An Editor Gets Second Chance on the Web
RANDY KENNEDY
07/21/98
When it was born three years ago, the literary Web magazine Word was widely praised as an example of how good Internet content could be, a kind of hip, lo-fi New Yorker magazine for a new generation.
It attracted well-known authors like Mary Gaitskill, who wrote about her first sunburn, and David Foster Wallace, who excerpted a chapter of his novel "Infinite Jest." The magazine won awards, and its hard-working, low-profile editor, Marisa Bowe, even ended up with her picture in Esquire, one of its "women we love."
The only problem? Like other worthy endeavors in the still unmapped world of Internet commerce, Word made no money. Its corporate parent, Icon CMT, which once dreamed of fast profits in Web magazines, closed it last March without so much as a courtesy call. ("They walked in at 5 and said, 'Be out of here by 7,'" Ms. Bowe recalled.)
But now, after months of dire "content is dead" predictions from Web watchers, Word is being reborn.
Its unlikely savior is a Houston company that was founded as an oil business in the 1950's by a young George Bush but that now focuses on processing protein extracted from fish. This summer the company suddenly announced that it would become a major player on the World Wide Web, though it had no experience in the Internet business.
The company, Zapata, controlled by the Glazer family of Rochester, then changed the name of its Internet division to the more cybercool Zap. Like a lonely heart looking for a date, it began advertising in newspapers across the country to buy Web sites.
It is a turn of events that Ms. Bowe says can sound like a parody of the Internet business, something Word itself might have published. The staff members now call a Louisiana fish meal company, one of Zapata's holdings, when they have questions about their health plan. ("They're really sweet," Ms. Bowe says of her new personnel department.)
And the editors count among their new corporate colleagues the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, a team also owned by the Glazers. "It's all kind of nerve-racking," Ms. Bowe said one morning last week before meeting with her staff, "but that's the Internet business itself."
She said that when she first heard about Zapata she "pictured some egomaniac Texan with a big hat going, 'Hey, I want to get into the content business.'" But whatever worries remain, her new backers have assured her not to worry about one thing: Word can continue to pursue its defiantly nontraditional vision without interference.
It will still have no celebrity profiles and no reviews. It will continue to publish funny, raw, sometimes disturbing and mostly first-person articles about subjects ranging from sex to getting stabbed. In other words, it will continue to have a slim chance of raking in a lot of money.
Avram Glazer, Zapata's chief executive, seems not to mind. "We didn't buy them because we wanted People magazine," he said, adding that, besides, he finds Ms. Bowe "witty and easy to work with."
The magazine is a creation that Ms. Bowe, 39, has been cultivating, almost unwittingly, for a long time. Growing up in Minneapolis, where her father worked for the Control Data Corporation, she would roam around a precursor to the Web developed by the Defense Department.
In high school, she used the early technology mostly to flirt on line with male programmers. "So my first primal experiences with computers were all sexy, fun, social," she said.
Then came the second part of her education, in which she developed what she calls a populist's passion for the unadorned and unrehearsed in American culture.
There was the job as a trainee lumberjack, then as a cocktail waitress and a taxi driver, all in Minneapolis ("my mini-Jack-Londonette trip").
She got involved in the city's punk scene, which meant mostly that she "chased the boys in the bands and got dressed up in cool clothes."
Moving to New York 13 years ago, she finally graduated from college, Columbia University, with a degree in modern European history. She became involved in a "Marxist guerrilla video collective" that produced angry public access television programs and then she managed an on-line interactive bulletin board.
All of that left her with a distinct yearning to create a Web publication for "people turned off by the incessant glare of publicity and promotion and gloss and perfect people using perfect things."
But one that was more funny than preachy. (A good sense of the tone can be gained by reading an editor's letter that Ms. Bowe posted at Word's Web site -- www.word.com -- which will become active again in September. Betraying a broad smirk, she asks loyal readers to remember that the magazine is "erudite, aggressively avant-garde, trenchant and metastasizing ergonomically," which is not always easy because it also tends to be hermeneutical and "ur-echt-gestalt-schadenfreude-y," which loosely translated means taking pleasure in pointing out American society's defects).
Ms. Bowe said that the magazine world is filled with niche publications aimed at small groups of readers, like, for example, baking enthusiasts. "Word is for people with a certain kind of a sensibility," she said. "There are probably more of them out there than bakers."
She added, smiling nervously, "But maybe not."
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