I started this list in the summer of 1993. I was trying to find some place to publicize Crash, a print zine I'd recently made electronic versions of. All I could find was the alt.zines newsgroup and the archives at The WELL and ETEXT. I felt there was a need for something less ephemeral and more organized, a directory that kept track of where e-zines could be found. So I summarized the relevant info from a couple dozen e-zines and created the first version of this list.

Initially, I maintained the list by hand in a text editor; eventually, I wrote my own database program (in the Perl language) that automatically generates all the text, links, and files.

In the four years I've been publishing the list, the Net has changed dramatically, in style as well as scale. When I started the list, e-zines were usually a few kilobytes of plain text stored in the depths of an FTP server; high style was having a Gopher menu, and the Web was just a rumor of a myth. The number of living e-zines numbered in the low dozens, and nearly all of them were produced using the classic self-publishing method: scam resources from work when no one's looking.

Now the e-zine world is different. The number of e-zines has increased a hundredfold, crawling out of the FTP and Gopher woodworks to declaring themselves worthy of their own domain name, even of asking for financial support through advertising. Even the term 'e-zine' has been co-opted by the commercial world, and has come to mean nearly any type of publication distributed electronically. Yet there is still the original, independent fringe, who continue to publish from their heart, or push the boundaries of what we call a 'zine'."

5.2. Future Trends for the On-Line Press

A new type of press has been born. In an article of the French daily newspaper Libération of March 21, 1997, Laurent Mauriac underlined the fact that February 28, 1997, was an important date in the history of press, journalism and the Internet. At 3.15 PM, one of the ten U.S. main daily newspapers, the Dallas Morning News, gave an exclusive on its website: Timothy McVeigh, the main suspect in the Oklahoma City bomb attack, just admitted he was guilty of this crime. Suddenly, the relationship between the on-line issue and the paper issue were inverted - for the first time, an exclusive piece of news was not given by a paper issue but by an on-line issue.

Less than one year later, the new mechanism was running fine. Pierre Briançon, another journalist of Libération, explained in an article of January 30, 1998, that the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal (about the sexual relationship between the president of the United States and a White House intern) was "the first main political event all the details of which are instantaneously reproduced on the Web". Most of the main media in the world were running a special web page or report on this matter. "For the first time, the Web appears as a direct and violent competitor, not only of newspapers - handicapped by their periodicity - but also of radios or televisions."

As these two examples show, the introduction of the Web in the press, and vice versa, created a new type of press on-line, which offers almost instantaneous information, or in any case much quicker than that given by TV and radio. The information can also be much more comprehensive thanks to the hyperlinks leading to other information sources and documents.

However, as was made clear particularly during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, cyberjournalists need a professional code of ethics. In an interview given to the German multimedia magazine Com! in March 1998, Hermann Meyn, president of the Federation of German Journalists (Deutscher Journalisten Verband - DJV) showed the necessity for such a code because the flood of information is much more rapid on the Internet than in the classic media, and rumors and false news spread much more quickly. National laws would not be enough to fight against this tendency on the Internet which is a worldwide computer network. A professional code of ethics for journalists would be much more effective.

Another important problem is the constant pressure exerted on journalists.
During the ILO Symposium on Multimedia Convergence held in January 1997, Bernie
Lunzer, Secretary-Treasurer of the Newspaper Guild, United States, stated: