Silicon Alley Reporter

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

~ the obituary ~

Silicon Alley was the name given to the cluster of internet companies that grew up in lower Manhattan in the middle nineties, in loft space that had been cheap until they arrived. In 1996 Jason Calacanis started a magazine to cover it, which was an odd thing to do for a scene that did not yet have enough companies to fill an issue. Silicon Alley Reporter grew at the same rate as the thing it reported on, and the parent company that eventually held it was called Rising Tide Studios.

The masthead turned out to matter more than the magazine. Rafat Ali was managing editor before he left to found paidContent.org and its parent ContentNext Media. Xeni Jardin and Clay Shirky wrote for it. Karol Martesko-Fenster worked with Calacanis on the launch from 1997, joined Rising Tide in April 1999 and served as president and publisher until the middle of 2001. Doug Mintz ran editorial in 2000 and 2001 and helped spin out the sister title, Venture Reporter, which is the piece of the operation that survived.

By 1999 the magazine was thick enough to be a status object in itself, and the trade press started writing about it rather than with it. The New York Post reported in April that year that the big publishers were circling. The following February the Wall Street Journal reported that Silicon Alley Reporter was looking for investors from inside Silicon Alley, which is a sentence that only makes sense during a bubble, and only for a short while.

A print magazine about a twenty block stretch of Manhattan was never going to reach a teenager on a dial-up line in Turkey, and it did not. I was seventeen when it folded, and the internet visible from Ankara had no trade press attached to it, only the sites themselves. Silicon Alley Reporter existed to tell an industry that it was an industry, a job that only works if everyone involved can get to the same party.

~ the case file ~

~ the list ~

Every year the magazine published the Silicon Alley Reporter 100, a ranking of the hundred most influential people in New York technology. It was the magazine's real product. A list like that hands out the status it claims to be measuring, and everyone on it knows this while continuing to care where they placed.

Salon wrote about the problem directly in March 2000, under a headline asking who decides who is who in Silicon Alley. The answer was a magazine run by a man in his twenties who had invented the beat he covered. Nobody came up with a better method, partly because there was no time before the whole thing stopped.

~ the postmortem ~

The magazine did not run out of readers. It ran out of the companies that bought the back cover, which happened all at once across 2001, and a monthly title carrying that much advertising has no version of itself that works without it. ClickZ reported on 8 October 2001 that Silicon Alley Reporter had gone under. The New York Times ran its piece the same day, headlined Requiem for a Cheerleader, which was accurate about the magazine's posture as well as its fate.

The name had already been changing. Rising Tide had renamed the operation Venture Reporter earlier in 2001 and pointed it at venture capital deal coverage, a subscription business with no dependence on display advertising. That version worked well enough to be worth buying, and Dow Jones bought it in 2003.

~ the inheritance ~

Calacanis started Weblogs Inc the following year and sold it to AOL in 2005, then went on to Mahalo and to interviewing founders on a podcast, which is roughly the same job as the magazine with the printing costs removed. Rafat Ali's paidContent became the trade publication that the next decade actually read, and was eventually bought by the Guardian.

What that means is the magazine failed and its staff did not. The Silicon Alley Reporter 100 is still readable in the archive, and BetaBeat went back through it in 2011 to see where everybody had landed. Most of the names were still working in New York. The magazine that certified them lasted five years.

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