So What Did Happen To Crazynet Then, James?

In which an embittered man gets much stuff off his chest and
leaves himself wide open for several libel suits

Yes, what happened to Crazynet? Why did the bright white hope of British internet magazines, described by Dave Green of NTK as 'what internet magazines ought to be', which hit its first-issue sales and advertising targets and seemed to have a bright future ahead, close down on 10th November 1999, two days before its second issue was due to go to press?

What happened to Crazynet? French people.

Let me explain. The first issue of Crazynet magazine, described on its cover as 'the wild side of the web' and at the head of its editorial as 'the internet magazine that doesn't suck', launched in the UK at the beginning of October 1999. It was completely sodding brilliant and I was its editor. As the person responsible, or at least the person in the principal flak-catching position on the team, I feel I owe the world something: at the very least a description, if not exactly an explanation, of why the second issue of Crazynet has not yet emerged and is unlikely to do so any time soon. And while this won't be a patch on Danny O'Brien's description of the life and death of Wired UK (because I am not a patch on Danny O'Brien in any respect except getting up late), I hope it'll prove as fitting an obituary. Because ultimately it was a similar sort of project, albeit on a much smaller scale, although the reasons it died were very different and very much more mundane and late-1990s.

Crazynet was launched in October by Freeway Press Ltd, the UK off-shoot of French company Freeway International, which had been running since the beginning of 1999. Fifty per cent of Freeway International is owned by Pressimage, the largest publisher of computer mags in France. At the time I joined, Freeway UK had two titles running: Freeway, a bike mag, and Rock Sound, a rock mag. It employed just over ten people, although the number fluctuated, and was planning to launch a new magazine roughly every four months. Crazynet was planned to be an English-language version of Micro Dingo, the best-selling internet title in France, which is published by Pressimage. But that wasn't how things turned out.

I answered a job-ad in the Guardian in June, was given the job in July and started work on the magazine for an October launch. Ten weeks. The last time I'd worked on a magazine launch (Bizarre) we were given ten months, a staff of five and an editorial budget of over £7000, and we did two dummy issues before launching. For Crazynet, which had the same number of pages plus a cover-mounted multimedia CD-ROM, we had ten weeks and a budget of £1500. Did we do a dummy issue? Yes, but we whacked a cover price on it and put it on sale.

Sorry, did I say "we"? I meant "I". The deputy editor didn't join the team until after the first issue had gone to press. The Art Director was a French bloke foisted on us by Freeway International, who came over for one week to design and lay out the magazine, and who couldn't or wouldn't be told that page-layouts based on GUIs and Ryan Hughes fonts were so early-1990s to British eyes that I got a physical pain every time I looked at one of his pages. The 'associate launch editors', Roy Delaney and Ulric Van den Bogaerde, are both brilliant and extremely talented guys but were only involved full-time for a fortnight each, in series rather than in parallel. The freelance writers did a terrific job, but there's only so much writing you can buy with a budget of £1500, particularly when that's supposed to cover all the pictures too, and the photo on the front cover cost £900 alone.

I should make it clear that this wasn't the job I thought I'd accepted back in July. We'd discussed and I'd signed up for a magazine with three staff, with G3 Macs with Quark XPress installed, a fast internet connection, a PC with CD-R for the reviewing of PC games and shareware and to master the CD-ROM on, and enough people to do the jobs that needed doing. What I got was one iMac and a share of the bandwidth on the company's ISDN line, which never got much over 5000 cps, and which crashed or was taken out of service to send files to our French masters several times a day – not helpful if you're downloading 30mb files off the net, which we were. We finally got a second iMac and one copy of Quark a fortnight before the first issue was due to be sent to press. We had been offered a copy of Quark before then, but I have this ethical thing against running pirated software.

It was becoming apparent that not all was as it seemed at Freeway Press.

F * * *

Let me make it clear that I didn't take the Crazynet job because I was impressed with the company's vision or by the dynamic personalities of its leaders, or because I had a personal dream that I wanted to realise, to shape a new kind of publishing or any of that. I took the job because they were going to give me money to write jokes, and I could run a magazine, and I'd be getting high-speed net access all day for free. As far as Freeway was concerned, I was hired to fill a role. I didn't even have a hand in naming the magazine – which explains why it was called "Crazynet": the title was chosen by French people who, as we were to be reminded time and time again over the next four months, didn't understand much about the UK magazine market.

