We are looking at new media formats that have significant improvements over conventional television or print in terms of selectivity, targeting, speed of access to time-sensitive information, compact storage and retrieval, and particularly interactivity (Kummerfeld, 1995)
In a very general sense, the publishing industry has been slowly shifting away from permanence and towards ephemerality. Books, the first "product" of the publishing industry, were traditionally viewed as essentially permanent: we can trace their evolution to the manuscripts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, hand-scribed on vellum and parchment. In later centuries, books were printed on high rag-content paper and bound in leather. It was only in more recent decades, with the increased use of wood-pulp paper and with the popularization of paperback books, that consumers (and publishers) began to treat the book as a more disposable product.
The emergence of newspapers and magazines as publication forms continued this shift away from permanence. Printed on lower-quality paper, they addressed "the [public's] desire for quick information and for regular entertainment" (Steinberg, 1977:240). Once read, they were quickly discarded.
The rapid growth of the Internet has provided the most recent instance of this evolution within the publishing industry, with Internet magazines continuing the shift towards impermanence. While print-based magazines and newspapers remain fixed in print once published, online magazines are infinitely mutable. The publication's content, its very structure, can be modified in the brief interval between one reader's visit and the next. They can change even while their pages are being turned. Such changes leave no record: all earlier versions of the publication vanish in a blink of the reader's eye.
In this paper I have attempted to focus on just one subset of online magazines, and have appropriated the term "webzine" to refer to that subset. I have loosely defined "webzines" to be the online equivalent of a segment of print magazines known as consumer magazines, which Leonard Mogel defines as "publications of general or specialized interest either sold or given free to the public" (Mogel, 1988:4). When referring to the Hip Webzine, I have capitalized and italicized the term, as shown.
Dealing in impermanence, publishing in a medium that has been called "a disorganized collection of often dubious information" (Reid, 1995), webzine publishers are exploring an arena for which few relevant business models exist. Using a technology still in its infancy, one that does not yet universally (or reliably) permit the electronic exchange of funds, webzines have, deliberately or through adaptation, become the Internet equivalent of controlled circulation magazines. Only time will tell whether this model will enable them to survive within their rapidly evolving medium.
The report is divided into two parts. Part 1 takes a business perspective and attempts to situate the category of "webzine" publications within the publishing industry as a whole by examining relevant characteristics of print and online media. Part 2 is a case study of the Hip Webzine, published by Hip Communications Inc. In that section I take a detailed look into the structure and production of that webzine, and situate it within the overall corporate framework of Hip Communications. At the conclusion of Part 2, I describe some research that was performed using the Hip Webzine as a case study. This research investigates the readership patterns exhibited as people interact with an online magazine.