From Publishers Weekly
The Industry Standard began publishing in April 1998 and grew explosively. Judged on its second-year revenue, ad sales and influence, it was one of the most successful magazine launches ever. It took in $300 million in its first 20 months, but didn't survive the next 20 months. Ledbetter, the magazine's European bureau chief, explains how it all happened in a terrific inside account of the Internet boom. The Standard was positioned exactly at the intersection of technology, media business and finance. It was the authoritative source for industry reporting; its stories could drive the Internet stock market; and it was a start-up new-media company with all the innovation and chaos the term implies. Ledbetter is the perfect person to tell the story: an experienced business media reporter who learned about technology and finance on the job; he had a position high enough to see the corporate machinations firsthand, yet had no day-to-day involvement, since he was thousands of miles away from San Francisco headquarters, busy trying to get good stories on a deadline. This mix of corporate history and memoir captures the story's economic and human sides, although at times it's hard for readers to keep track of the characters and events. Despite having a limited initial audience-how many people really want to read about a magazine that croaked not long after its second birthday?-it serves as a fantastic testament to a bygone era.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From
In the year 2000, the Industry Standard—the would-be bible of the New Economy—appeared to be one of the most successful magazines in history, with more than seven thousand ad pages and projected revenues of two hundred million dollars. The next year, it went out of business. This self-lacerating postmortem by the magazine's former European editor shows that the Standard was doomed by early success. Unbridled optimism led to wild spending, dubious side projects, and an unwillingness to make hard decisions. The Standard, then, was just like the dot-coms it wrote about, and so the story of the magazine's failure becomes a parable about the era of the bubble. Ledbetter's account of the backroom negotiations that attended the Standard's demise drags in places, but he is adept at capturing both the late-nineties atmosphere of irrational exuberance and the bitter, hung-over feeling that followed.
Copyright © 2005
The New Yorker
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