Crazynet was not your run-of-the-Pagemill web-mag. That was the whole point. While it was still going I described the magazine variously as the first internet-entertainment title, the first nerd-lifestyle mag and the first humour magazine about the web, but none of those were it. The point is: most internet magazines are boring. Some of them are proud to be boring. Others try hard not to be, but because they’re produced by computer journalists trying to write lifestyle pieces, or lifestyle journalists trying to write about technical stuff, they simply don’t work.

Crazynet’s secret formula was simple and twofold. Firstly, it wasn’t actually about the internet at all. It was about cool celebs, films, sex, sport, weird people, cutting-edge technology and the unbelievable truth; but we whacked a few URLs around all of them to make it look as if they were net-related. Which in a way they were. The net was our excuse, not our raison d'etre.

The second part of the secret was not to take anything seriously, least of all ourselves. Everything was a potential target for ridicule and abuse. Even before the first issue came out, we managed to hit a few targets. The magazine’s guidelines for freelance writers said that anyone wanting to grasp our style should buy The Net, .net and Internet Magazine, read them thoroughly and throw them away, because we would never print any of the sort of things that they considered feature articles, because they were boring and smug. The staff of Haymarket, publishers of The Net, took such umbrage at this that they refused to even mention Crazynet in their magazine for media wankers, Campaign. Did we hit a sore point there? Oh, I hope so.

The way Crazynet came out wasn't actually how it was intended to be. It was meant, as I said, to be a UK version of Micro Dingo. The thing was – and the guys at Pressimage, who know something about magazines, understood at least a part of this – that Micro Dingo wouldn't work in the UK. It was too French. Its humour didn't translate, its layout would look amateurish, and the relentless nudity in it would put it straight on the top shelf, next to (God help us) X-Net. The British news trade would eat it alive, like some anthropomorphic Gallic marshmallow, squealing and wriggling piteously as it disappeared down the same mighty gullet that had already eaten Escape, Cyberia and a number of other unlamented tosh-like internet titles.

But there was enough about Micro Dingo that, if coupled with an editor who was a complete sodding genius, could make a very fine internet magazine, utterly unlike anything currently on the UK market. It wouldn't be an English translation of Micro Dingo; nor even an English version of Micro Dingo; but a magazine inspired by Micro Dingo which unashamedly nicked its best bits. A son of Micro Dingo, if you like, particularly if the son in question was Oedipus.

So we started. We – I must stop using that word – I sat down and worked out how I thought I could make something a bit like Micro Dingo succeed in the British market. I put together a set of writer's guidelines (still visible here) that turned out to be more of a manifesto, and publicly declared war on the mediocrity and tedium of The Net, .net and Internet Magazine. I recruited friends to write for the mag. I collected photographs and video clips, got clearance to use material, gathered screenshots, commissioned articles and basically ran myself ragged in a long, long succession of 100-hour weeks.

In short, in two months I devised the magazine, assembled 100 pages of material (roughly two-thirds of which I wrote myself under various pseudonyms), compiled and edited a CD-ROM with 500mb of material on it – including creating the HTML interface, which is not something I’ve ever done before, which is why it was awful – and watched as a French bloke wearing baggy shorts coloured the whole thing shit-brown and put ugly early-90s pixellated hand icons all over it. Less than twelve weeks from the day I started the job, the first issue was on the shelves of newsagents across the UK. It was not the magazine that Pressimage had been expecting, but it was an internet magazine that I (and, I hoped, a few others) would actually want to read from cover to cover. And I was pleased. It wasn't perfect, but it did the job. Was it 'The internet magazine that didn't suck'? I wouldn't have written that if I didn't believe it.

We may have hit our deadlines, but other parts of the organisation, which shall be nameless, did not have their act so firmly in gear. I have great respect for West Side, the company that was selling advertising space in the magazine, who did a fabulous job considering that the deal with them was only signed a week before the first issue went to press. I have a lot of time for PRomote (sic), the PR agency hired to publicise Crazynet's launch, particularly as they were hired after the first issue was already on sale and they were given a pathetic budget. Pathetic in PR terms, that is – it was still almost three times the editorial budget I was playing with.

