Word: stim
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Stim was a bold bid by Prodigy, the dowdy online service started by IBM and Sears, to break into the hot, youth-oriented Web-content business. Some $2 million was budgeted for the first year, paying the salaries of a dozen staff members. But when the first million was gone, with readership scant and no real revenue in sight, Prodigy decided to cut its losses. The company has given Halpin Stim's name and the computer that housed it. A neighboring firm has donated some office space. But with nothing to pay its contributors, Halpin & Co. must resurrect the 'zine...
...took the subway downtown recently to the great lofts of New York City's Silicon Alley to make a condolence call. The infant Stim, a Website that was born here in May amid a tide of ain't-the-Net-great hype, had just succumbed, carried off by a corrective wave of antihype. I figured I'd pay my respects to the survivors...
...found Mikki Halpin, Stim's erstwhile editor, sitting among a double row of mauve, mostly vacant cubicles. Stim (named after William Gibson's imaginary "digital drug") was typical of the flood of 'zines that launched last year. It was silly and fun and new, and it took the kinds of risks you don't take if you've already found a market. In the weeks preceding the Democratic National Convention, for instance, Stim's political commentator was forbidden to read or listen to press accounts of the presidential race; he had to write his stuff cold. Then when the Dick...
...Stim's tale is typical, if you're to believe the Wall Street Journal, which, coincidentally, ran a front-page story the day Stim hit the skids pointing out that too many Web publishers were competing for too few ad dollars. Consequently, lots of them began quitting. The cowards...
...year it was born. Indeed, it did die for one day, before its patron reconsidered. The magazine at the time had a paltry circulation of 2,700--perhaps, as James Thurber once pointed out, because it started out so sophomoric and error prone. I'm not saying Stim could ever have grown into the New Yorker. Or maybe I am. The point is, we will probably never know...