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History Omni was launched by Kathy Keeton Guccione, wife of Penthouse magazine publisher Bob Guccione, and edited by Ben Bova from 1978 until 1981. After Bova left, Editors of Omni included Richard Teresi, Gurney Williams III, Patrice Adcroft, Keith Ferrell, and Pamela Weintraub (editor of OMNI Internet). Kathleen Stein, OMNI staff writer, managed the magazine's prestigious Q&A interviews with the top scientists of the 20th century through 1998. Ellen Datlow was fiction editor of Omni from the time Bova stepped down in 1981 until the magazine folded in 1998. 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. OMNI also brought the works of numerous painters to the attention of a large audience, such as H.R. Giger and De Es Schwertberger. 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. OMNI's pro-technology orientation has been compared to the later magazine ''Wired''. OMNI entered the market at the start of a wave of new science magazines aimed at educated but otherwise "non-professional" readers. Science Digest and Science News already served the high-school market, and Scientific American and New Scientist the professional, while OMNI was arguably the first aimed at "airchair scientists" who were nevertheless well informed about technical issues. The next year, however, Time introduced Discover while the AAAS introduced Science '79 (later '80, etc.). Advertising dollars were spread between the different magazines, and those without deep pockets soon folded in the early 1980s, notably Science Digest and Science News, while Science '79 merged with Discover. 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. Webzine 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 1998, Kathy Keeton, whose vision inspired OMNI, died from complications of breast cancer, 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. TV A short-lived syndicated television show based on the magazine's format (and called Omni: The New Frontier) aired in the United States beginning in September 1981, hosted by Peter Ustinov. See also | ||||||||||
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