Geek tragedy.

• Author: Malanowski, Jamie
• Position: Starving to Death On $200 Million: The Short, Absurd Life of The Industry Standard - Book Review

STARVING TO DEATH ON $200 MILLION The Short, Absurd Life of The Industry Standard by James Ledbetter Public Affairs, $26.00

IT'S IN THE NATURE OF WRITERS to love their stories, all their stories, even the lop-eared, runt-of-the-litter stories that for mercy's sake should be stuffed into a sack and heaved into a swift-moving stream. It's also in the nature of writers, particularly youngish writers at newish, underdoggy, out-of-the-mainstream publications, to love those publications deeply, and romantically. This is because the work is exciting and involving, and because bosses at newish, underdoggy, out-of-the-mainstream publications classically feed their underlings a motivational line that makes them feel like Che Guevara in the mountains, even when they happen to be writing about latte or cell-phone corporations. In the end, the work becomes not merely the writer's community and family, but also his or her raison d'etre. These idiotically romantic feelings become especially intense if the publication craps out before descending into disappointing middle age. In death, a magazine or a newspaper, like a lover, can forever remain perfect in its possibilities. In Starving to Death on $200 Million: The Short, Absurd Life of The Industry Standard, a very fine journalist, James Ledbetter, succumbs to both of these tendencies like the swoony boy lead in a Kirsten Dunst movie. The problem is that he simply has less of a story than he thinks he does.

You remember the Internet--not the helpful tool most of us use every day for a host of tasks, but Internet the Idea, the belief system which held that the Internet was a transformational force that was going to completely remake the society in ways so far-reaching that most humans could not yet begin to comprehend them. This belief was so powerful that people invested fortunes in the hope and expectation that soon, maybe even within a couple of quarters, vast numbers of people would be downloading their dog food and consulting anonymous on-line physicians about their medical problems, and other such miraculous transmogrifications. The Industry Standard was a weekly magazine that for about two years chronicled this industry. It was a good publication, but it was one of a bunch that did what it did; its claims of unique excellence, fashioned over so brief an existence, aren't immediately apparent to an outside observer. However, during the height of Internet fever, its weekly status gave it a...