Rust and Renewal at Ironminds
By Julia Lipman

A few weeks ago, I got an e-mail from someone who wanted me to give him some advice on a website he was about to build. The site was to be an "online lifestyle magazine geared towards the 18- to 24-year-old market." The writer said, "None of us know anything about developing a site and what is involved with running" one, and then asked, "How can I market this site for potential revenue opportunities?"

In a not unrelated story, Novix Media recently announced that it was ending its association with the online magazine Ironminds — returning it to the personal control of Editor Andy Wang — and firing eight staffers.

And it wasn't exactly an amicable divorce. In a phone interview, longtime Chicago Sun-Times rock critic Jim DeRogatis, who's still owed $600 for articles he wrote for the magazine, calls Novix "corporate scum-sucking weasels" who "want your first-born child and a pint of blood for their measly pittance."

Ironminds (which, like Flak, is a Newcity affiliate; see disclosure at article's end) was in some ways a model for small, feisty content sites, an example of how smart writing alone could cause a site to command an audience and a paycheck. If it ran a few too many autobiographical twentysomething sex essays, it also proved itself as a purveyor of consistently sharp criticism and solid reporting. It had interviews with O. J. Simpson and Hunter S. Thompson. It had high-profile writers like DeRogatis and Celia Farber. With it dies a piece of all of us — well, all would-be content providers, anyway.

Except it hasn't, in fact, died. Ironminds is still there, still producing content, even though Novix no longer owns it and isn't paying anyone to work on it. After taking a two-week break, it ran 30 pieces of content last week. Managing editor and columnist Will Leitch takes exception to news coverage implying that the publication is defunct. "The fact is, it's been reported in three or four different places that Ironminds was killed, or dead, or never coming back,'" he says in a phone interview. "We are in fact still going, despite the fact we don't have the corporate anchor dragging us down anymore."

That corporation is the same one for which Leitch left his full-time job at the New York Times website. Now, he's unemployed. But Leitch isn't bitter or anything.

Well, maybe just a little. One thing that irks him is what he sees as Novix's utter lack of Web proficiency. He says Novix initially hired him and the other Ironminds staffers to work on a new site for twentysomethings, but he quickly decided that it would be a long time before the new site ever launched.

"We were there for about a month and realized, 'Let's not hold our breath on this twentysomething site' ... They were disorganized, their tech staff had no experience in actually putting together a Web page ... it was basically a bunch of old media people: movie people, TV people and music people who decided to play Web dress-up for a while." So the Ironminds staff started working on the magazine again in the summer of 2000, while waiting for Novix to start the new site, which is now going to be called WetPaint. ("Isn't wet paint something you want to get away from? You don't go to wet paint!" Leitch says.)

Leitch points to the Novix project IssuePaper, staffed by Ironminds editors, as an example of the company's incompetence. The political site, the first site actually launched by Novix, featured an amateurish design, complete with an incorrectly cropped image. (A recent design update didn't remove Novix's name, even though Novix no longer operates it.) What scant promotional efforts the company dedicated to the site, he says, were no more successful. "When IssuePaper launched — they finally launched something after all that time — we were just filing stories in a vacuum," he recalls. "[Novix's] tech people came up with this 'cool' design for it — it was hideous!"

Finally, Novix relinquished both Ironminds and IssuePaper to the control of Wang, who continues to work for Novix. The company fired most of the staffers and has yet to pay the freelancers. DeRogatis describes the letter he got: "Basically, 'We don't need you anymore.'" An Inside.com story characterized Novix's decision as one of corporate calculation, quoting Novix Chairman Michael Berman as saying, "We're building more of a mass-market site here. Ironminds was off-strategy for us."

But Leitch scoffs at that interpretation. "The question is: But wait, why did they just fire their whole editorial staff if they're still going to launch that site? The answer is: They're not going to launch that site."

So was the abrupt dismissal of Ironminds a shrewd corporate move or the last desperate act of a sure-bet candidate for the dot-com dead pool? Leitch makes a convincing case for the latter theory. "They're entirely out of money. We were all paid with personal checks on the last two weeks — it was just disastrous. We didn't get severance pay ... because they just didn't have any money." A former vice president, Pamela Henning, is suing Novix for failing to pay her severance package.

