point at anymore.

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