McCracken writes, “Pretending that the internet didn’t exist sounds like a preposterous strategy for keeping a print magazine alive, but it somehow worked. Maximum PC and MacLife survived—scrawny, but with a pulse—until 2023. Their final issues were 98-page weaklings that cost $9.99 apiece and seem to have a grand total of one page of paid advertising between them—plus an article sponsored by a mail-order computer dealer. MacLife has an editorial acknowledging it’s going digital-only; Maximum PC does not.
“Should we mourn the end of computer publications printed on paper? No—and yes. What was great about the computer magazine age wasn’t that the information was printed on dead trees and delivered by truck once a month. In most respects that matter, the web is a far superior way to keep people informed about the technology in their lives.
“But as timely and efficient a means of communication as online media is, the entire computer publishing industry failed to figure out how to turn it into a business that was remotely as vibrant as print had been. And those vast quantities of full-page ads paid for some amazingly ambitious service journalism.”
Read more here.
Dow Jones & Co., the parent of The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, MarketWatch.com and Investor's…
The Wall Street Journal is seeking a White House reporter in Washington, DC, to break…
Ben Pershing, the politics editor of The Wall Street Journal, is leaving the news organization.…
New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn sent out the following on Friday: A January 2010 front…
Brent Jones, the senior vice president of training, culture and community at Dow Jones, is…
The Wall Street Journal is looking for an editor to lead its coverage of logistics…