Jupitermedia CEO Alan Meckler
PC Magazine The Barometer
When I think of the glories of PC trade print publishing I cannot help but think about PC Magazine. When Ziff Davis was sold several times in the mid-1990s, the big horse for valuation was PC Magazine followed by PC Week.
PC Week became Eweek a few years ago and is a shadow of its former self. It was once a robust weekly tabloid. Now it is a 56-page magazine-style weekly that is struggling to survive.
PC Magazine has been published twice monthly since the mid-1980s. But like Eweek, PC Magazine is now a thin version compared to its glory days of the 1990s. And to add insult to injury, the guaranteed circulation of PC Magazine was recently reduced from approximately 1.2 million to about 700,000. A story on this drop has some interesting facts about the decline.
The Internet is killing PC Magazine and its competitor PC World (from IDG which is reducing its guaranteed circulation to 850,000 from well over 1 million) just as it has killed several other books over the previous few years. The information in these magazines is dated by the time it is published because of the speed of Internet publishing. Price guides and comparisons are nice to see in print, but this information is more readily updated and found on hundreds of Web sites that are changed daily.
I have long been predicting the further decline of trade and tech print magazines. This latest news from Ziff Davis only reconfirms what we have all been watching -- a very slow but steady decline and death of computer magazines.
I believe that the postive annual cash flow on PC Magazine was north of $50 million in 1995. I wonder how much of that incredible number still flows at Ziff Davis? I also wonder what the people who publish Red Herring as a "New" magazine were thinking about with this recent print launch. Magazines for tech coverage are like the horse and buggy manufacturers taking on Henry Ford, Alfred Sloan and Walter Chrysler and the auto industry in the early part of the twentieth century. Magazines in the tech field belong in museums.
And besides the fact that they're dreadfully out of date 2mins after you've got it home they just *feel wrong* to me.
Magazines are disposable media but when you can get up to date info from blogs and tech sites on the web why would you bother? What's more immidiate and disposable than a blog?
Nick
The information in these magazines is dated by the time it is published because of the speed of Internet publishing.
Alan,
I agree with your points, but would also add that books like PC Mag and PC Week were hit with a “perfect storm” by the Internet combined with other factors. In addition to the content being fresher on the Net, it’s also free; a factor I see you stress in previous posts regarding WSJ and others. PC Mag is a paid circulation book. While PC Week is a trade book, both books have been hit with an almost catastrophic erosion of their potential advertiser universe. PC Week lost the dot com vaporware ads while PC Mag, in addition to losing software stalwarts like WordPerfect and Lotus, also lost “PC’s.” I see where Gartner has just predicted that three of the ten leading PC manufacturers will be out of the market by 2007. I’d be hard-pressed to quickly name ten to begin with.
While tech books may represent the canary in the gold rush, I see similar challenges resulting from a combination of the Net and corporate consolidation across a wide variety of industrial sectors. These challenges are affecting not only publishing, but also tradeshow and conference models and pricing as well. And certainly creating “interesting times” for all participants in these fields.
What about Red Herring? They are revving their engines with a new print mag. They seem to be targetting Asia too with hiring of teams across Asia (and Europe) for editorial content. Why would they launch a print mag when others are closing shop? Does Alex at Dasar know something we do not? And is it significant that he is focusing on Asia tech news (China in particular) while others like Cnet, Wired, and internet.com are pulling out? Questions for us all to ponder...