Getting snowed by magazine editors

First, we find lines like “Somehow the Web encourages you to be a little more attitudinal,” “[Online,] ‘there’s almost a necessity ... to make your central argument in the first sentence or so, and do it as provocatively as possible,’ ” and “It’s definitely a ranter’s medium.”

Quite fair – in comparison to newspapers. We like the less-uptight approach. Give us this over strict journalistic factuality anyday.

Next, from the magazine throne of the ancien régime, we read the whopper “Florio said Condé Nast’s early strategy was simply to recycle the editorial content of its magazines online. But now its new fashion site, Style.com, ‘seems to be working.’ And Lucky, a new shopping magazine, also will have an E-commerce site, to be called Lucky.com.”

Oh, please. Condé Nast specifically refused to “repurpose” its magazine “content.” We wrote about this before. An early Condé Nast online effort was Swoon.com, which attempted to unite a bit of “repurposed content” with Web-specific features, like databases and searching. Where’s the truth here, let alone the news? (Recent CondéNet/Blogger mention.)

And as for Lucky.com: Weren’t they having ever so many problems attracting employees not exactly salivating at the prospect of working for a glorified catalogue?

Posted on 2000-10-28