Feed Me

By Wendee Shinsato

courtesy Yale Banner Stefanie Syman, PC '92, FEED co-founder

Suck. Slate. Salon. What do these words have in common? They represent magazines taking advantage of the newest medium in journalism: the World Wide Web.

Stefanie Syman, PC '92, has found success in the brave new world of online journalism with FEED, an online magazine she co-created three years ago.

'A fresh angle on culture and technology'

Over the past few years, the number of online magazines and publications has increased rapidly. Established print publications have developed online versions, and small independent web magazines seem to emerge overnight--and disappear just as quickly. Without the costs of printing and delivery, starting a magazine on the web is as easy as creating a web page and writing a few stories. The hard part of making a magazine work is establishing a readership, finding sponsors and advertisers, and differentiating your online magazine from the hundreds of other online publications.

Syman and FEED co-founder Steven Johnson have managed to do just that. According to Syman, FEED, named for data and video feed, targets "the people on the web who like reading and who might be readers of The New Yorker or Wired. Basically, anyone who's looking for a fresh angle on culture and technology." The site currently attracts about 50,000 readers a month, and IBM and Barnes & Nobles have advertised on the site.

FEED started off small, with only Syman and Johnson staffing it full time at first. Syman learned and operated HTML and PhotoShop initially, although she has since passed over those duties to their full-time tech person. Currently, the paid staff numbers only six people. This small-business approach has attracted investors. David H. Horowitz, former chairman of MTV Networks said in The New York Times, "They are not taking the big company approach.... They have small offices, morale is good. You know the investment is going to go a long way."

courtesy FEEDMAG.COM FEED's home page

Syman and Johnson have worked to create a magazine that has well-written and intriguing articles and which takes advantage of current Web technology. FEED currently has a daily column and five sections that are updated weekly. Each of the magazine's sections has a distinctive style. For example, "Filter" concentrates on media phenomena, "Documents" contains articles relating to the online revolution, and "Dialog" has a series of daily commentaries posted by experts in response to one another. This structure makes it easy for the reader to navigate and find the articles that he is interested in. FEED is also notable for its innovative use of the capabilities of its medium. "Metalinks" are incorporated within a story--when a reader clicks on one of these, the site opens a small dialog box alongside the article so that the reader won't have to leave the story to look up the link. There is also a column down the side of the article with relevant facts and links and an update on how many responses the article has obtained so far.

One of the main features which differentiates FEED from its competitors is its accessibility to its readers. Johnson said in a CNET interview, "We are also increasingly imagining our site as a community, rather than a magazine. FEED is not just a place to read articles--it's a place to hang out, share ideas, make new friends. That's why every new article on the FEED site contains direct links to reader commentary, as well as a reprint of the 'best from our readership' directly at the bottom of the article itself. That's precisely the kind of direct feedback and interaction you can't get out of a print magazine." Recently, FEED designed its own conference software to make it more user friendly, and, since then, Syman said that both the "number and diversity of the people [using the discussion areas] have increased. Certainly I no longer know all of the names."

'The timing was right'

Syman, who studied literature at Yale, had a lot of exposure to the media before she started FEED. She worked as a freelance writer and contributed to articles in many publications, including Vogue, Rolling Stone, and The Wall Street Journal. She met Johnson through a mutual friend, and after reading his proposal to start a new Web magazine that would examine all aspects of culture, she decided to join him. She said about their agreement, "I knew I would eventually move from journalism to digital media since it combined many of my interests--technology, visuals, and text. Plus, the timing was right."

While FEED is a full-time occupation for Syman, she still finds time to contribute to other projects. Since the start of FEED, Syman still occasionally writes for other publications. Last year she became a member of the board for the New York New Media Association (NYNMA), whose mission is 'to serve the entrepreneur, creative and business professional leading the new media industry in New York.' She also is working on some fiction.

Just 'another medium'?

Although FEED has not made profits yet, Syman and Johnson are not worried. The expected time for a print publication to become profitable is three to seven years, and there is no guarantee that this rule applies to online publications. FEED is currently in its third year of publication, and Syman says that, "I think FEED magazine in five years will absolutely be profitable." She cites the growth in web advertising as one of the factors which will help to produce this profitability. FEED is also currently working on a book as a branch of its online site.

Although online magazines have yet to obtain a large following, if FEED's initial success is any indication, online publications, with their increased reader interaction and use of hyperlinks, seem poised to become another established medium in the media industry. Syman says that she does not see a future conflict between print and online publications, but rather a complementation. She says that online media is just "another medium coexisting along with television, print and radio."

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