HOT 'ZINES ON THE WEB

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

Marisa Bowe, editor of a new publication called Word, is the first to admit it isn't for everyone. "We don't have any movie or CD reviews," she says. "No celebrities. No Cindy Crawford. None of the usual product-pushing, hypey stuff." Nor is Word bothered--as its writers pursue such burning questions as "Do rock-'n'-roll musicians ever actually experience sexual rejection?"--by the usual constraints of paper, printing or distribution costs. Word goes straight from editor to reader without sacrificing any trees.

Word is a "webzine," one of dozens of bright new publications that have blossomed in the past year on the World Wide Web, the hot new multimedia hangout on the Internet. With edgy graphics and clever first-person writing, webzines are attracting a small but fiercely loyal readership. They are also starting to attract something even more important: good old-fashioned advertising. Saab, IBM, MasterCard and clear-beer Zima are among the sponsors whose winking logos bedizen every screenful of Word. And the stimulus of these ad dollars has encouraged even more publishers to come online.

The attraction of the new medium is obvious. Webzines and their primitive, text-only precursors, the E(lectronic)-zines, are relatively cheap and easy to produce. Anyone with a computer and something to say can start one. And since it costs no more to distribute 30 million copies than it does to distribute one, there's plenty of room for small niche markets that mainstream, print-based media tend to neglect.

Hundreds of web- and E-zines have sprung up in recent months, covering everything from big- city nightlife (Total New York) to punk rock (Intrrr Nrrrd). FaT GiRL caters to lesbians whose girth is apolitical as well as an aesthetic choice. Snuff It purports to be a "Church of Euthanasia" publication. Its motto: "Save the Earth; Kill Yourself."

What, until recently, most 'zines had in common was that they were as non-commercial, communal and idealistic as the Internet itself. But all that changed with the advent last year of HotWired, the sassy online sister of Wired, and later of Pathfinder, Time Warner's mammoth collection of magazines-come-to-the-Net. Advertisers sensed new possibilities. And why not? The typical Internet user is a Madison Avenue parfait: mid-30s, hyper educated, mostly male, and with plenty of disposable income and free time.

No 'zine has pursued that demographic more assiduously than Mr. Showbiz, a breezy, topical webzine catering to folks with a serious addiction to the entertainment industry. Conceived by former Spy publisher Tom Phillips, edited by former New York Post gossip queen Susan Mulcahy and lavishly bankrolled by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, Mr. Showbiz dishes up everything from the Scoop of the Day to a daily Hugh Grant poll (Should Elizabeth Hurley dump Hugh? Should prostitution be legal?).

Not everybody has Allen's billions, of course, and right now nobody is making much money in the webzine biz. Analysts warn that most of the advertising is coming from the flaky side of corporate budgets: the "new media" departments of businesses anxious not to miss the Internet boat but still profoundly skeptical. If the ads don't generate product sales, they could quickly dry up. "A lot of advertisers lined up to throw money at this stuff because they were caught in the hysteria about the Web," says Karen Burka, an electronic-marketing analyst at media consultant SIMBA Information. "But now they want to know how you make money selling a $1.59 bottle of dish detergent on the World Wide Web." There may be better ways to make 'zines pay. Kyle Shannon, who started Urban Desires with some friends in his Brooklyn living room, believes that within the next few years, people will be willing to pay small amounts of money--"like a nickel an article," he suggests--to read their favorite online publications. All it would take to survive is thousands of people a day, each paying 5 cents an article--a scenario that is hampered right now by the fact that collecting a nickel over the Internet costs more than 5 cents. Until that changes, webzines are more likely to follow in the footsteps of Mr. Showbiz, which is planning to register readers in so-called premium areas and start billing them for access to the juicy bits. After all, says editor Mulcahy, "this is not a charitable venture."