 "The Industry Standard" called itself "the newsmagazine of the Internet economy", and it specialized in areas where business and the Internet overlapped.Like "Wired", "Red Herring", and (later) "Business 2.0", it was part of a breed of late 1990s publications that filled a gap in technology coverage left by mainstream media at the time.The magazine, which was owned by the technology publishing company IDG, was in many ways the brainchild of John Battelle, who had been a journalist at "Wired" both in the United States and the United Kingdom.