The phantom magazine

Print magazines are wonderful businesses, apart from, you know, the awkward business of actually printing the damn things, and getting them onto the newsstand. So kudos to Alex Vieux, publisher of Red Herring, who has hit on a new business model: print intermittently; and hope advertisers don't notice that the troubled magazine's not actually on sale. Sarcasm aside, Valleywag operatives have been trying to get hold of the publisher's letter in the latest issue. (What can we say? That's how we get our kicks.) No luck: neither Borders nor Mac's Smoke Shop, in downtown Palo Alto, have received an issue since December, according to their respective managers.

The distributor told Mac's Smoke Shop that, because of a dispute, it was no longer carrying Red Herring. We thought Vieux's magazine business was in bad shape because the diminutive publisher had defaulted on a loan from Comerica Bank; but for a magazine group to miss payments to its distributor would be like Google failing to pay the electricity bills for its server farms. That is, suicidal.

Red Herring's magazine is still available in electronic form, and subscribers have sometimes received their copies by mail. But advertisers, such as Mail Foundry, do tend to expect that a magazine should be on sale, you know, with all the other magazines.

In its 1990s heyday, startups and their publicists begged and lobbied for a mention in Red Herring, or a slot at one of the magazine's sold-out conferences. Along with the Industry Standard, it was the Valley's most influential title. Now the magazine is back, but as a ghost. And here's the true measure of the decline of a legendary title: Red Herring hasn't been on the shelves, in Palo Alto at least, for four months. And nobody noticed.

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