LIFE AND DEATH ON THE WEB

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

I took the subway downtown recently to the great lofts of New York City's Silicon Alley to make a condolence call. The infant Stim, a Website that was born here in May amid a tide of ain't-the-Net-great hype, had just succumbed, carried off by a corrective wave of antihype. I figured I'd pay my respects to the survivors.

I found Mikki Halpin, Stim's erstwhile editor, sitting among a double row of mauve, mostly vacant cubicles. Stim (named after William Gibson's imaginary "digital drug") was typical of the flood of 'zines that launched last year. It was silly and fun and new, and it took the kinds of risks you don't take if you've already found a market. In the weeks preceding the Democratic National Convention, for instance, Stim's political commentator was forbidden to read or listen to press accounts of the presidential race; he had to write his stuff cold. Then when the Dick Morris scandal broke, Halpin immediately dispatched the writer to find and interview a prostitute. "We wondered if maybe hookers were untapped sources of political gossip," says Halpin. For the "security issue," one of Stim's contributors wanted to put on a bulletproof Kevlar vest and let a friend shoot him in the chest. (The experiment was scotched when the shooter chickened out.)

Stim was a bold bid by Prodigy, the dowdy online service started by IBM and Sears, to break into the hot, youth-oriented Web-content business. Some $2 million was budgeted for the first year, paying the salaries of a dozen staff members. But when the first million was gone, with readership scant and no real revenue in sight, Prodigy decided to cut its losses. The company has given Halpin Stim's name and the computer that housed it. A neighboring firm has donated some office space. But with nothing to pay its contributors, Halpin & Co. must resurrect the 'zine on little more than good wishes. As she says, "Operations such as processing invoices and ordering supplies will be greatly streamlined now that we have no money."

Stim's tale is typical, if you're to believe the Wall Street Journal, which, coincidentally, ran a front-page story the day Stim hit the skids pointing out that too many Web publishers were competing for too few ad dollars. Consequently, lots of them began quitting. The cowards.

Here's my prediction: no Web publisher will make money this year or even, maybe, the next few. This is an infant medium; it needs time to find its way. A print magazine can take five years and many millions of dollars before turning a profit, and that's in a proven market where people actually pay for content. We need courage if we're going to create something wonderful. The New Yorker nearly died in 1925, the year it was born. Indeed, it did die for one day, before its patron reconsidered. The magazine at the time had a paltry circulation of 2,700--perhaps, as James Thurber once pointed out, because it started out so sophomoric and error prone. I'm not saying Stim could ever have grown into the New Yorker. Or maybe I am. The point is, we will probably never know.

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