Magazines: Time Warner
Typing away on Macintoshes on the fortieth floor of the Time Life Building in Manhattan, ten floors above People magazine, a small team started an area of the Web known as Pathfinder. It offered electronic versions of Time Warner’s vast stable of magazines. Zonker Harris at the N & O had a slogan, “May the best server win.” The Durham newspapers might not be in the game so far, but Time and brethren were.
Zonker was justifiably proud of the 300,000 or so accesses a week that the N & O’s Web area was enjoying after several months on the Web. But just within a week of start-up in fall 1994, the Time Warner area was drawing more than 80,000 accesses a day. That didn’t mean that the N & O’s efforts were doomed—hardly. But despite all the talk about the Net being nirvana for smaller companies, Fortune 500 corporations arrived with some advantages of their own. Once readers grew comfortable with a certain area of the Web, they might spend less time on other parts of the Net. This wasn’t so much a pattern at the time, but as mass audiences descended on the Net, corporate logos might count far more. Beyond that, Time Warner already offered a daily version of Time—a newspaper in effect. It was just one service among a rackfull of publications. Readers could read up on foreign policy or the latest Star Trek film in Time, take in reviews from Entertainment Weekly, keep up with Ice-T and other hip-hop musicians in Vibe, or fire off questions to authors of best-sellers from Warner Books.
An even greater threat to the N & O, in the long run, was the fact that Time Warner didn’t just own magazines and book publishers. It also owned pipes, including a cable operation in the Raleigh area. And someday it might use cable TV lines to send the Net into homes there, competing with the N & O, which had already been providing Internet services. If no antitrust or other legal boundaries existed, then Time Warner would be remiss in its duties to its stockholders[stockholders] if it did not explore this route. Think what this would mean to users of the World Wide Web. If an article came with fancy photos, they might have to wait several minutes for the whole works to reach them at a speed of 14.4 kilobits per second. But suppose Time Warner used cable TV to bring the Internet to them. Their televisions would still work with cable the usual way. But their computers could share the cable and retrieve Web articles and other material in a fraction of the time. Cable modems sold for hundreds of dollars. But pilot projects were going on with other companies, and the cost could soon drop to a fraction of that amount. More important, big, well-financed corporations might be willing to modify the old cable for these new capabilities.[[4.15]] What did this mean for local, N & O-sized companies? Just as high tech had blurred the difference between telephones and televisions, the Net itself was blurring the barriers between local and national. It was unclear whether the public would win or lose.
For better or worse, Time Warner’s area on the Net was part of an evolution in cyberspace. The process had begun with the small academic magazines and hobbyist publications that turned to the Net as a cheap way to find readers. Many if not most still relied on plain text without graphics; they were little more than archived dispatches to mailing lists—which was fine because the words mattered above all. One of the best of these was Adam Engst’s Tidbits. Written for Apple owners, it also appeared on the World Wide Web and bulletin board systems, and Engst claimed more than 100,000 readers—no small feat for a kitchen-table-style publisher. Nonconglomerates still provided most of the magazines on the net, and not all were for techies or sci-fi buffs. International Teletimes was edited by Ian Wojtowicz, a gifted high school student who lived in Vancouver, British Columbia. Teletimes went out over the Web with fetching art, not just text, and some of the prose could have graced Harper’s or the Atlantic. Recounting a winter trip by train, a college student named Paul Gribble wrote: “Every now and then we pass a lake, completely frozen over, flat and white, smooth as a skating rink. I’d love to walk to the center of a big frozen lake like that and just sit there for a while. I’d feel like the first blot of paint on a fresh silk canvas.”
Many steps up from Teletimes, in business terms, was Global Net Navigator. Like the N & O in North Carolina, GNN was trying to use advertising to support its activities, and you could see ads from companies as large as Digital Equipment Corporation. GNN was not just technical. It posted informative, brightly written articles on topics ranging from money to food and travel. Wired magazine was on the Net, too, with an offshoot called HotWired, which itself wandered far from technical topics and attracted lucrative ads from the likes of Volvo and AT&T. None of these publications, of course, happened to be a Household Name like Time Warner’s Time or People. Many experts felt that as a profitable medium for big-time magazines—and let’s not confuse size with quality or lack thereof—the Internet had a long way to go.
Jeffrey Dearth offered at least an interim answer. Teaming up with a small corporation with the grand name of the Internet Company, Dearth offered the Electronic Newsstand. Like the Pathfinder or N & O’s Net edition, the Newsstand was a godsend to browsers. You could wander through sample articles from Business Week; Field & Stream; The Economist; The New Yorker; National Review; Maclean’s, Canada’s largest newsweekly; or The New Republic, of which Dearth himself was publisher. The Time Warner experiment notwithstanding, most of the Names were far behind. Dearth offered them the equivalent of a catch-up course or at least some solid remedial instruction. They could test the waters of the Net to see how much interest their articles drew, before deciding whether to set up their own areas there. Via the Newsstand, magazines could accept subscription orders.
But order taking was a long way from fancier “interactivity”—to use a pet term of media people—and this was where Time Warner’s Pathfinder area would shine. The area didn’t just recycle magazines on the Net, it also offered powerful tools to find old articles by typing in search words or the names of topics. From the start, the searching capability was among the more popular services. Soon Pathfinder would include hypertext links that let you go from an article on a certain topic to an ongoing discussion. Already Time Warner provided special services such as one for gardeners. They could type in their general wishes about flowers and supply their location and other odds and ends, and then Time would offer tips on what to grow. It also allowed inquirers find out how their congressman or senator had voted on certain key issues. And many more applications like this were on the way. What’s more, people could talk back to Time Warner writers and others by way of an advanced bulletin board system designed for the Web. It was much easier to use than the N & O’s.
Not everyone liked the Web area. One woman hated the “overstuffed” artwork—others said it gobbled up too much downloading time. She also chided Time for putting out the online version of Sunset magazine “for Northern Californians still living in their ’50s ranch houses.” I myself, however, enjoyed the kitsch and flashy, busy look of the Web area as a whole. That was the way the real magazines came across; this was pop culture, not the Kenyon Review.
Almost immediately the Time board teemed with lively talk on issues ranging from Clintonian stupidities to, yes, the future of the electronic medium. I felt much more comfortable here than in the message area of the N & O; people on the Time board spoke their minds more freely. Some amusing posts showed up. Amazingly, the software let people key in their own identities, and the late Henry Luce, cofounder of Time, arose from the grave as luce@pastmytime.com. One message appeared, truthfully or not, with the name of a staffer at U.S. News & World Report. He promised that U.S. News would set up an outpost on the Net soon, and someone at Time twitted him for not answering e-mail promptly. Despite my fondness for the reporting in U.S. News, I had to agree. Researching a Net guide for political activists, I’d written U.S. News six months ago and had yet to receive an answer.