The demise last week of the techy business read Industry Standard Europe coincided with the merger in the US of the two companies which provided commentary on the new economy, Powerful Media (owners of Inside magazine and the Inside.com website) and Primedia, owners of Brill's Content.
The individuals mangled in this pile-up of content catastrophes reads like a Who's Who of the new economy. Steve Brill, owner of Brill's Content, Michael Hirschorn and Kurt Andersen of Inside and John Battelle of the Standard were all in the vanguard of spreading the electronic word. They were not the callow fools who cratered Boo.com but seasoned professionals whose very business was second-guessing the market.
Indeed, in Kurt Andersen's overlong byte-buster of a novel, Turn of the Century, he introduces the neat joke of a character made redundant by News International after Rupert Murdoch's great dot.com disaster. A masterful piece of prediction, but an irony which will not be lost on a journalist as sharp as Andersen.
Inside.com and Brill's Content will now merge and produce a "media industry (print) bible" entitled Inside Content, while the website becomes a paid-for only service. The Industry Standard Europe has rather reversed the equation by folding its glossy mag, but sticking with its core US publication and website.
The unhappy circumstances of these forced marriages and measures are the alarming economic downturn in the US and the dot.com crash in Europe. The fact that the publishers which were part of the story they reported are retrenching is apposite and will no doubt be interpreted as a further piece of evidence that the web don't work. Whereas in fact their lessons, particularly the Industry Standard's lesson, is that media doesn't work full stop. In a downturn, the overheads of a magazine are far scarier than those of a website and the revenues are no more secure.
What is blighting the publishing industry at the moment is the fact that there is a recession just around the corner. It is the economy, stupid, as the maxim runs. But because the seeds of the recession were sown in Silicon Valley, the issue surrounding dot.com viability has become clouded to the point of opacity.
On the one hand, we are assured that the advertising model for the internet does not work - advertisers report low "click through" rates, banners and buttons are not the panacea, we are told. Yet open the FT last Wednesday and there was the plain fact that, with more than 2% of all ad spend going on the net, it has overtaken cinema as a medium.
Obviously there are far more websites than cinemas, and herein lies a problem. But to crack 2% within five years is an astonishing achievement. Until recently, US research company Jupiter was predicting that online advertising would increase by 2005 to $16.5bn, which represents 8% of national ad spend, with 73% of advertisers claiming they would increase their online advertising within the next 12 months.
Undoubtedly this figure is revised downwards on a daily basis. But let's look at the alternatives. On the same page of the FT which featured the internet overhauling cinema, there was a quaint report about the Telegraph shrinking by four cm. Telegraph CEO Dan Colson, the cheeky monkey, pays homage to earlier editors with shrinking papers - resurrecting the old joke that a smaller paper will make it easier for women to read owing to the shorter length of their arms.
But in fact, it is a measure which reflects the imminent 11% rise in the price of newsprint. Couple this with the fact that the most exposed newspapers have seen a 40% drop in parts of their advertising business in the first quarter of 2001 and it is tempting to suggest that newspapers don't "work" either.
But of course we know they do, because we have 200 years of experience which proves it. If the portable printed word had been invented two years ago, then given a blank piece of paper now, you wouldn't think in a million years that putting ink and pictures on it would make a viable business.
Powerful, Primedia and the Standard do not prove that the internet is a bad place to be at the moment. They prove that publishing is a bad place to be at the moment.
The business cycle has always been thus. Johann Gutenberg invented the amazing moveable type printing process in 1436, but later incurred such a huge cost in the process of developing the technology that he was eventually sued by his partner Mr Fust. Fust and his son-in-law made a fortune from printing. Gutenberg died in poverty. It is a lesson every dot.com disaster victim can take some heart from, though sadly allegories do not pay the wages.
