Transfert.net

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

~ the last words ~

Transfert was founded in 1998 by Christophe Agnus as a monthly magazine and a website launched together, which had not been done in France before. The subject was what the technology revolution was doing to society rather than which gadget to buy, and the newsroom was built to feed print and web at once. Le Nouvel Observateur called it the French Wired. The wordmark on the site described the beat as société de l'information, which is precisely what it covered.

The money behaved the way it did everywhere else in 2000. In June that year the company raised ten million francs from an investment house. By the end of 2000 it was past two million page views and 300,000 unique visitors, with 32,000 people signed up to its newsletters. Then the advertising market that paid for a free site evaporated. In October 2001 Transfert was sold to a publisher called L'Île des Médias, and the version of it that had a paper magazine attached came to an end.

Turkey in 1998 meant a modem at home and reading in English, because English is what the web mostly was. French technology journalism had no route to a fourteen year old there, and the imported titles on the newsstand came from Britain or America. I came to Transfert backwards, more than twenty years late, through its own shutdown notice.

The second life is the interesting one. In April 2003 an association called Transfert 2, formed by former employees, restarted the site as a semi-paid publication with no advertising at all, funded by subscriptions aimed at professionals. One permanent employee and six part-timers put it out, with around twenty freelance journalists filing into it, on an operating budget of 15,000 euros a month.

~ the record ~

~ the economics they published on the way out ~

The closing notice is timestamped 1 December 2003 at 18:53 and still leads the site. It is a remarkable document because it does the arithmetic in public. They had known from the start that they had until the end of 2003 to prove the model. The site was drawing seven to eight thousand visits a day and could not convert them into paid subscriptions at anything like the rate required. The financial reserves were nearly gone. The staff were being let go, though the association itself would survive.

The self-criticism is specific rather than wounded. They had probably underestimated how much selling the thing would take. The research tools built for subscribers were genuinely useful to their own newsroom but hard to understand from outside, and only made sense once you had used them a while. And they had deliberately left part of the work free, because cutting it off would have broken the links and the search traffic that carried their journalism outward. Their verdict on the whole exercise was that the equation of independent online journalism, widely held to be unsolvable, still had unknowns in it.

~ what it was writing about ~

The last front page, frozen in place, is a good argument for the publication. The lead stories were about world oil reserves being overstated and the approach of peak oil, filed under economics. The French data protection regulator had just put RFID smart labels on its blacklist. There was a piece on an activist cartoon called The Meatrix as a model of how something spreads online, which in late 2003 was an early read on viral video as a political form.

Their standing files were intellectual property against the opening of knowledge, and the advance of surveillance against what was left of privacy. Further down came the new nuclear age and the uses of genetics for identifying people. The last item on their own list was the thinning boundary between producer and audience, which they were writing about two years before YouTube existed.

~ the archives are still there ~

The promise in the notice was that the feed stops but the archive stays open, and the domain still answers twenty-three years on. The orange wordmark loads and the November 2003 headlines sit in the sidebar. The article announcing the closure still leads the front page where they left it. It is the rare dead publication that was shut down carefully enough to still be readable, by people who were being laid off that week.

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