Something was clearly not well within Freeway.

* U * *

The magazine was received well. Trade mag TMB (‘The Media Buyer’) loved it. A bloke called Sheldon Lazarus didn't, but we'll ignore him. Put it this way: the directors of Pressimage (owners, lest you be dozy and need reminding, of Micro Dingo) started talking seriously about doing a French edition of Crazynet – which is a pretty good indication of how different our mag was from theirs, how much original material we'd created for ours (approximately 95% of the first issue was ours, as opposed to the 40% they'd been expecting – which pissed off Pressimage who were supposed to get royalties on any material we translated) and the general level of insanity of the French.

Buoyed by more than 200 letters and emails, and sales of over 20,000, the team – meaning myself and Maria, the deputy editor whose start-date had been put back more than once due to total blithering incompetence on the part of Freeway's management – began work on the second issue, putting right all the things that had been rough or rushed in the first one, or which the cold light of dawn over Clerkenwell had revealed weren't working.

Clerkenwell was turning out to be the only good thing about working on Crazynet apart from being paid. It's a glorious area, where it's possible to get a very nice hummus-in-pitta-bread at one in the morning, which is useful if you're going to be working until 3am, then going home and spending another two hours testing shareware for the mag on your PC because there's only one PC in the Freeway office and it's not up to the job, and will then be back in the office by 9.30am, having spent the entire journey writing reviews of that shareware on your Psion 5 because if you don’t squeeze every moment out of every day then the magazine isn’t going to meet its deadline.

Freeway had two lofts on Rosebery Avenue: great airy spacious offices with interesting smells drifting up from the Mediterranean restaurant below. They were clearly expensive offices, and they spoke a great deal about Freeway being a company that was going places. I had my first inkling of exactly where it was going when in mid October the landlord's agent started showing prospective tenants around the building – including Crazynet's floor, which at the time was occupied only by me, Maria, the company's small repro department with two employees, and enough empty space to stage a reasonable five-a-side football tournament.

If you know anything about magazine publishing companies, you might find it strange that a company with three titles had its own repro department. I found it strange too. But then I was new to the job and enthused by the idea of being part of a young company with its eye on future growth, a company with solid backing from not one but two parent organisations, one of which was insanely keen about the product I was producing. No matter that I was working so hard and getting so little sleep that complete strangers were telling me that I looked like I was going to die, and I was spending more time with cab-drivers than with my wife. I calculated I was earning less, hour for hour, than at the 9-5 job I’d been doing in 1991; per-annum the figure was more than double, but so were the hours I was working. My life might have been bloody awful, but Crazynet was showing signs that it might soar and, I hoped, my career would fly with it.

One of Crazynet's distinguishing features – along with its shit-brown colour-scheme and general lack of proof-reading – was its overtly cynical editorial tone. With hindsight, I should have taken that tone and used it as a lens on my life. All the signs were there, if only I'd bothered to put them together: the piles of red bills on publisher Patrick's desk; the continued lack of resources for the magazine; the fact that French Freeway staff who were supposed to be visiting the London office suddenly didn't; the fact that Bertrand's trip to the UK to lay out the second issue (he'd decided to go with a vile mustard-yellow this time) was abruptly cancelled. And there was more to come.

Actually I had read the signs and knew which way things were going – I just didn't know how quickly they'd get there. Crazynet was an immensely satisfying thing to be producing, but it had become my entire life, and not only was that life not a terribly pleasant one, I was getting almost literally no time to myself, let alone to spend with my wife. I'd already accepted an offer from my old editor at Penguin to produce a movie tie-in book for them before Christmas, and had lined up an interview for the editorship of a magazine in an entirely different field. As the signs became clearer and clearer, and my workload became heavier and heavier, and I grew more tired and more stressed, I made up my mind: I would finish the second issue of Crazynet, see it sent off to the printers, and would hand in my resignation the same day. The two months' notice I was obliged to work would mean that I'd ultimately produce four issues of the magazine, enough to get it established and strong enough that a new editor could take it over, and it'd also give me plenty of time to find another job.

