As the Editor of NetGuide, I spent a fair amount of time deriding Yahoo! Internet Life. Making fun of its name was easy; making fun of its content was much much harder.
And it was no fun at all to look across the battlements and realize that I was competing with Barry Golson, who once edited TV Guide and who conducted some of the best known Playboy Interviews of the 70s and 80s. What made it worse was the realization that his management knew what it meant to create a great consumer title, and while mine didn’t have a clue.
YIL outlasted NetGuide by a ridiculous length of time. Ziff Davis folded it today: bad ad environment. Its 1 million-plus circulation probably just made it too expensive for advertisers, and Ziff is in no position these days to carry titles that aren’t making it. But the closing sucks greatly nonetheless — a bunch more of my friends are now out of work.
Barry, Angela, Ron, Scott: have a round on me. Lord knows you’ve earned it.
