About Red Herring

Red Herring

Red Herring was an American technology business magazine founded in 1993, at the dawn of the commercial internet age, which flourished during the dot-com boom, collapsed with it, and was revived in a second life during the 2000s. Its name came from banking slang: a "red herring" is the preliminary prospectus issued ahead of a stock offering, warning investors that the document is not final. The name announced the magazine's mission — a first look at the young companies and the venture capital money behind them, before the rest of the business press arrived. At its height around 2000 the magazine's parent company employed some 350 people, took in revenues approaching 100 million dollars, published two thick issues a month and ran conferences on several continents. The print magazine ceased publication for the first time in 2003, returned in late 2004, and ended print publication for good in 2007. The brand continued digitally and through its Red Herring Top 100 awards and conferences.

The magazine is listed as a San Francisco publication, and San Francisco was indeed its best-known base — its offices in the city's Hamm's Building in the mid-1990s and later addresses such as 185 Berry Street are part of its record. Its very first home, however, was further south: the magazine was launched in 1993 from Woodside, California, and began in Belmont, midway between San Francisco and Silicon Valley, a geography that mirrored its position between the money of the city and the engineers of the Valley.

Founding: Perkins, Alden and Herlick

Red Herring was launched in May 1993 by Anthony B. Perkins, Christopher J. Alden and Zachary A. Herlick, initially out of the home of Alden's parents in Woodside. The first product of their company, Flipside Communications, later renamed Red Herring Communications, the magazine was aimed first at the venture capital community — the investors, lawyers, accountants and bankers who serviced Silicon Valley start-ups — and only then widened its scope to the technology sector generally. Perkins, a former banker, had previously founded Upside magazine with Rich Karlgaard, who later became publisher of Forbes. Alden and Herlick, friends since junior high school, had run a computer consulting company and taught computer science before joining him. Ron Conway, of Angel Investors, was an early adviser and board member. The formula found its audience quickly in a Valley hungry for a publication that treated start-up finance as front-page news.

"The Business of Technology"

Under editor Jason Pontin, who led the magazine in its boom years, Red Herring adopted the tagline "The Business of Technology." Pontin later wrote that although the magazine was especially interested in venture capital, start-ups and public markets, it took all of technology as its subject, including its impact on the arts, sciences and society. Its tone was jokey and informal — insiders inviting readers to what Pontin called the best party on earth. The magazine avoided covering the internet during the first wave of hype in the mid-1990s and was founded, former staff recalled, on a principle of scepticism about the technology industry; a 1997 editorial declared "There Is No New Economy." In 1999 the founding editors published The Internet Bubble, a book that foretold the crash and coined the term "dot-bomb." Even so, Red Herring was an unapologetic evangelist for technology entrepreneurialism, and critics of individual companies rather than of the system that produced them. In 1999 it was still expanding its roster, adding seven new columnists including figures from venture capital, design and management to write on the expanding business and technology universe.

Events, the Website and the Top 100

From early on, Red Herring was more than a magazine. In May 1995 it launched an events business and its internet division on the same day: the conference Venture Market West premiered in Monterey, California, alongside the company's first website — making it one of the first publishing companies with a flourishing daily news site. The Venture Market series expanded to East, South and Europe editions and ran until 2001, joined by events such as NDA, Venture and Herring on Hollywood. In 1996 the magazine began the Red Herring Top 100, its awards programme highlighting start-up companies and private ventures in Asia, Europe and the Americas; the Top 100 became the brand's most durable asset, long outliving the print magazine. The internet operation grew steadily and peaked in 2000 with the acquisition of Stockmaster.com. At the height of the boom, Pontin recalled, the company published two 500-page issues every month and hosted six large events a year, such was the demand from banks and start-ups for advertising pages and sponsorship.

Investment and Expansion

Outside money followed the growth. In 1997 Ziff Davis invested 2 million dollars for approximately ten per cent of the company, and Ziff Davis chief executive Eric Hippeau joined the board, as did former Ziff Davis president Scott Briggs. In 2000 Broadview Capital Partners invested 25 million dollars, with Steven Brooks and Stephen Bachman joining the board. The company expanded to hundreds of staff in offices in three cities, with bureaus eventually in Bangalore, Beijing and Paris and global distribution for the magazine. Hilary Schneider was hired as chief executive in late 2000, succeeding Alden, who had succeeded Perkins. Red Herring competed in a suddenly crowded field of "new economy" titles — Wired, the Industry Standard, Business 2.0 and Fast Company among them — all chasing the same technology advertisers. As Jason Pontin put it, Red Herring was one of a half-dozen publications founded in the 1990s to cover the digital revolution, and by his account the most original of them.

