The Memoir

(This is chapter 16 of my ongoing memoir of the Internet industry.)

Pathfinder Personal Edition, launched in November 1996, turned out to be the biggest and most expensive debacle in early web history. The dimensions of the failure were immediately obvious to Time Warner management, who cut off all plans to promote or continue the service in early 1997. Now all that was left was to fire everyone responsible for the mess.

It was fascinating for me to watch the machinations and weak attempts at defense that now took place. I observed a desperate rear-guard action by a few Pathfinder executives to blame the whole fiasco on Marie Blue, director of publicity and marketing. It's true that her Personal Edition ads were insipid (they featured a dog who would "fetch your news") and Marie Blue was quickly fired. But Time Warner top management knew Pathfinder's problems went deeper than bad marketing. Other heads would have to roll.

As a middle-manager in the tech team, I was too low on the totem pole to be blamed for anything. The big brass weren't going to fire me; they didn't even know my name. We in the soldiering ranks of the tech team basement knew our jobs were safe, because the Internet was still burning-up hot and Time Warner was clearly committed to succeeding on the web. It was unclear, though, whether or not Time Inc. New Media or Pathfinder.com would continue to exist in their current form. And it was totally clear that most of our bosses were going to get fired.

(This is chapter 14 of my ongoing memoir of the Internet industry.)

We had our book deal. Now all Christian Crumlish and I had to do was assemble a kick-ass anthology of great fiction and poetry from the web. Then we'd be all set. We just needed to find forty amazing pieces of fiction and poetry on the Internet.

In other words, we were in big trouble. We'd done such a convincing job of hyping up the creative potential of the online literary scene to our publisher Marjan Bace, to our friends and fellow writers, to each other -- but we'd been talking about potential, and now we were supposed to come up with a groundbreaking literary anthology representing a cornucopia of online talent, a new scene bursting with originality and genius. Genius? The literary web was two years old.

Who exactly were the hot online writers of 1996? I emailed Carl Steadman of Suck.com, and Joseph Squier, whose 1994 "Life With Father" had been the first well-known web poem. I was very glad when both of them agreed to be in the book. Jason Snell and Greg Knauss from Intertext signed on for the ride. I asked Mia Lipner from Word for permission to use her story about blind (literally) dating, and asked Clay Shirky if he would represent Urban Desires with his clever "Notes on Sinking".

(This is chapter 13 of my ongoing memoir of the Internet industry.)

By early 1996, Pathfinder's day-to-day advertising operations had become a gigantic impossible mess. This was because we were, unfortunately, very good at ad sales.

It was the only thing we were good at. The Pathfinder.com site was a public laughing stock for its stale content and unhip design. Our top management was weak ever since our leader Walter Isaacson ran for the hills (leaving Paul Sagan to keep the train chugging along), and our clunky site was also famous for slow delivery and sudden crashes. People even made fun of our URLs, which contained an early attempt at cookie-like persistence via session IDs, making them look like this:

http://www.pathfinder.com/@@YgCb20QASf3HvD/Welcome.html

The ad team, however, was part of Time Inc.'s larger and world-renowned advertising juggernaut, and they put together a young but powerful sales team for Pathfinder, led by Linda McCutcheon and Charlie Thomas, who immediately began executing on the plan to lure Time Inc.'s blue-chip clients like AT&T, Ford and Merrill Lynch to the web.

Advertising was really the only area where Pathfinder was living up to its name and truly blazing new trails in the Internet economy. Along with our California peer HotWired, we were ahead of the pack in pushing six-figure deals. These deals were no easy sell for either HotWired or us. HotWired based their sales pitches on hype and community, because that's what they were good at.

(This is chapter eleven of my ongoing memoir of the Internet industry.)

The big idea behind Pathfinder.com was to turn Time Warner's top magazine brands -- Time, People, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, Life, Money, Entertainment Weekly, the always incongruous Vibe -- into the best and most professional website in the world. If all went according to plan, Pathfinder would dominate the Internet the same way Time Warner CEO Jerry Levin's earlier venture Home Box Office had come to dominate cable TV.

The Pathfinder plan was an aggressive one, with a lot of money and corporate muscle behind it, and many people expected it to succeed. That didn't mean many people wanted it to succeed -- in fact, several of my web developer friends hated the idea of Pathfinder so much they reacted with horror when I joined the team in June 1995. I took a lot of heat on my tech/art mailing listantiweb and on rec.music.dylan after I proudly announced the new job change.