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''Omni'' developed a dual personality during its life. In its early run, its high circulation (permitting payment for stories many times higher than that of other science fiction magazines), coupled with some outstanding fiction editors, allowed it to attract prominent Speculative Fiction writers, and it published a number of stories that have become genre classics, such as Orson Scott Card 's "Unaccompanied Sonata", William Gibson 's " Johnny Mnemonic " and George R. R. Martin 's "The Way of Cross and Dragon". The magazine also serialized Stephen King 's novel '' Firestarter ''. The bulk of the magazine, meanwhile, profiled science and scientists with a visionary, Gonzo -style science journalism rooted in story-telling, Verisimilitude , and authorial voice. OMNI's Q&A Interviews constituted a collective oral history of 20th-century science told by the world's greatest thinkers in areas from evolutionary biology to chaos theory to space. OMNI celebrated science with an edgy entertaining patter and irreverence, leaving the straight reporting to the popular science magazine,'' Discover ,'' launched a couple of years after OMNI itself. OMNI's pro-technology orientation has been compared to the later magazine '' Wired ''. ''Omni'' also brought the works of numerous painters to the attention of a large audience, such as H.R. Giger and De Es Schwertberger . In its later years, especially the last year or two of the print publication, OMNI was criticized for weighting its coverage more toward Pseudo-scientific topics like UFOs and ESP. Some have speculated that this may have been an effort to increase circulation during leaner years, but the strategy backfired. Though OMNI's treatment of these topics was essentially skeptical, the weighting nonetheless damaged its credibility and led, in part, to its demise. Guccione shut down the print version of the magazine following the Winter 1995 issue due to waning popularity and the many financial difficulties plaguing his company, General Media . After the print magazine folded in 1996, OMNI Internet was launched. Free of pressure to focus on fringe science areas, OMNI, by now a webzine, returned to its roots as the home of gonzo science writing, becoming one of the first large-scale venues to deliver a journalism geared specifically to cyberspace, complete with real-time coverage of major science events, chats and blogs with scientific luminaries, and interactive experiments that users could join. The world's top science fiction writers also joined in, writing collaborative fiction pieces for OMNI's readers live online. Though the website generated large traffic, it did not turn a profit in those early days of web development — much like its counterparts Slate and Salon . Then, in 1998, Kathy Keeton , whose vision inspired OMNI, died from complications of Breast Cancer . Without her sponsorship, even the website would not survive the turbid financial waters in which General Media was immersed. In 1998, after almost 20 years of publication, the staff of OMNI Internet was laid off and no new content was added to the website. General Media shut the site and removed the OMNI archives from the Internet in 2003. A short-lived syndicated Television Show based on the magazine's format (and also called ''Omni'') aired in the United States beginning in September 1981 , hosted by Hal Linden . EXTERNAL LINKS |