Starlog Web Site "Removed for Non-Payment"

So maybe this is how Starlog goes out, not with a bang but with a non-payment notice.

As of 5:46 p.m. (Pacific time) today, Wednesday, February 10, 2010, the starlog.com web site -- which has been unavailable for days, and before that had only been up briefly since its last down-time -- currently displays the notice imaged on this page: "Site removed due to non-payment by The Brooklyn Company, Inc."

Starlog Group was once the behemoth of the science-fiction (and movie-related) periodicals world, at one point being the number-one publisher of licensed movie magazines in the country. Over the years, the company published dozens of magazines -- some great, some good, some stinkers, but almost always worth a look. A very entrepreneurial company at its best, based on a geeky magazine that started life as a Star Trek one-shot. Starlog itself was the unrivaled champion of the SF media magazine world, burying such competitors as Famous Monsters of Filmland, Questar, Fantastic Films, Sci Fi Universe, Cinefantastique, SF Movieland, Dreamwatch, Space Wars, and others. At its peak, hundreds of thousands of copies flew off the newsstand shelves each month. Today, it can't even pay its web server bills. How the mighty fell.

But give the company a few bankruptcies, two changes of ownership in less than a decade, a cessation of print publication last year, the resignation of long-time editor David McDonnell this past fall, and a whole buncha turmoil at sister magazine Fangoria this past month, and I am thinking Starlog might be dead as a doornail.

As someone who can still off the top of his head remember almost every article in the first issue of Starlog I bought with my allowance waaaaay back in 1980, I'm sad it's come to this. The awful economy -- in which even successful small businesses have been unable to get financing -- was, I'm sure, a contributing factor. But can't anyone buy this title and make it a winner? Give me the money and I'll do it, for pete's sake.

Oh, well, at least I guess this means I own the complete collection.

UPDATE: I checked again this morning, 6:47 a.m. Pacific time, Thursday, February 11, 2010, and the non-payment notice is gone, replaced by this message: "Internal Server Error. The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@starlog.fangoria.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error. More information about this error may be available in the server error log. Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request." Either way, it ain't good.

Bankruptcy at Starlog, Fangoria owner

Bloomberg news and other sources report that Creative Group, the publisher of Starlog and Fangoria magazines as well as the producer of animation and other related businesses, filed for Chapter 11 protection from its creditors earlier this year. (On the Bloomberg link, the story is about halfway down the page.) In short, it declared bankruptcy. I'm not able to figure out if the cause of Creative's financial troubles was its small magazine division or if it was the various video production and other parts of the company.

Though this news admittedly set off a spate of professional fantasizing by me ("I could round up investors and buy Starlog/Fangoria from Creative! Invest in rebuilding the Starlog brand and implement all of my digital-and-print publishing and marketing plans!"), more realistically, it will follow the pattern that is expected when the core business that's in trouble is nonetheless still valuable: it will be picked up by its creditors at a bargain price, and they'll sell or just close what's a total money hole, rebuild and then sell anything that looks like it has strong upside potential, and sell immediately anything that's got value in it but not a lot of upside. Bloomberg notes that the creditors are already wrangling over that, and I just hope it's not going to take a big toll on the staff or the brands themselves.

If Starlog and Fangoria get someone who can continue to invest in Fango's multi-platform development and start to invest in Starlog's platforms (there are many inexpensive or even free things they could be doing that would help tie their audience to them, such as short video blogs by the editors, video interview excerpts, text blogs by editors and other contributors, weekly e-mail newsletter, etc.), then they can reap a big profit from a very respected and venerable brand name. They can also finally begin to really take on the market threat: The British publishers, who appear to be able to put out magazines that are bigger in every way (more pages, larger page dimensions, higher prices) and who are expanding their market presence, all while Starlog has suffered over the past 7 years. It's been even worse for Starlog's competition; in recent years, Cinefantastique (redubbed CFQ) ceased publication, as did Dreamwatch and Cinescape.

So let's hope they get an investor/owner who both wants to make money and who's smart enough to mine what value is already there – built up over more than 30 years of continuous publishing and market dominance – and to know how to expand the brand to take on the competition of today. Hello, investors?