Publications born on the Web.
The Internet makes it possible for anyone with access to a Web server to start telling stories... true or false, fact or fiction, with words or with pictures. No press card or journalism degree is required, but that doesn't mean there aren't well-trained professionals behind some of these sites, not just self-proclaimed pundits with axes to grind. Whether publishing online can pay the rent at the same time is another question, but new ideas keep showing up. Feel free to suggest additions to this list.
- APB Online subtitles itself "The Source for Police and Crime News."
- APB's features include FBI files opened under the Freedom of Information Act. There's even a hint of celebrity tabloid in the section APB calls "The G-Files."
- Argon Zark! was probably the first full-length comic book made for the Web.
- That was back in 1995 and you had to type "www.netaxs.com/~cparker/aztitle.html" to get there. Now it has been promoted to "www.zark.com"
- Dr. Fun probably was the Internet's first daily cartoon, launched in 1993.
- It took one of the first Web servers to do it, the University of North Carolina site formerly called Sunsite (now Metalab).
- "A fish, a barrel and a smoking gun" was the original motto of suck.com,
- a fine collection of online attitude. It began as an independent zine but became part of Wired, where its creators already worked. You can check the archives to see whether it was more outrageous in the early days, before it started running advertising like its parent company.
- Salon moved from a literary magazine model to rake a little muck during the scandals of 1998.
- The emphasis is still on book reviews, columns, comics, travel and entertainment. See MediaCircus column archives, and its own best-of collection.
- Feed is another online publication modelled after classic magazines.
- IMedia and technology are major interests. It also has the addition of discussion areas and searchable archives online.
- Slate played catch-up with Salon and Feed, but had very deep pockets.
- It is Microsoft's attempt at Web magazine publishing, and started as a free site, then became a pay site, and now is free again, mostly. (Follow the link for the editor's candid column on the problems of making money online.)
- C|NET
- Is many things, probably first known for industry news and reviews. Now it is a cyber-household-word, even grabbing the address news.com
- Computer Mediated Communication Magazine
- Started by John December (www.december.com), whose fame spread around the Net when he created a list of communication-related resources while a grad student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
- The Electronic Frontier Foundation
- The EFF Publications Archive provides background information on the organnization's activities on behalf of online free speech.
- Howard Rheingold
- Author of important books on virtual reality, virtual communities, and the early days of computer communication now offers much of his work online, as well as a discussion group.
- WORD
- A graphically intense web magazine that came, went, and returned. (Warning: Lots of javastuff that may annoy people with old computers and slow network connections.)
- CRAYON at crayon.net
- The acronym stands for Create Your Own Newspaper... a project that started at as a student project at Bucknell University (with a much longer address). Note that it is not crayon.com, which linked to a famous record store chain the last time I tried it by mistake.
- Portals: A whole new category of "publication"
- Many of the sites above borrow from magazine or newspaper models, but the Web's original jumble of sites quickly made search engines like Altavista and index sites like Yahoo some of the most popular destinations. They have evolved into multi-purpose "portals" to attract even more visitors -- and revenue from advertising. Some of those advertisers are online businesses like Netscape, Microsoft, Excite and Snap.com whose own "portal" elements include news publishing.
Internet service providers like Mindspring, Bell South and Southern New England Telephone also feature portal-style home pages, usually pre-set as a new subscriber's start-up page. Their style is similar to America Online, which began providing both access and exclusive content to direct dial-in subscribers. It adapted to the Web and became the largest point of entry for the Internet.
Online publications we've discussed share this "gateway" model to varying degrees, although many see their own content as the attraction, not a wealth of potentially confusing links to information from other sources. It will be interesting to watch these sites as they try to strike a balance between offering rich information that encourages the visitor to stay, or offering a wealth of links that encourage visitors to keep coming back.
Index | Newspapers | Magazines | Born on the Web | ManyMedia | Commentary/Discussion
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School of Journalism and Mass Communication
The University of North Carolina at Chapel HillLast revision: 01/Mar/99