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.
Mark Seibel, The Washington Post’s technology policy editor, is retiring. Seibel supervised coverage of technology,…
Unionized journalists behind The New York Times’s Wirecutter have unanimously approved a new three-year contract.…
Chase Rogers, who covers transportation for the Austin American-Statesman, is moving to the Dallas Morning…
Studies show a negative bias in U.S. coverage of the economy and gas prices, particularly…
Bloomberg Law has hired Aruni Soni to cover intellectual property law. She most recently has been a…
Robert Libetti, an executive producer for The Wall Street Journal where he leads video…