Can the paperless magazine make it?

Starting a national magazine has always been an expensive venture. Most mainstream magazines rack up $10 million to $15 million in costs by the time they break even, which usually takes years, if it happens at all; most magazines, in fact, fail before they earn back their investments. We,re soon

The explosion of interest in the Internet's World Wide Web is providing would-be publishers with cheaper options. Even as hundreds of print publications establish Web sites that are little more than repositories for recycled print articles, and as hobbyists establish thousands of small-scale zines, a handful of editorial entrepreneurs are trying to establish real for-profit publications on-line. They are trading print and its attendant financial uncertainties, like fluctuations in paper costs, for the uncertainties of the Web.

"It would never even have occurred to me to start a non-Web publication, simply because it would have been way too expensive," says Steven Johnson, twenty-seven, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Feed, which made its debut on the Web in mid-May -- three months after Johnson wrote up a proposal. With its simple, elegant design, and with such regular features as hypertext-enhanced discussions among cultural critics and hypertext-annotated versions of documents like "The Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age" (which was produced by Newt Gingrich's think tank), Feed is sort of like a plugged-in version of Harper's Magazine. Its only permanent full-time employees at this point are Johnson, who in addition to his duties as editor-in-chief also does the magazine's graphic design and a lot of the programming, and co-founder and editor Stefanie Syman. Partly because of the small size of its staff, the magazine was able to spend less than $100,000 -- most of which came from Johnson's family -- in its first six months, and most of that money went toward luring writers with solid print credibility like Sven Birkerts and Howard Rheingold.

Though Feed has no current plans to charge for subscriptions and has only begun attempting to sell any ads -- and therefore has yet to make any money -- it recently unveiled an innovative ad-pricing scheme: advertisers will pay for the number of times that a page their ad is on is actually seen; for example, 8,000 accesses will cost $4,000. (Ads on the Web tend to appear at the top of a page; clicking on the ad links you to more information about the advertiser. So far, most on-line ads are charged on a per-month basis.)