FEED is one of the few outlets of cultural criticism on the Web that doesn't look like it would be more at home languishing on a coffee table.
Sites like Salon and Slate have garnered mainstream respectability by proffering Monicagate ruminations and front-loading mastheads with well-known authors who made their names in print, while consigning interactivity to threaded-discussion ghettos. FEED foregrounds knotty ideas, innovative programming, and lively exchanges between FEED readers in The Loop.
On Thursday, FEED relaunches with a new format and new content. The new FEED will be divided into four sections: Media and Culture, Technology, The Loop, and Classic FEED. New columns will be added to the mix, including a TV column called "BroadBand" by Ana Marie Cox, one on high-tech gadgets by founding Suckster Carl Steadman, and a visual arts column called "The Materialist" by FEED editor Stefanie Syman. Editor Steven Johnson will write "The Interface," which will take the historical and theoretical notions at play in his book, Interface Culture, and use them to critique emerging technologies, such as videogames and Palm Pilots.
Wired News spoke with Syman and Johnson about the revamped FEED, the future of the medium, and the significance of the Web for the generation that dominates the online media industry.
Wired News: While other Web publications seem to be shrinking the scope of their cultural purview, FEED is broadening. Why is FEED expanding, while other Web sites are narrowing their focus?
Steven Johnson: I think what's happening is not so much that we're expanding our coverage, but trying to give it more structure. From the beginning, we've covered a wide gamut. It used to be organized around the format of the articles: Dialogues, Feedlines. That was a perfectly good way for the editors to organize the magazine, but not particularly good for people coming to it for the first time.
One of the things that this redesign does is divide the site up into modules that we can build on down the line. There's a segment of our readers that's really just interested in our technology coverage, so they can now come into our site through the technology home page. Down the line, we hope to add modules, so you may see us expand our coverage more. This is an infrastructure that will let us do that.
Stefanie Syman: Some of the arbitrariness of our coverage before came from having a really tiny editorial staff. Having done this for three years, we have a sense of what we want to be doing, more than, "OK, this great pitch came in." We're being a lot less reactive, and a lot more proactive.
WN: I started reading the Web every day in 1995, and at that point, it seemed to be making the transition from personal homepages and technical and scholarly information to a kind of underground newspaper of the emerging online culture. For a while, the Web had a point of cultural leverage where it could reflect on the culture at large from an outsider's perspective. Where is the Web now?
Syman: It's lost a little bit of its outsider status, because the connections to mainstream media are getting stronger every day. It's getting harder to claim that you've got this scrappy outsider's perspective when you're being bankrolled by the same advertisers as any Condé Nast publication. The Web has pointed to the acceleration of the process whereby fringe media become mainstream media. Mainstream media are so voracious in their need for new ideas, new stances, and new talent, that it's only a matter of two years before you have Matt Drudge on Fox TV, and people are treating Salon, FEED, and other publications as just another media outlet.
Johnson: One of the encouraging things that's happening to people publishing on the Web in the last two years is that it's gotten harder and harder to make generalizations about what Web journalism is. That's a sign of the medium maturing. When we started, Salon, FEED, HotWired, and Suck were really similar in some ways -- a little bit of attitude, or a little higher budget, differentiated them. Now, even those closely related properties have all gone off in different directions. What we're hearing now is editorial voices starting to mature and get a shape that is not defined by the medium itself, but by [the editors'] own interests and inclinations.
WN: What will the Web look like in five years?
Johnson: What we're seeing happening with the editorial styles of the different publications will start happening with the actual underlying technical basics of how the medium works. You'll be able to interact with the Web in a way that makes it feel exactly like a radio. Parts of it will feel exactly like television -- only you'll be able to choose the camera angles -- and parts of it will feel like good old-fashioned hypertext and interactive communities.
One of the things about the Net-depression study is that to talk about the Net as this unified force that people interact with in the same way is misleading. The difference between IRC, and reading a long article on FEED, is the difference between radio and the book. We're going to start becoming aware that the Web is a bunch of different media bundled into one.
Syman: A variety of experiences will come in a variety of formats. The vehicles will be much expanded in five years. We'll be doing a lot more on PDAs. We'll get close to an electronic book. There will be the little tiny apps running all the time on your PC. The fragmentation of the medium will be reflected in the devices that we use to access it.
Johnson: That's one of the things that we're going to be doing more of that you'll start to see in this new design: to have features on the site that experiment with new ways of doing journalism beyond just adding hypertext. Matt Debord wrote this piece about The X-Files that had six different standalone sections, and we created a list of 30 different categories or themes that were touched upon by these different objects. Readers could come in and say, "OK, I'm interested in these particular themes," and a script would custom-build the article for you. We now finally have the technical resources to do some interesting programming tricks. We're going to explore that as much as possible.
WN: When critics talk about the Web's influence on society, they often talk about the "Drudgification" of news coverage, and so on. Do you think the Web is having any subtler effects on the culture on large?
Syman: I do think the whole notion of everyone becoming a publisher has triggered a bit of a shift in how people thought about themselves and their relationship to media. Ultimately, I think that's going to be a smaller part of the Web, and the self-publishing will take the form of participating in conversations. But I think that was a healthy reconsideration of one's relationship to media.
It's something that happens in cycles. Media agglomerate, and seem like a monolithic force, and then DIY stuff crops up around the edges. You saw it with radio, you saw it with the birth of the zine, you saw it with desktop publishing. Then those people and publications get incorporated into the mainstream. It's good for culture to be periodically reminded that it's not one monolithic, unchanging beast.
WN: I got email from a reporter at Entrepreneur magazine who asked me, "What are the secrets of running a financially successful webzine, like Wired and FEED?" Is FEED financially successful?
Johnson: Does "financially successful" mean profitable? Then, no, it's not profitable yet. But we continue to be very optimistic about our goals of reaching profitability by the end of next year. I don't know if you can say what the secret of our success is yet, because our success hasn't been totally proven, but for FEED it's always been staying as small and lean an operation as possible -- putting out as good a site as you can, and not spending a huge amount on building up your traffic numbers artificially by buying a lot of expensive links.
We're finally hiring our first person who will be working full time on the business side. It tells you something about the way that we've managed to bootstrap this operation -- we've been online for three years, and never had a business person before. [Johnson acknowledges that he solicited "in the neighborhood" of US$100,000 in start-up capital from his relatives to launch FEED. -- S.S.] So we'll be expanding that side of the company. We've been concentrating on the editorial product as much as we could.
WN: You both turned 30 this year. What has the Web done for your generation?
Syman: A lot of the growth of the Web had to do with the intersection of cultural and economic forces. There was a recession, which meant that a lot of people coming out of college at the time that we did -- the early '90s -- hadn't gotten entrenched in an interesting or lucrative career path. We were also completely fearless in the face of new technology, unlike people just five years older than us, with, obviously, many exceptions. So we all saw opportunity where a lot of other people saw something confusing and scary. We also had attitude coming into this: A lot of us weren't willing to settle into the corporate job, with no creativity and only security. We were all hungry for something more interesting, but with the potential to be lucrative.
Johnson: It's amazing to me, the percentage of friends of mine who were not at all interested in technology when we were in college -- bored to tears by the latest displays of my new screen-savers, and all the other geeky things I was into -- who are now involved in the Web business. I think that has to do with the shape-shifting capacity of the medium: You can project your own image of the medium. I know a lot of people who would have been starving artists, or journalists who would have been trying to get a gig at the New Republic, who went out on the Web because that was the quickest way to get published. Because the medium is so open to being shaped into these different guises, it was seductive to people who weren't technically inclined.
