There’s been a lot of talk lately about the imminent demise of the print media. With the economy in the toilet, subscriber bases shrinking, advertising rates declining, and demographic shift moving many publications’ readers ever-older with no younger readers to replace them, it’s looking grim. Some cities will be losing their only daily newspaper. Even the New York Times is in danger of going bankrupt. Even with advertising rates putting pressure on net-based publications, online publishing is here to stay. Is there room in this world for printed tech publications?
Back in the pre-internet days, magazines, newsletters, and catalogs were a very important part of the computing world. They were the computing enthusiast’s lifeline to what was happening, along with various computing clubs and user groups, where computer users swapped disks and ideas. Being a computer user back then was an uncommon and sometimes-lonely life. But from the time that a few university and corporate users started to push the boundaries of the early internet, and the first modems came screeching to life, letting geographically-dispersed geeks connect on BBSes, thus began the information revolution. Once the internet started to go maintream in the mid nineties, the reason for many of the computer-oriented publications to exist started to evaporate.
The zines and newsletters went first, cheerfully replaced by newsgroups and web sites. Then the popular print magazines started dropping off. Byte ceased publication in 1998. InfoWorld in 2007. PC Magazine in 2008. Some print magazines (or their corporate parents’ substitutes) survived a migration to the web, some didn’t. Mail order vendors have been happy to steer their business to the web — but haven’t really loved the way that decreased barriers to entry have increased competition and driven prices down — but the printed computer parts catalog is now mostly dead, and largely unmourned.
Two separate phenomena are contributing to the changes in the tech media landscape: first is the information revolution, which has made publishing cheaper, easier, completely interactive, and more instantaneous. But less obvious is the effect that the mainstreaming of computing is having on the tech media. Back in the 70s, there were very few computer users, and they were highly technical. They pretty much had to write their own software, and in many cases build their own hardware too. As time went on, computing became more accessible, and more popular, and users became more insulated from the traditional computing experience. There are more hard-core technical computer enthusiasts now than there ever were, but there are also now hundreds of millions of ordinary computer users. Computing news, at least the more superficial stuff, is now of mainstream interest. Also, since computers can be used for so many things, the definition of a “computer enthusiast” is now divided into dozens of subcategories (programmers, gamers, musicians, photographers, Facebookers). In short, we’re in a world that’s tailor-made for the web, and a challenge for the print media.
Let me just chime in here to discuss my biases. I’ve never been much of a newspaper reader, but I’m a dedicated magazine fan. I’m a fanatical news junkie, and spend at least a couple of hours every day catching up on the day’s news and views online. But I get the most pleasure by sitting on the couch with an old fashioned dead tree magazine and reading a mixture of short and long-form news and analysis. This love affair with the periodical started in childhood with National Geographic World and Boy’s Life. In high school, I loved Popular Mechanics and Omni. In my adult life, political and business news gained importance, and I’ve become a dedicated fan of The Atlantic Monthly and The Economist. I rely on the internet for most of my technology and science needs, and the only tech-oriented print magazine I still read is Wired.
Where Wired fits into this landscape is a worthwhile thought experiment. The internet’s immediacy and ability to target thousands of micro-niches make it perfect for breaking daily news and discussions of problems and solutions. But many people don’t like to read long-form prose on a computer screen, and even with the Kindles and eBook readers on the horizon, this is unlikely to change for a while. Wired’s focus on long narrative stories and investigative pieces on general interest technology and science subjects plays to a print magazine’s strengths. To expand on that idea, publications that focus on timely but not time-sensitive, long form analytical or investigative pieces are probably best prepared to weather the coming apocalypse.
Early in OSAlert’ history, we considered creating a print publication as a sister to the online version. This was based on two realities: print tech magazines were still widely read (due mostly to short-term inertia, it turns out), and the advertising world was still firmly focused on print advertising campaigns, making advertising in print much more lucrative than on the web. In hindsight, we made the right decision not wasting our time making a printed OSAlert. Readers have adjusted their habits, and advertisers have largely come around, though online publishing is still vastly less profitable by circulation than traditional publishing was in its glory days. (Alas!)
So what lies in the future for computing and technology publishing? I believe that the shakeout is mostly complete. The internet is a far superior medium for most technology content. As fondly as we may remember the defunct tech pubs of the past, their time is gone, and we would never give up the news sites, forums, and blogs of the present, with all their benefits. A few printed publications will survive, especially the ones that lend themselves to being read for pleasure while lying on the couch or sitting on the can. But the aesthetic of the computing subculture of the past is gone largely because computing is now part of the mainstream culture, like it or not.
