The Inquirer

» see theinquirer.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Mike Magee co-founded The Register in 1994. He left it in 2001 after falling out with the people he had built it with, and the thing he did next was start another one. The Inquirer went up the same year, the Wayback Machine has it from 5 April 2001, and it carried a strapline that told you the editorial policy in five words: news, reviews, facts and friction.

What it actually did was semiconductor gossip. Intel roadmaps, AMD stepping revisions, motherboard chipsets that had not been announced yet, fab yields that somebody inside a fab had been indiscreet about. The INQ published them fast and often before anyone could confirm them, with a tone that assumed you already knew what a northbridge was and did not need the paragraph of explanation a real newspaper puts in. Typos stayed up. Headlines were puns. The whole operation read like a very well-sourced person typing quickly, because for a long stretch that is exactly what it was.

VNU, the Dutch publisher, bought it in 2006. Magee left in February 2008 to start IT Examiner, and the site passed to Incisive Media, which ran it out of a London newsroom with a proper masthead: Carly Page editing, Dave Neal, Chris Merriman, Roland Moore-Colyer, Lee Bell on the bylines. It was a real publication by then rather than one man with a contacts book, and it kept a healthy readership right to the end. The money was the problem, not the audience.

The chip-rumor economy of the 2000s had a long tail that reached Ankara. A roadmap leak would surface on a British site in the morning and by evening it was a thread on donanimhaber with forty people arguing about whether the clock speeds were plausible. I was building forum signatures out of my hardware list in those years like everybody else on frmtr, and the specs people wanted in those signatures came out of this pipeline. I did not read The Inquirer daily. I read the Turkish forum posts that had read it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ where the stories came from ~

The INQ's method was unfashionable even at the time. It took anonymous tips from inside the supply chain and printed them with light verification, on the theory that being first and sometimes wrong served readers better than being fourth and always right. Competitors complained about it constantly. The model also meant the site had no real moat once the chip vendors got better at controlling their own announcement calendars and started briefing everybody at once.

By the 2010s the stories it had owned were press releases with embargo dates, and the traffic that used to come from being the only place with the leak came from Google instead. Display advertising paid less every year for the same pageviews. Incisive was a business-information company by then with its attention elsewhere.

~ the last week ~

Staff found out roughly a week before readers did. The announcement went out on 19 December 2019, six days before Christmas, and that same Thursday was the last day anything new was published. Incisive said the decision came down to the recent decline in digital advertising and a change of focus for the business. Every publisher uses that sentence. Here it happened to be accurate.

The archive was left up. The plan was to keep theinquirer.net serving until the end of March 2020, and the Wayback Machine's last substantial crawl of the domain is 3 March 2020, a few hundred captures in one morning that look very much like somebody grabbing a site before it goes. It went.

~ the next chapter ~

Everything the INQ invented is now standard. The leak-first posture and the deliberately unserious headline over a properly sourced story make up the default voice of tech media now, and both were strange things to do in 2001. The Register survived its own co-founder's departure and is still publishing. The Inquirer did not get that ending.

Magee had already moved on twice by the time the site he started was closed by its third owner. The thing lasted eighteen years on an asset that was originally one person's phone.

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