Over the last few months, I've had the pleasure to participate in a series of teleconferences that has included George Gendron, who stepped down last year as editor-in-chief of Inc. after 20 years at the helm.  A recurring theme in our discussions has been our sense that familiar forms of communication regarding entrepreneurship -- business books, conferences, magazines -- have become less relevant.  Rather than being spoken to, people want to be participants in productive conversations [1].  Top-down forms continue to have their place, but even the best find it difficult to adapt fast enough in the dynamic environment of entrepreneurial business.  So, in its 10th anniversary year, Red Herring shut its doors last Friday.

I'm prone to looking at the world through the lens of real options thinking.  The fundamental concept are straightforward enough: flexibility has value in the face of uncertainty.  During the 1990s, we all started to get the feeling that this Internet and web stuff could be big.  Of course, few, if any, of us had a clear sense of what the hell it all really meant in regard to business.  Consequently, readers and advertisers, alike, found heightened value in investing time and money in a broadened portfolio of business magazines: Fast Company, Wired, Business 2.0, Industry Standard, and, of course, Red Herring.  At one point, I subscribed to all of them, hungry for some insight.  To his credit, Tony Perkins at Red Herring warned us early, often, and loudly about the dangers of the Internet bubble economy.  Nevertheless, the ambiguity that surrounded the "new economy" fueled the option value that his magazine represented.  At the peak, an issue of Red Herring was as thick as my thumb had more ad pages than Vanity Fair.  In contrast, Issue No. 123, which just arrived by stage here in Bozeman, is a modest 76 pages and has fewer ads than an academic journal.  When uncertainty is resolved, option value evaporates.

From time-to-time, Red Herring has infuriated me, but the quality of its writing has always been very high.  From my end of the telescope, Red Herring didn't fail for lack of quality, it's just that its form didn't allow the magazine to contract quickly enough to reflect the collapse of its option value to readers and advertisers.  Not at all surprisingly, none this was lost on Mr. Perkins.  A short while ago, he lead the launch of the AlwaysOn Network, a kind of membership-based, edited web log portal.  Building upon a web platform, AlwaysOn offers the potential to scale (up and down).  Similarly, by drawing upon contributions from industry leaders and members, Perkins is mining a flexible source of content that can be changed rapidly to adapt to an ever changing business context [2].  Furthermore, AlwaysOn offers its members a convenient and sanctioned way to engage in conversation with contributors and, to a limited degree, other members.

In his farewell to Red Herring, Perkins wrote, "The Herring may be temporarily down, but it sure the heck ain't out."  With AlwaysOn, I wonder whether we're seeing a preview of a successor form of entrepreneurship media.  As the AlwaysOn crew writes, "In the next wave, media companies will have to share control with the audience they serve."  Certainly, the considerable advantages of print media will ensure that business magazines will be with us for a very long time, but I suspect that we're going to see much from the edited web log/member-directed form in the coming years.

[1] I would be remiss not to note that Chris Meyer and his colleagues a the CGE&Y Center for Business Innovation have been developing the conference-as-conversation theme for years.

[2] George and his colleagues at Inc. did more than most to tap its network of non-professional writers from the business community.