Posted on 04/13/2007 1:33:24 PM PDT by Paleo Conservative
Tom Shea, writing in these pages 25 years ago, had it almost right. His article “Subscribe to Magazines with your Microcomputer” in January 1983 described Publishers Aide — a “magazine subscription fulfillment” company that planned to let home computer users “key … in a code” to access subscription data from the company’s IBM mainframe. “I believe magazines will, in time, be computerized,” Publishers Aide President Michael Ciuffreda told our readers. “You’ll just go buy a tape that you’ll display on your TV screen when you want to view it. It will then become a permanent part of your library.”
Not bad for an article written before the advent of a public Internet, the World Wide Web, or e-commerce. Sure, “magazines on tape” sounds a bit like something Alaska Senator Ted Stevens (who famously described the Internet as a “series of tubes”) might have come up with. But the idea of connecting to readers online is there, as is the notion of using technology to streamline manual processes. And that thought process leads directly to the current state of affairs, in which online publications, now including InfoWorld, are supplanting their print counterparts.
At this point, hardly anybody argues that online publications are transforming the publishing business and causing headaches for traditional media companies. One look at the financial statements of media firms such as Gannett or The New York Times, which are struggling amid declining readership and eroding print ad revenue, says all that needs to be said.
The question that’s harder to answer is “Why is it happening?” And that’s the question we set out to answer in this, our final print edition.
It’s no surprise to InfoWorld readers that one of the most important things that “happened” was technology.
You can see the first inklings of the coming content revolution in that same 1983 issue of InfoWorld, where Derek Wise reviewed Wordvision, a $50 word processing program for the PC that was “designed to be sold in bookstores and needs no vendor support.” At a time when putting out a weekly magazine still required typesetters who could work with the ATEX publishing system, paste-up artists who assembled typeset copy and art, and photo editors who obtained photos for print, inexpensive desktop tools such as Wordvision were starting to put the power to publish into the hands of ordinary people.
In time, desktop publishing tools such as word processors and, later, e-mail and digital photography, transformed the business. They obviated expensive, specialized systems such as ATEX and empowered reporters to do more of the work of producing the magazine, said Dante Chinni, a former Newsweek reporter and a senior associate who researches the magazine industry for the Project For Excellence in Journalism. “Those little things changed the economics of the magazine business, but we adapt very quickly and forget how different things really are,” Chinni said.
With its deep ties to the technology community, InfoWorld was quicker to embrace those changes than most. Our magazine had been “on-line” since at least April 1983, when it announced a deal with Compuserve to place weekly software reviews on their system.
“It’s an experiment in the future,” said Editor in Chief Maggie Canon at the time. “We realized that is where the future is — electronic publication.”
But a controlled, subscription-only environment such as Compuserve couldn’t fully prepare InfoWorld, or any publication, for the tidal wave of change that would sweep over the publishing industry in the early 1990s with the advent of the World Wide Web, which made text and graphical content available to anyone with a Web browser.
The Web transformed both the way information was transmitted, and readers’ expectations for it, said Sree Sreenivasan, a professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.
Still, in the past decade, magazines and newspapers with both print and online components clung to processes that were designed around the rigid requirements of print publication, rather than flexible “always on” nature of the Internet, said Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University and creator of NewAssignment.net.
Given the expensive proposition of having to maintain parallel print and online operations that serve different needs and the continued high cost of print publication, countless magazines and newspapers have been forced to consider abandoning print altogether.
More recent refinements in online information delivery, such as RSS (Really Simple Syndication), have accelerated the transformation of news consumption among readers. RSS — which allows Internet users to subscribe to news feeds from various Web sites, then aggregate them on the desktop — lets readers zero in on specific topics that interest them and filter out the rest.
In the same vein, technologies such as RSS have empowered a new generation of self-publishers — bloggers — to democratize the reporting process and provide readers with direct access to subject experts without the filter of editors and reporters. And some of those blogs have established competitive brands with substantial readerships, using nothing more than a PC, an Internet connection, and some free software to challenge established magazines and newspapers.
But technological change is nothing new to the field of journalism — and nothing to be feared, Rosen said.
“From the very first, journalism has been about communicating ideas across big territories. Technology — whether it be Roman roads or the global Internet — has always been part and parcel of the profession. That means when technology changes, journalism has always been forced to change, too.
“Journalism is an old practice that keeps getting rebuilt because the technology for doing it keeps changing,” Rosen said.
The print version folded, but the company is still covering and publishing the news. It’s not dying, it’s just changing how it does it’s work. This is an entirely different situation from what the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, etc. are facing.
But the article goes on to talk about how many of the old media news outlets are having trouble.
John C. Dvorak, Robert X. Cringely, ...
Thanks for the trip down Memory Lane.
I remember when the NY Times hired someone to write columns about computers. Then they went over to columns about the internet. For a year or two, it was actually helpful. I was playing around with a beta version of Mosaic at the time, I think something like version 0.7, and it didn’t really work very well or very easily.
Then there was PC Magazine, PC Computing, PC World, and many others, which were also useful for learning about all thise new stuff that was constantly coming out.
