When a new comedian breaks in the UK they go through four inevitable
stages: the ‘have you heard of them?’ stage; the ‘you must see them’
stage; the ‘have you seen what they’re up to?’ stage and the ‘whatever
happened to them?’ stage.
That’s been the UK media’s reaction to the Internet to date. The Net has
reached stage three and, unless something happens, it runs the risk of
falling into stage four pretty swiftly. Now that something may have
happened. This week sees the launch of Shift Control, the UK’s first
serious on-line magazine, under the guiding hand of the Guardian Group’s
New Media Lab.
The magazine is a culture arts and lifestyle magazine only available on
the Net. According to Simon Waldman, the New Media Lab’s editor, the
magazine aims to avoid the pitfalls of much of the on-line publishing
world by actually being the kind of magazine you would buy from a
newstand and not just a bunch of boys playing with new media toys. It
has contributors such as the Observer’s William Leith, novelist Toby Lit
has provided an extract of his new novel and the readers themselves are
offered the chance to contribute as reviewers.
‘We’ve tried to get the character and spirit of the Guardian and its
editorial quality but make the most of what the Net can offer,’ Waldman
explains. ‘It’s been sponsored throughout by Whitbread so we have been
working with the security of financial support behind us for a year.’
Waldman broke into new media by accident. After working on various
fashion and media trade titles he freelanced for the Evening Standard,
the Guardian, the Daily Mail and produced programmes for London News
Radio. He also worked for style title Dazed and Confused. Commisioned by
the title to write a feature on the movers and shakers in all things
futuristic and bizarre, he had to get onto the Net in an afternoon at
the time when few people in the media had heard of it.
‘My computer, which I knew so well, was suddenly this unknown beast
sitting in my room with hundreds of thousands of things running through
it,’ he says. ‘It was a little unnerving at first but then it became
exciting and I would stay up to three or four in the morning just trying
to find out how everything worked and what was going on.’
He was soon writing about new media and found not only that few other
people were, but that even those actually working in the field
understood very little about it. ‘It began to irritate me when people
would explain something brilliant and new about the Internet that I had
discovered six months ago,’ he says. ‘I had reached the point where I
was reviewing websites and I could tell what was wrong with them while
the site creators couldn’t spot it themselves.’
One day, after a long lunch with the New Media Lab’s boss Robin Hunt and
the staff of the Idler magazine, Waldman gave up his freelance
journalist status and turned gamekeeper at the lab. He worked on the
Guardian’s Euro ‘96 site and then began preparing Shift Control.
He’s confident of its success as he believes the editorial team
possesses all the qualifications that mark out a great magazine. ‘I’m
working with two other editors, Robin Hunt and Pade Petrovic on this,’
he explains. ‘Robin comes up with the grand concepts, I rubbish them and
Pade makes sure the resulting idea actually happens.’
HIGHLIGHTS
1990 Reporter, Media Week
1991 Features editor, Media Week
1992 Deputy editor, Media Week
1996 Editor, New Media Lab