The Crash

The collapse, when it came, was as fast as the rise. The bursting of the dot-com bubble destroyed the advertising market on which the new economy press depended. Red Herring's revenues, which had reached nearly 100 million dollars with a staff of around 350, contracted sharply in 2001 and 2002. The magazine went through repeated rounds of layoffs — one round in 2001 cut about a third of the workforce — as it tried to survive the slump and escape expensive property leases in San Francisco and New York. Broadview invested further rounds to stabilise the company and obtained control of it, and in 2002 put Red Herring through an assignment for the benefit of creditors, a California process similar to federal bankruptcy. RHC Media, owned by Broadview, bought the assets out of that process and kept the business operating. When efforts to sell the company failed, RHC Media decided in early 2003 to cease operations. The subscription obligations were sold to Time Inc., and in March 2003, after ten years, the magazine folded. Perkins, looking back, noted that the company had operated largely profitably for seven years, and suggested the brand might sensibly be put on ice until the technology industry turned.

Revival Under Alex Vieux

The brand did not stay on ice for long. In April 2003 Alex Vieux, a French technology entrepreneur, purchased the Red Herring brand, its URL and intellectual property, including back issues and online content, through his company Dasar, with plans to revive the magazine. Vieux relaunched Red Herring as a website in September 2003, with James Daly, founding editor-in-chief of Business 2.0, heading the editorial staff, and set up offices in Mountain View, California. Joel Dreyfuss, a veteran of PC Week and InformationWeek, was brought in as editor-in-chief for the print revival. Vieux promised to make the magazine systematically global, aimed at senior technology executives and international readers, produced at lower cost than before. Test print issues appeared in the fall of 2004, the first official issue of the relaunched print edition was published in November 2004, and from January 2005 Red Herring appeared again as a full weekly magazine. Its 29 August 2005 cover is among the best-known artefacts of the second era.

The End of Print, and the Digital Afterlife

The second print run lasted three years. The print edition ended in 2007, but a digital edition continued through the company's website until around 2011, and Red Herring continued to publish technology sector news online thereafter. Signs of strain were reported as early as 2008, when technology blogs placed the operation on "deathwatch" amid reports of office and staffing problems. The brand periodically resurfaced — a relaunched website with video and social features was unveiled in 2007 — and the Top 100 awards and conferences, the parts of the business least dependent on print advertising, continued to be held internationally each year. The magazine itself, however, never regained the position it had held in 2000, and its history became the standard cautionary tale of dot-com publishing: a title whose fortunes were tied so completely to one industry's cycle that it rose and fell on exactly the schedule of the companies it covered.

Controversy Over the Top 100

The awards programme that sustained the brand also attracted its sharpest criticism. Some critics charged that the Red Herring Top 100 was operated in a way that pressured winning companies to pay substantial fees to attend award ceremonies in order to receive their awards. Red Herring objected to the criticism and rejected the charges, in coverage by TechCrunch in 2013 among others, defending the awards as a legitimate recognition programme for start-ups and private ventures across Asia, Europe and the Americas. The dispute reflected a wider debate about pay-to-participate awards in the technology industry, in which Red Herring's name, precisely because it was one of the oldest and best known, featured prominently.

People and Legacy

Red Herring's newsroom was a training ground for a generation of technology journalists. Its alumni include Om Malik, later a partner at True Ventures; Peter Rojas, founder of Gizmodo and Engadget; Kenn Cukier, later a senior editor at The Economist; Joanna Pearlstein, later an opinions editor at The New York Times; Owen Thomas, later business editor of the San Francisco Chronicle; and Duff McDonald, author of The Golden Passport. Debbie Gravitz, the magazine's first managing editor, was credited by Pontin as the unsung hero of its early success, and designer Roger Black redesigned the magazine at least twice. As a publication, Red Herring is remembered with its peers Wired, The Industry Standard and Business 2.0 as one of the defining media creations of the 1990s technology boom — the magazine that treated venture capital as a spectator sport, named itself after a stock prospectus, and chronicled, in its own corporate biography as much as in its pages, the full arc of the dot-com era from euphoria to collapse.