I got into word processing, because it was much easier to write books and articles on a word processor than a portable typewriter, or even the IBM selectric which I regretably bought a year before I got rid of it in favor of a Kaypro. And then there were those early DOS games, long before the appearance of Mario.
The Times ceased to publish its columns, probably about the time that I, a nonprofessional reader, realized I knew more about the field than their “expert” did, whose name I now forget. Gradually all the PC mags have faded, too.
I still have several articles from the magazines you mentioned plus from InfoWorld on file. In their time they were a very important source of information about equipment and software. Being the head of an IT department I had to keep reasonably current with new stuff, discontinued stuff, bad stuff, etc. They were my prime source of such type of info.
Nowadays you can get 100 times the data and info on a product almost immediately when it is released, not the four or five months lag time from introduction to printing with the magazines. InfoWorld was faster being in a newspaper type environment but it still would be several weeks after an introduction.
Sad to see them go but I don’t miss them.
I must say their demise was not because of the Dinosaur Death Watch. They are gone totally because of the change in technology, not because of any bias, prejudice, or outright fraud the way most existing paper media is.
For example: I happened across the May 5, 2007, issue of the New Yorker while getting a haircut. Their lead story was all about how much better the world would be today, environmentally, climate wise, peace wise, standard of living, health wise, education wise, you name it, if only the will of the people had been followed in 2000. The article even went on to say that AlGore and company knew of the impending attacks on 9/11 and if they had been in power they might have been able to prevent them. My question is why didnt they let somebody know about them before hand.
There I got that off my chest. Thank you.
There's another article in the last dead tree issue of InfoWorld about the environmental impact of print publishing.
Magazines vs. the environmentTraditional print publishing takes a heavy toll on our little blue-green planet
Ted Samson
April 02, 2007
Companies today are wrestling with a conundrum: How do they cut costs and reduce environmental impact while maintaining — or even sharpening — their competitive edge?
For some organizations, technologies such as virtualization are the answer. For the publishing industry, the answer is the Internet. And as online use continues to swell, publishing companies (including InfoWorld parent IDG) are increasingly embracing the medium as a way to achieve their business objectives of delivering information to readers efficiently and inexpensively. Reducing environmental impact is a welcome side benefit.
Make no mistake: The world of traditional print publishing takes a heavy toll on our planet, much of which derives from the energy involved in simply cranking out paper. According to a 2002 study by the Energy Information Administration, a division of the U.S. Department of Energy, the paper industry emits the fourth highest level of carbon dioxide among manufacturers, after the chemical, petroleum and coal products, and primary metals industries.
Moreover, as reported in October in The New York Times, Time magazine found that an average issue was responsible for creating about a quarter pound of greenhouse gas emissions. Compounding the damage, weekly magazine subscriptions generate an average of 90 pieces of mail in the form of renewal notices, premiums, and the like, according to the U.S. Postal Service.
Yet paper usage is just the tip of the waste-berg. Delivering tens of thousands of magazines from the publisher to subscribers’ mailboxes means adding more weight to the post office’s fuel-burning planes and trucks. With gas prices increasing year after year, it’s no surprise USPS raised magazine shipping rates last year by 5.4 percent.
In short, InfoWorld’s move to an online-only publication makes a world of sense, not just from a business perspective, but from a sustainability standpoint.
And while being kinder to Mother Earth wasn’t among the top-of-mind reasons for the move, it’s a healthy by-product — one that companies struggling with issues of efficiency and resource management can surely appreciate.
NO, quite right. I transfer my bookmarks from one computer to another, and occasionally I weed them out when they no longer point to anything. There are still a few online PC magazines, although information tends to be scattered around a lot more, and you find it mostly through Google or sites like BetaNews.
The print magazines were very helpful in the early years. The pivot point was when it became routine to find stuff on the internet and not to have to wait half an hour for it to download.
I confess I don’t know how they will continue to make profits, since I personally use an ad blocker. But hopefully they will survive in one way or another. And there’s a fair amount of free information out there from people who are simply trying to be helpful, or who like to talk about tech on the net.
I worked as a sysop for CompuServe for a number of years, even though I’m not a professional techie, also as a beta tester. My motive, basically, was that those were good ways to keep up with the field and to make some return on the help that others gave me.
Dr. Dobb's was great!
Now all the magazines suck.
That's the polite word.
If people wonder,
Tom Pittman is still alive!
Here is his website!
If they can get some of that old spirit back on their revamped web site, more power to them. But they only had themselves to blame for their dead-tree edition going under.
Somewhere around here I've got an old copy of "The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog" from around the same period, 1993-94 or so. Several hundred pages on how to use Gopher, Usenet, FTP, MCI Mail, WAIS, telnet, etc ... and maybe 15 pages right near the end about how to access that newfangled "World Wide Web" that may or may not amount to something one day. :)
(And I seem to recall that even most of that section was about how to use Mosaic to read newsgroups and access FTP sites.)
That's what my brother thinks about it. It used to have articles about topics that were important about computers. In the last five years its become mostly a listing of IT projects at Fortune 500 companies. They took no interest at all in small business computing. The online renewal application's smallest budget listing per item was something like $49,999 or less. I don't think our budget ever got to that level in total.
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