SmartPlanet

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

~ the last words ~

SmartPlanet was trade press for people whose job involved buying things, which is a real readership and was never mine. The CBS Interactive property I read from Turkey was ZDNet. SmartPlanet was the sibling site in the same portfolio that you arrived at by following a link from the bottom of a ZDNet article and then wondering, two paragraphs into a piece on corporate sustainability reporting, how you had got there.

Its lineage is strange for a clean-technology magazine. Ziff Davis launched smartplanet.com on 2 November 1999 as an online learning service, a personal learning community for technology professionals, which in 1999 money meant selling courses to IT staff. CNET Networks ended up owning the name after it picked up ZDNet, and relaunched it in 2001 as a paid training service. Neither version worked well enough to be worth defending.

The version people mean started in June 2009, when the name came back to the United States as a business publication under Larry Dignan, who was editing ZDNet at the same time. It covered clean technology and the places IT touched healthcare, transportation, architecture and corporate sustainability. Quantcast put it around 250,000 readers in 2011. CBS Interactive filed it into the business portfolio alongside ZDNet and BNET.

~ the record ~

~ the year it was british ~

The 2008 relaunch is the part of this history that looks inexplicable from outside and probably made perfect sense in a meeting. The domain was carrying a paid learning product nobody wanted, green consumer content was cheap to commission and had advertisers attached, so SmartPlanet became a UK site reviewing ethical and sustainable products. Adam Vaughan edited it, and went on to cover energy for The Guardian.

That lasted about a year before the site was switched off and rebuilt in America as something that took itself seriously about industry. Almost nothing carried across except the URL.

~ the day it stopped ~

SmartPlanet published its last posts on 30 June 2014, fourteen years and eight months after Ziff Davis put the name up. There was no lawsuit and no traffic collapse in the public record.

What there was instead was a portfolio decision. CBS Interactive had one general technology site with real scale in ZDNet and two smaller business sites sitting beside it, and the smaller ones went. BNET had already been merged into CBS MoneyWatch on 27 March 2012. SmartPlanet's staff and archive followed into ZDNet two years after that, which left the parent site holding everything and the siblings holding nothing.

~ what zdnet kept ~

Merging a magazine into a bigger magazine is the softest way to kill one, and it also erases the most. The bylines survive and the posts survive under a different masthead. What does not survive is the editorial position that made them worth reading as a group rather than one at a time.

smartplanet.com redirects today to zdnet.com/topic/innovation, which is a section heading rather than a publication. A 2011 feature about a municipal solar program reads differently under a front page of enterprise software news, and that is what happens to any magazine that becomes a subdirectory.

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