Novix referred our first inquiries to Wang himself. Wang, in a phone interview, disputes the allegations that Novix is out of money, saying that they've already filed invoices for the freelancers' paychecks and assured them that the money is on the way. Berman, in a later phone interview, says, "I'm not comfortable talking about" the severance package dispute.

Former freelancer Jami Attenberg, however, says in an e-mail that she's not convinced she'll be paid. "Not one person at Novix has ever gotten in touch with me, with the exception of the editors. Most recently, an editor still involved with Ironminds told me I could pretty much kiss that paycheck goodbye."

Wang defends Novix's solvency, and adds that the company is on track to launch WetPaint. "They're buying a bunch of websites that are going to become WetPaint," he says. (Berman says the new site will be ready to go by the end of the year.)

Wang's use of "they" to descibe Novix, his own company, underscores his awkward position. He commands the complete loyalty of people who went to work for Ironminds and then were terminated, even when Berman told Inside.com, "As far as we're concerned, we acquired Andy and Ironminds was a nice bonus." Both Leitch and DeRogatis defend him from what they see as Inside's unfair coverage that inaccurately makes Wang look complicit in the firing of his friends. "He's a guy with integrity and good taste," says DeRogatis, who will continue to write for Ironminds for free. "Andy signed up with these corporate bastards ... and then Novix pulled the plug." Leitch also challenges Inside.com's "spin," and adds,"[Wang] didn't know Novix was as bad of a corporation as it was."

But when asked to take a position on DeRogatis' "corporate scum-sucking weasels" characterization, Wang says, "I don't really agree or disagree."

Leitch says it's fine with him and the other Ironminds staffers that Wang continues to work for Novix, because Wang's salary goes to fund Ironminds. "We keep telling Andy, 'Keep takin' the checks, man.'" And that's working for them, at least for now. But the single-staffer's-salary-funded model isn't a viable one for too many sites, even, Leitch says, for Ironminds in the long term.

For a brief moment this summer, if you were a small content site, you wanted to be Ironminds. Maybe you wanted to be Ironminds with fewer first-person essays, or Ironminds with fiction and poetry, or Ironminds with a far-out Flash splash page. But Ironminds was a kind of ideal. They had a full-time staff. They paid writers. And their target audience was anyone who wanted to read terrific writing.

But now, for big or small content sites, there aren't really any more ideals. Salon's problems have been well-publicized. Feed merged with Suck. Slate is well provided for by Microsoft, and their efforts at getting readers to pay for content were a colossal flop. As for the rest, well, working for free is not ideal.

So were Novix's problems what Leitch describes as a lack of organization, a clueless tech staff and endless PowerPoint presentations that substituted for real decision making? Or was the real pitfall trying to create profit from pure content? DeRogatis is less than optimistic about the future of content sites: "Is it possible to make money with a good, smart read? The answer may be no."

Ironminds is still, judging from this week, Ironminds. Rick Chandler's column manages to make the conflation of wrestling and "Rock the Vote" uproariously funny. Celia Farber writes about women and commitment with real feeling instead of the "Sex and the City" insouciance or Danielle Crittenden feminist-bashing that lesser writers tend to fall into.

But you have to wonder if Wang's continuing to work for Novix is affecting the content at all. Leitch's column, a self-deprecating rumination on the state of being unemployed, doesn't mention the corporation that had more than a little to do with it. The letter from the editors, explaining that Ironminds is back, only makes an oblique reference to Novix. A less-than-careful reader (okay, me) might not figure out at first that Novix doesn't actually have anything to do with Ironminds anymore, or even that something has radically changed about the site in the last month.

Jami Attenberg feels that involvement with Novix changed the character of the site from the beginning, and not for the better. "Ironminds went from a small, quality site that was all about the writing, to a medium-sized, quality site that was all about the publicity."

Good quality is good quality, no matter how it's packaged. But other would-be content providers may take Ironminds' example as a stern warning to stay away from anything that doesn't fit Berman's description of a mass-market site.

How will Ironminds take its own example? It's hard to say. Leitch sums up the experience. "We went through the corporate machine and came out a little tattered, but still going on, I guess."

And where exactly are they going?

"We're trying to find a buyer."

E-mail Julia Lipman at julia@flakmag.com.

— graphic by Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)

James Norton contributed to this article.

Disclosure: Flak Magazine and Ironminds are both affiliated with Newcity, a network of alternative newspapers and content sites. This affiliation includes the gratis trading of banner ads. Flak does not have any direct editorial or financial stake in Ironminds.