Another cheeky webzine bites the dust - that's news?
In the case of the UK's Shift Control, which announced its retirement last Thursday after 50 weekly issues, news of the end didn't even come as much of a surprise to British Web-watchers, who saw in Shifty - the spunky, irreverent online annex of the Guardian newspaper - an ambitious attempt to forge a publication truly native to the Web that never found its niche.
In the demise of Shift Control, however, say many of those associated with the project, there are lessons to be learned about the state of online publishing in Britain and changing priorities at the Guardian - and about how not to promote a webzine.
Shift Control launched in October 1996, buoyed by a £200,000 year's sponsorship from Whitbread. There was poetic justice in choosing a distiller of bitters and stouts as the zine's sponsor: The muse of Shift Control first visited Guardian product developers Robin Hunt and Craig Wilkie during a night of drinking at a new-media confab in New York City.
Hunt and Wilkie's original inspiration was to create a Web-savvy zine to be called Control-Shift. By the time it hit the bitstreams, the moniker had been inverted, and the scope of Shift Control's cultural purview had become sufficiently wide to include, Hunt told Netnews in September, "anything to do with the 20th century."
According to Bill Thompson, the former head of the Guardian's New Media Laboratories, Hunt's aim was "to show the Guardian management that an online magazine could be really successful and make a splash. He wanted to teach them a lesson." (Hunt, who resigned his post at the New Media Lab last summer, did not return calls for this article.)
Hunt and Wilkie's vision proved a colorful and provocative one, if not successful in marshaling a large audience. In its year online, Shift Control boasted droll and occasionally revelatory essays on such subjects as James Bond, Oasis, Elvis, acid jazz, Lost Highway, and a tour of London's fetish clubs. The site also floated hypertext fiction and cartoons. The tone was smart, trendy, and insiderish, but rarely sneering, in keeping with the zine's tag line: "Not bitter, but critical."
Shift Control took interactivity seriously. A section called "Remote Control" enabled readers to submit their own reviews for publication. Readers could then read these reviews by selecting subjects from a series of pulldown menus that would result in such filtering options as "Let me read reviews of dark '50s written word" or "Let me read reviews of heroic 1996 multimedia."
The site was not template-based, so each weekly issue had its own distinctive look, often employing innovative Web design, such as a pictorial spread called "Naked NYC" that allowed the viewer to undress the subjects of the photos with a flourish of the mouse.
The constant design revamps, says former editor Rada Petrovic, took their toll on the small staff. "It was quite demanding," Petrovic recalls. "All the pages were hand-built, so you were not only pushing copy through."
Though the magazine earned some early accolades, there were also problems soon after launch. At first, Shift Control required that readers register with an email address, which drew flames on Usenet, and the site shoved so many "cookies" down the throats of readers' browsers that, says Thompson, "If you had cookie-protection on, it was impossible to navigate the site." And the marketing information that made it into the database, Thompson admits, was "never properly used."
Danny O'Brien, editor of the often scathing and clued-in British online newsletter NTKnow, charges that Shift Control "was launched with a target advertiser in mind rather than a target audience."
A few weeks after launch, when shockingly low reader statistics were leaked to the Net (Thompson confirms that certain issues of the zine only had 100 to 200 readers), O'Brien says his fellow Net pundits "found it a bit embarrassing to be writing so much about Shift Control, when the access stats showed us to be the only ones who were reading it."
Shifty's inability to strike home with its target market was compounded, O'Brien observes, by a lack of publicity both online and off, and just as significantly, by the site staff's lack of immersion in the tightly woven online communities that could have spread the word about it. O'Brien says the cultural landscape of wired London is changing in that regard.
"Shift Control suffered from the sense that it was launched before there was a grapevine. It is the last of that first generation ... [and] in the last six to nine months, there's been a community developing" among content developers, online journalists, and Web readers, O'Brien says.
Several of the zine's original staffers have left to pursue other projects, and the ones remaining will be absorbed into the next phase of the New Media Lab's mission: putting all of the Guardian's content online, and launching a network of more narrowly targeted Web projects, under the aegis of former Guardian New York correspondent Ian Katz. The first of this new breed is the Guardian's soccer site.
Katz, a roundly respected reporter in print, is excited about the number of "senior journalists making the transition" to online reportage and publication. Calling the evolving role of news gathering on the Net "the most exciting challenge in media," Katz promises that some of the successful features of Shift Control - such as the emphasis on interacting with its readers - will be incorporated into the emerging Guardian network in the next six months.
Petrovic, now an editor at Guardian online, recalls the days of "paying people to write things just because you're interested in them" with a pang of nostalgia.
"Shift Control was a complete luxury product that never would have happened without the sponsorship money," she says. "We wanted to be upbeat, not ultra-cool, derisory, and snotty ... We built up a friendship with our readers, and felt we were in touch with them."
