Atlantic's Anna Wiener writes about Suck.com, a webzine that was founded in '95 and ran for six years. With the newsletter "Suck, Again" that publishes Suck's archived material, the site gains new interest in today's crowded media landscape.
Suck emerged at a time when nobody—publishers, marketers, readers, or writers—really had any idea what they were doing on the web, or what the web would do for them. "Stumbling on this sly, skeptical voice in a sea of repurposed press releases was so refreshing," Havrilesky [Heather Havrilesky, Suck.com employee] wrote. It still is: These types of voices still exist on the Internet, but they are a minority and can be harder to surface, surrounded as they are by optimized, data-driven content.
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Mark Macdonald, the 32-year-old developer at the helm of the "Suck, Again" newsletter, seems to have felt this loss acutely. For him, part of Suck's appeal is its singular editorial vision. (Appropriately, Macdonald is building a website called Gazet, a platform for assembling and dispatching "hand-picked digests of stories and videos.") Macdonald uncovered the site's archive using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, and his newsletter is copy-pasted verbatim from the original versions, including images and links. "Suck, Again" is neither monetized nor advertised; it has several thousand subscribers. "It lives or dies depending on whether people tell each other about it," he said, but regardless of subscriber numbers he intends to send out the full archive—all 7 years of it.
Resources mentioned in the article:
Featured image: Suck.com's Net Moguls trading card series with art by Charlie Powell.
