TechWeek

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

~ the goodbye ~

TechWeek was a controlled-circulation magazine, which is a category that barely translates. It was free, it was a biweekly, and you could not buy it. You qualified for it: if your job title and your employer put you inside the Silicon Valley technology workforce, a copy showed up, and the advertisers paid for the privilege of reaching a list of a hundred thousand people who had all been verified as the right kind of reader. Nothing like that existed in Turkey, where a computer magazine was something you bought at a kiosk with your own money, so my entire mental model of a tech magazine is the opposite of how this one worked.

It was published by Metro States Media out of Sunnyvale, and it started in 1998. The masthead on the cover of the 20 March 2000 issue, volume 3 number 6, reads SILICON VALLEY above the wordmark and What technology professionals need to succeed below it. The cover story that fortnight was called "Digital Dreams," subtitled "The surprising sagas of five entrepreneurs continue." It ran a comic strip, Rudy Park, in among the coverage.

Three years is a short run for a magazine and a long one for a company that launched into the end of a bubble. Volume 3 was as far as it got.

~ the chronicle ~

~ free to the right people ~

The economics of a controlled-circulation trade book are brutal in a way that subscription magazines are not. Every copy is a cost and no copy is revenue, so the entire business is one number: what advertisers will pay per thousand qualified readers. When that number moves, nothing cushions it. There is no subscriber base to lean on while you figure things out, because the subscribers were never paying.

TechWeek put about four million dollars into advanced advertising formats, trying to give buyers something that print could do and banner ads could not, and never made the money back. Tim Graham, the editor-in-chief, blamed advertising migrating to the internet and said the magazine had never spent enough promoting itself. He also called it bad timing. The first of those reasons was the one he had been assigning stories about since 1998.

~ the last issue ~

The final issue is dated 27 November 2000, five weeks before the end of the year that broke the sector it covered. The Industry Standard, which was the fat and famous version of this same bet, would last another nine months before folding in August 2001. Red Herring and Business 2.0 took longer to die but died of the same thing. A whole shelf of magazines had been built on the premise that technology advertising would keep expanding, and all of them were reading their own obituary in their own pages for about eighteen months before anyone said it out loud.

~ the clock that kept running ~

What happened to techweek.com afterward is the part I keep thinking about. The site did not come down. From December 2000 until at least late November 2001 the Internet Archive keeps collecting the same page, byte count hovering between 5,488 and 5,499, never meaningfully changing. Nobody touched it for a year.

One thing on that page was still moving. Buried in the markup is a JavaScript routine with a hand-built array of month names and day names, and its only job is to write today's date at the top of the page. So for twelve months after the last issue, a dead magazine's home page greeted every visitor with the correct current date, calculated fresh on their own machine, under headlines that had stopped moving in November. The one piece of the site still doing work was the one telling you how long it had been since anyone else did.

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