Rodale's Prevention , the nation's largest health magazine, teamed with Wire Networks to put up a site called Healthy Ideas , taking some articles from print, and adding others. Some fragile print magazines like Omni, Progressive Architecture, bOING bOING, and Millenium Science Fiction just shut down their print operations and set up online, saving all those print and distribution costs. Lots of openings for writers, but only if they have spent a year or so totally immersed in issues like spiders, agents, and push indexing. Accompanying these new markets for writers are sites that simply re-purpose material already bought and paid for. Led by the San Jose Mercury , the Wall Street Journal , and the New York Times , newspapers are beginning to see their Web sites as significant sources of revenues, and, in some cases, their salvation.
Book publishers are, slowly, slowly, creating Web sites, and allowing customers to buy online.
Similarly, a few new online super-bookstores are challenging each other, with deeper discounts than they ever offered at retail outlets. So all the old markets are reappearing, in some form, on the Web. The literary world is reemerging from the Net mists, and its double is growing, quite rapidly, on the Web. In addition, hosts like America Online and Microsoft Network are funding the creation of hundreds of new sites that combine traditional feature articles with columns, chat areas, bulletin boards, databases, and downloadable files. In order to provide content that will attract millions of visitors a day, these two giants, along with smaller fry like CompuServe, contract out a lot of writing.