Life has a funny way of getting ahead of you, doesn't it?

* * C *

We were timetabled to finish the second issue on Friday 12th November. The CD had already been sent to the pressing plant – the interface was created out-of-house this time, by a genius who'd managed to make all the principal links Java buttons that didn't work under versions of Internet Explorer pre-5.0, or any other browsers at all – and we were on schedule. Morale was not brilliant but the response to the first issue had been fantastic. We'd been deluged with emails and reader-response forms, people were sending us jokes, images, shareware and video clips for future CDs. The first issue sold over 20,000 copies, at a cover price of £2.99, with not really a lot of PR and not a single advert anywhere. Compare that to the much-advertised and ballyhooed The Net from Haymarket, our principal declared enemy, which was reportedly selling 30,000 copies at £1.99. We hadn't necessarily won, but it looked like we were winning.

On 3rd November, word came from our French masters that Freeway was closing that day. Not Freeway Press but Freeway the bike magazine, first launch and flagship title of the UK end of the company. Three jobs went with it. It had been underselling its target, but not by much, and the title was less than a year old in a market where conventional wisdom says that you shouldn't expect to make money within the first eighteen months of a magazine's life. Not only that, but one of the three jobs to go was Dan Angel, a very talented designer who'd been with the company just over a week. He'd turned down a substantially better-paying job because he wanted the chance to work on a bike mag.

Naturally this did wonders for morale within Freeway. We were in the middle of production week, slogging our guts out – leaving the office before midnight was unusual and weekends had long ago become nothing more than two days when the newspapers got fatter, not that we had time to read them – and all our unvoiced fears were suddenly given foundation: not just about the viability and management of Freeway Ltd, but about the way our French parent company saw us. Will, editor of the UK edition of Rock Sound, who maintained pretty close contact with his opposite number in France, made a few phonecalls, and the words that came back weren't good. They were words of financial troubles abroad, of a cash-crunch in Freeway France, and of an attempt to get more money from Pressimage.

Cut to the chase: Pressimage didn't come through with the cash. At about 11am on Wednesday 10th November, two days before the second issue of Crazynet was due to go to press, we were summoned to the third floor, where Patrick informed us that the entirity of Freeway Press Ltd had just been shut down by Freeway France, and we were all out of a job forthwith. Cue the predictable wailing, gnashing of teeth, clearing of desks, backing-up of files onto Zip disks, stealing of copies of Quark XPress, going to the pub, and talking drunkenly of half-arsed schemes to set up our own co-operative and publish the magazines ourselves.

As you might have gathered, for me the sting wasn't as bad as it might have been because not only had I seen it coming, I was already psychologically divorced from the company. I had a job interview already arranged for 5.30pm that evening (it was for the editorship of Total Film and I didn't get it). Losing the magazine was still an enormous kick in the balls. It's one thing to decide to leave a project and quite another to have it taken away, particularly after you've poured so much of your life and yourself into it. And much of Crazynet was me, personally: not just my feelings about the net but my personality, my sense of humour, my likes and dislikes. As I said at the top of this, our first editorial began: "Welcome to the internet magazine that doesn't suck", and we believed that firmly and fervently. We were giving the UK internet magazine sector the kick in its boring, boring arse that it needs so badly, and for our efforts we were bent over a fence and buggered. By French people.

And Crazynet was good, and I’m not just saying that because I was the guy who did it. When a magazine goes down or runs late, the distributors expect to get a handful of phonecalls from readers and newsagents asking about it – three or four. When the second Crazynet didn’t appear as scheduled, our distributors Marketforce got forty phonecalls about it in a fortnight. We were doing something right. Towards the end I was so short of sleep, so stressed, so frazzled, so disjointed and out of synch with time and real life that not only can't I remember what that was, but I can't even think back to the less-stressed times before the work-craziness set in to analyze it. (How tired was I? Only once before had I been so exhausted, so mentally and physically drained that I could only focus and function on one thing at a time, to the point of not being able to switch focus for something as simple as answering the phone... and that was towards the end of a world endurance-record I broke with some mates about fifteen years ago, when I was younger and more stupid. At my previous job I'd worked myself so hard and late for so long that my doctor wrote my boss a note reading "Give this man some time off or he'll have a nervous breakdown" (they didn't). I worked harder than that at Crazynet.)

