If this is the future, let's live in the past - magazines and online services - Editorial

Early in March, an interesting press release whipped across the business wire. The first I heard of it was via a call from a journalist who doesn't normally cover media. "Did Omni go out of business or what?" he asked, after explaining the gist of the release.

I guess the answer (albeit not the officially sanctioned one) is yes and no. It seems the ex-magazine will transmogrify as of May into an online publication, supplemented by a newsstand-only quarterly. In Omni's press release, the name of author William Gibson is invoked several times. This seems apropos because in his cyberpunk classic, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Gibson envisions a character who lives only in digital form. In Gibson's fantasy realm, human intelligence, upon the body's death, can be exported to microchips. This is a mixed blessing for the deceased, condemned as they, are to a much-reduced existence.

Likewise, a magazine that exists only online - in cyberspace, to use Gibson's neologism - is a lesser life form. There are things that magazines do well and there are things that online services do well and when you meld the two, you have a powerful product. That seems to be the current consensus in our industry a fact made clear in our feature, "Franchise fever" (see page 40). So why, eliminate one very pleasing method of presenting information (and I include advertising under that rubric) to favor another that doesn't at this point do the job nearly as well?

According to a quote in the press release from Omni editor Keith Ferrell, "By, taking this step we are getting a jump on the arrival of the new millennium." "But is it a jump, or was the magazine pushed? Omni and Discover are the last two broad-interest science magazines left in what in the early eighties was a crowded category. And now Omni is selling its 602,298-name subscriber list to Discover. In spite of all the spin control, it looks like the fate of a magazine that can no longer sustain itself as a mass consumer title, regardless of reported gains in ad pages over the past year. So far, only two Omni advertisers - Dodge and AT&T - have made the leap from print to pixel.

Online services' forte is their capacity to cater to the audience of one. The fact that invariably strikes you as you dive deeper and deeper into the layers of various forums is the narrowness of interests represented. Last year, for example, the Time Warner pet forum split dog-and-cat owners off from bird-and-reptile owners, establishing a cordon sanitaire among animal-companion-forum fans.

Don't get me wrong: I believe online services are incredibly valuable and have almost unimaginable potential. But what they lack that magazines excel at (besides the obvious stuff like gorgeous high-resolution graphics and easily read text), is the ability to move from the specific to the general, surprising readers and opening their minds outward. Online services are designed to move readers in the opposite direction.

So if your goal is to publish a zine, go online - it's the perfect medium. But if you want to publish a magazine, don't throw out your printing contract. There's life in old media yet.

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