AVweb Turns 20

0

Did you happen to catch the Super Bowl commercial that had a 20-years-younger Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric discussing “the little a with a circle around it” then asking their off-camera producer to explain what this thing, the internet, was? The spot was funny because anyone who sees it now will marvel that just two decades ago we were so dumb about what was coming. I know I was.

But not all of us were and thanks to Mike Busch, I got clued in early; really early. In case you’ve forgotten, Mike and his then business partner, Carl Marbach, saw the wave building on the horizon and were prescient enough to act upon it. And unlike thousands of web entrepreneurs, their creation not only survived, it thrived. In 1995, Busch and Marbach launched AVweb, which this year celebrates its 20th anniversary as what I think can still be called general aviation’s premier online news and feature service.

Just as all of us remember what we were doing when significant historical events occurred, I remember distinctly when Mike called to discuss what would become AVweb. He explained that the internet, which had just morphed into the commercial world from its ARPANET origins, was soon to get a graphic user interface that would re-brand it as the World Wide Web. At the time, Netscape was the hot if not the only browser. And who knew what the hell a browser was anyway? Mike explained how it would all work and although I got it, I didn’t get it. Mike said the new site would have a weekly news service and he wanted me to provide that while he concentrated on features and columns and the technical minutiae. (He is by training a mathematician and computer programmer.)

The other day I phoned Mike to probe his recollections of the AVweb launch. Neither of us could remember if it was early in 1995 or in the fall. I’m going with the spring, because I clearly remember covering Oshkosh myself and e-mailing Mike photos scanned from prints from a film camera. (Now it takes six of us to cover the show and I haven’t used a film camera in 15 years.) Why did this thing get started?

As is always the case, it was a confluence of technology, good timing, perceived need and a visionary to tie it all together. In this case, there were two in Busch and Marbach; I was merely a hired gun. Busch acted as editor in chief and content officer, while Marbach was publisher and marketeer.

“This was about the time the internet was made available to commercial entities. I was convinced it would be a major game changer like the microprocessor had been 15 years before,” Busch recalls. “And I wanted to learn everything I could about it. So I had to figure out some project to do on the internet so I could learn about it. I got the idea of starting a web-based aviation news site,” Busch says. At the time, he met Marbach-probably through CompuServe, the leading online service of the day-who explained his idea was a weekly news service that would deliver an e-letter via e-mail to subscribers. The synergy was obvious. “A web-based magazine would be sort of a pull thing and the news a push thing, so we felt the two things combined would have more potential than doing them separately,” Busch recalls. Both were pilots, owning and flying high-performance twins. Busch still has his Cessna 310.

The formula worked and it’s what we still follow 20 years and some 2000 e-letters later. We have no way of determining this, but I would guess that a large percentage of those subscribers who signed up in 1995 and 1996 are still with us. How we found them all is a mystery lost to time because AVweb pre-dates Google by three years and it pre-dates just about every other aviation web site I can think of. Mike couldn’t remember any specific promotion of the publication; I vaguely recall some space ads in AOPA Pilot and other magazines. I think the real magic was timing. AVweb could very have been among the first 1000 dot-com web sites in a universe that’s now clogged with more than 600 million. It was new, it was novel and it had compelling, timely news that no one else did. By 1997, 50,000 subscribers had signed on. By print standards of the day, that was about $1 million worth of invested circulation that had just found its way to the publication. No junk mail required. This really was different.

Of course it was-and remains-free. Twenty years ago, the web ecosystem debated which business model the future would support-paid subscriptions or advertising-supported content that was free to readers. AVweb went with the overwhelming groundswell toward free content. It was an industry-wide decision that had and has serious reverberations to this day, not all of them necessarily positive, in my view. Nonetheless, web-based news services such as AVweb provide a kind of journalism that offers benefits far in excess of the negatives.

In exchange for the lack of story depth that sometimes frustrates us, we have an unparalleled breadth of coverage. As we once did with newspaper extra editions, we can push a news report to readers within minutes of the event actually occurring. We can use video and audio to give reporting a texture words alone can’t create, but also at the risk of veering into shallowness that only TV news can own. (And yes, that happens to us sometimes.)

Print publications rely on editors to make judgments about what readers want and how much of it they want. To a degree, online publishing has removed the length restriction and story choice is potentially broader, thus the reading selection process is more democratic. With that browser we all learned about in 1995, readers can be their own gatekeepers, choosing from a larger and constantly refreshed pool of content. I qualified the lack of length restraint above in deference to my fellow editors, who would remind me that flabby prose is flabby prose, whether it’s ink on paper or pixels on flatscreens. Concision matters no less on the web than in print.

Twenty years hence, Busch can compare the vision to the reality and find, if not perfect alignment, then definite confirmation that the kernel took permanent root. “My angle was not so much that I had a burning passion to create a news magazine as I had a passion to learn everything I could about the internet,” he recalls. The news, then and now called the Flash, was necessary, but his interest was the site’s feature content. The original idea might not have envisioned a content well as a stage for new voices, but our rich catalog of content proves that it went that way. “The part I enjoyed more was the magazine part, which was to find people who had something interesting to say and convince them they could write,” Busch says.

Another thing about that web that none of us banked on 20 years ago-at least I didn’t-was its archive and searchable data capability. We don’t have every scrap we’ve published from day one, but we have the vast majority of it, still spinning around on drives in servers or drifting through the cloud. As part of our 20th anniversary year, I’ll be commenting on that content during the coming year. I hope you enjoy it.

So a tip of the hat to Mike Busch and Carl Marbach for seeing a need and stepping in to satisfy it. And for those of you who joined us during that crowded hour in 1995 or who may have just found us this morning, I offer my heartfelt thanks for being readers. I hope we keep you engaged another two decades.

Join the conversation.
Read others’ comments and add your own.

LEAVE A REPLY