So Crazynet had started a revolution backed, we thought, by an army who believed in what we were doing and were prepared to give us the supplies we needed to fight the war and win it. I'd fired the opening salvo, only to turn round and discover that my generals were already waving white flags. And it was nothing to do with us or the magazine, or even Freeway Ltd. The best internet magazine the UK had seen – this year anyway – died because some French bastard didn’t bother to keep track of his own company's spreadsheet.

* * * D

So it all comes down to other peoples' money. Very late-1990s. I apologise for the lack of tales of great personality clashes, screaming arguments, firings or dramatic outbursts, threatened suicides and ad-departments going insane with fire axes. It was all very orderly and British, and rather disappointingly I hold nobody from Freeway UK responsible. In fact, of the people who worked there I liked all but two (one I thought was a prat and one I actively loathed) and ultimately we all got shafted. And if you subscribed – I'm sorry, but there's not much I can do.

The story looks like it ought to end there, but it doesn't. About three weeks later, which brings thing quite close to the present day as I write this, I was asked to a meeting with the guys from Pressimage, who apparently wanted to fund a restart of both Crazynet and Rock Sound. We’d lose the nice Clerkenwell offices, and all layout and production would be done in France, but it would be a chance to get some sense of closure, to carry on with the vision, to put right the things that were wrong with the first issue – and despite my enthusiasm for it, I’d be the first to say that there was a lot wrong with it. In fact I could take you through it page by page and tell you exactly what was wrong and what we were going to do about it in the second issue, and the third, and the fourth.

For various arcane reasons the meeting ended up happening in the back of a cab on the way to Waterloo Station. And the guys from Pressimage open their mouths, and their opening gambit is -- I paraphrase -- "It’ll just be you, no deputy editor. We can't afford the extravagant resources you had before. You’ll be spending a week every month in a Paris suburb overseeing layout and proof-reading the magazine. And we want the next issue ready ten days from now." And my opening response was "You can fuck off back to France, then." Again, I paraphrase. I didn't say that; not in so few words. I wish I had. The cab arrived at Waterloo, we shook hands, and they fucked off back to France.

But then two or three days later I bumped into Paul in Tottenham Court Road. Paul is one of the ad-blokes from West Side, the agency who'd done a sterling job selling space on the first issue and was doing a sterling one on the second as well, including lining up big-ass clients like the Ministry of Sound. Glad to hear it's all back up and running, he says. Had a meeting with Patrick [Crazynet's publisher and the guy who ran Freeway UK] this morning, he says. Patrick says Pressimage is funding the title and tells us you're back on board, he says. Re-start in the new year, he says.

So: is Crazynet genuinely going to come back, or is Patrick merely promising people things he can't deliver again? I have no idea, and frankly I’m beyond caring. Crazynet is a closed chapter in my life. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t be interested in another magazine along similar lines; in fact I’m touting that very thing around publishers right now, and if you’re interested then you should email me (james@erstwhile.demon.co.uk) right now – unless you’re with Paragon, because I am not moving to Bournemouth for anyone. In the meanwhile I’m also writing books, developing games, running Hogshead Publishing and doing TV stuff, all of which keep my stress levels well below what they were in the four months of Crazynet’s short but unhappy life. And I’m getting more sleep, or at least getting to spend more time in bed with my wife, which is not necessarily the same thing.

But if you're browsing through Guardian Media or, knowing the tight-fistedness of the whole operation, something a lot cheaper and not generally known for its media jobs section, like London Graduate – and you see an advert looking for an editor for something that sounds a lot like Crazynet reborn, then... well, best of luck to you. You'll be inheriting a magazine with a following, with a lot to live up to, and with backers who will expect you to perform the impossible with essentially no money, no equipment and absolutely fuck-all moral support, who have already sent the mag and its staff and contributors into limbo once this year. So: if you decide to go for it, the best of luck to you, mate. Just – please – don’t ask me to get involved.

James Wallis, 1999-12-09

Back to the homepage, why not?