Goodbye to all that
An entire category fades away...Issue #93
More years ago than I’d ever care to admit, I walked into my very first grown up adult apartment carrying a large box of magazines. It was my third week on the job and first time working without a trainer. The company I worked for, a publisher owned national magazine and book distributor, sent me a box of samples to carry around my five state territory to use on my sales pitches.
One of those titles was a magazine called Computer Shopper. No, this wasn’t the Manhattan phone book sized Computer Shopper of the pre-WiFi era. This was the pre-Ziff-Davis hobbyist only Computer Shopper. It was tabloid sized and printed on a yellowish newsprint. It had a cover price that was low, even for the times. To make the sale even more difficult, it was being offered to magazine wholesalers and retailers by the smallest and least appreciated (ie: respected) national distributor. Point in fact: One of our best selling titles was a word search title called Find A Word.
So you can imagine, getting a buyer to see its potential was not so easy.
Fast forward ten years and I am now an independent consultant. My biggest and most successful client is the magazine publishing behemoth, Ziff-Davis. They have shed all their non-technology titles and are ensconced in a large building in mid-town Manhattan. The biggest title, the magazine that all of the wholesale buyers are asking me for is Computer Shopper. The headline when I phone in new orders every week is: “More Computer Shopper. More PC Magazine. More PC/Computing. More everything Z-D.”
Until it wasn’t. During that time we launched some incredibly successful titles like Computer Gaming World, PC/Computing and Yahoo! Internet Life (Seriously, it was very successful early on). We grew the computer gaming category. But time caught up to us and sales fell away as the technology changed, the web became more accessible, and the newsstand business dried up like so many shallow tidal pools.
Read on below to see former PC World* editor Harry McCracken’s ode to the end of the line for computer magazines here in the states.
*: PC World was a pretty big competitor to PC Magazine
one__The end of computer magazines in the US (Wait…didn’t that already happen?)
Maximum PC and MacLife magazines will continue on in a ghostly digital format. But their print editions will be gone effective with the start of this month. This is the somewhat sad and quiet end to what was once an incredibly busy, diverse and profitable category.
As the author, Harry McCracken writes:
Computer magazines had been such a robust business that they could spend years dwindling and remain viable. PC Mag didn’t abandon print until 2008, shortly after I left PC World. Shopper followed the next year. PCW held on until 2013, whereupon I wrote a piece for TIME asserting that the era of the computer magazine had ended. (In retrospect, that was a tad premature.) Macworld made it to 2014.
Like McCracken, I take this a bit personally. Being a part of Ziff was an important part of my early career. Riding the up escalator of Shopper, PC Mag, PC/Computing was an extraordinary privilege.
But what goes up, will often come down. Hard. Check out the chart included in his article:
two__Paper Magazine lays off their staff
Founded in 1984, the notable fashion magazine made a splash in 2014 with the famous Kim Kardashian “Break the Internet” cover. The magazine was sold in 2017 to the ENTtech Media Group. In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, the print publication was halted.
"It was a surprise but deep down I felt something was coming," PAPER news editor Jade Gomez told Resident Advisor. The news came during their company-wide meeting that morning and was effective immediately, she explained. "Happens a lot in media sadly. Rug gets ripped out from under you. Honestly, everyone is still in shock."
Personally I hate to see these types of magazines fall away. But if the revenue’s not coming in and there aren’t enough fiscal buckets to rely on, the chance of survival is rather low.
Pro tip to magazine media publishers circa 2023: Have a lot of buckets. Preferably without holes in them.
three__Florida book banners now going after Nora Roberts
It’s a little hard to believe, but the school district in Martin County, FL has decided, after getting some pressure from a group called “Moms for Liberty,” to pull eight Nora Roberts books from their library shelves.
As the author herself was quoted:
“All of it is shocking,” Roberts told us. “If you don’t want your teenager reading this book, that’s your right as a mom — and good luck with that. But you don’t have the right to say nobody’s kid can read this book.”
According to the article in The Washington Post, what the book banners are going after now are modern Romance books. Roberts isn’t the only author they’re targeting. Apparently Jodi Picoult has seen her novels pulled from school shelves in the sunshine state.
four__WSJ Magazine editor resigns, no word on a replacement
Is this the end of the line for the vaunted Journal insert? Hard to say. As the circulation and ad revenue shrinks at major US newspapers, we’ll probably see more papers deciding not to invest in weekly or monthly insert magazines. It’s a shame because the writing in these magazines is generally first rate. They are a wonderful way to enjoy a long read.
five__Ukrainian anti-invasion magazines defy Putin
You’d think that a country in the middle of an all-out war for their survival wouldn’t have time for things like books, magazines, a culture. But that does not seem to be the case with Ukrainians and their amazing defiance of Russia. It’s incredible that they’ve been able to hold out for so long. Equally incredible, in the face of all this, in much of the country, daily life continues.
When the war first broke out, I found and posted an article about how Vogue Ukraine continued to publish, but subtly shifted their focus. (Update: Vogue Ukraine has returned to print production for the first time this month!) In this case, The Guardian is reporting on a whole new crop of independent magazines that tell the story of life during war.
-Anna Karnauh, Editor in Chief, Telgraf Magazine
Your moment of Magazine Zen…
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That’s all I’ve got for you at the moment. I hope your week finds you well, your Slack is, well, slack, your in-box is manageable, and no one calls for a Friday 4:30 PM all team meeting. Just sayin’…