Most papers are now owned by a handful of people/companies and they all have about the same political slant.
Something similar happened in the tech media. It didn’t have anything to do with political slant, but during the eighties and nineties, there was a lot of consolidation of tech magazines into a few big media conglomerates. I think it’s possible that this consolidation made the various tech magazines too-similar and also hindered them in being able to change quickly enough to stay relevant.
Afterall, people still need something to read while on the crapper
“Afterall, people still need something to read while on the crapper
“
Why do You think, netbooks are so damned popular?
Edited 2009-01-19 23:05 UTC
Just remind me never to borrow your netbook, ok ?
… Or to borrow you mine
Anything ephemeral or non-essential is at risk in times like these because it is the easiest to cut back on. Imho, traditional newspapers and tech publications will eventually have to go far, far upmarket to survive. The net does basic news, reviews and instant opinionating (blogs, e.g.) far better than print, so in order to get anyone to actually buy your printed publication you are going to have to offer sophisticated, thoughtful opinions by seriously well qualified people and essays so detailed they could almost be papers.
Everything else – the moron stuff involving paparazzi, cheapo sports reporting and showbiz – will morph into freesheets and crappy websites. Since those upmarket publications will have relatively small markets, the whole traditional print/news industry will vanish too, I suppose.
I don’t see books going West, though. I think people have a hunger for story-telling and connectedness that is almost a primal instinct, and so essential. No one has yet invented anything that does it better, though the medium may well change in the next couple of decades with much better (and affordable) electronic books and print-on-demand for those who still want paper.
In my case, I still prefer trade paper backs over e-books. Even comics, I prefer flipping thru pages. Nothing beats a Sunday morning on the porch with a book, coffee and cigars, he he he.
What I’ll miss about the old publications is their isolation. A single journalist would write a long article on his own and it would be published in solitary glory. The thinking of one man presented for your consideration. Maybe in a month, there’ll be one or two letters on the subject of sufficient quality to print. Or maybe not.
These days every article is linked to half a dozen other articles about the same thing. And at the end you get endless, witless comments from dumb bastards like me, who pick the article apart or just shout their own tangential passions.
And then there’s advertising. At least with magazines, adverts don’t appear magically from the very words of the article. At least they weren’t animated.
Navigation of a magazine was good too. You didn’t need to surround every article with information about what else the magazine had to offer, because the reader had the very pages in his hands. You knew there was other stuff in there and you knew how to find it.
Oh, and magazines had better graphics.
Yes, there’s a lot to be said for the old media when you think about it.
I completely agree with you.
Paper magazines are more comfortable to read and have better layout.
Maybe a paid subscription on some websites would resolve the problem of the crowded advertising.
I was so sad when Windows Magazine stopped publishing, they don’t even have Internet archives
I don’t want print media to die, they have high standards of writing, mostly, better than any regular blogger.
Magazines and newspapers is still where the quality is. I read a fair number of blogs and other online news sources and I’ve yet to see anything which comes even close to matching the quality of the better articles in for example the Economist or the Financial Times. The quality of the writing and the level of journalism is atrocious on far too many blogs.
That is not to say all print is better than all online sources, far from it. There are far too many magazines and newspapers out there that are shit. They will and should go bankrupt. I hope there is a special place in hell for people who publish magazines who’s articles consist of little more then press releases and advertising copy from their advertisers.
Still I actually find myself buying and reading more magazines and newspapers today than I did 3-4 years ago. The meteoric rise of blogs and similar sites has demonstrated very clearly how hard truly great journalistic writing is and how few are really good at it. I for one am more than happy to pay the few people who still know how to write really well.
I say good riddance. Modern print media isn’t succeeding precisely because it isn’t providing what people want. Let it die a natural death and let something else fill the void, that’s how society evolves.
Pretty much all print media projects a liberal point of view anyhow. People can’t relate, therefore they don’t buy. Provide something fresh and more ideologically balanced and you might have a chance.
“Liberal media”, right. Because there aren’t loads of business-oriented publications.
And, as it happens, almost all the newspapers and TV networks in the US are owned by convervative companies.
Hmmm, thats odd. I work as a desktop publisher for a local newspaper in west michigan and we’ve seen a steady increase in sales and circulation in the last 11 months. How strange.
Must have something to do with having competent writers and editors who actually make the local community’s input a priority in the publication. That and not being owned by a larger company that just wants to slap AP drivel on a page and call it news.