RIP: The Perl Journal

mbadolato writes "I'm surprised this hasn't been reported yet. Over at use.perl they're reporting that when the current issue of SysAdmin comes out, this will be the last installment of The Perl Journal. It's a shame. TPJ originally was stopped as a stand-alone, but was then included into Sysadmin. Now that's going too. We all owe a big thanks to all the contributers, and to Jon Orwant, for providing us a great resource in TPJ over the years."

Comments

Periodicals are advertising supported...

[Anonymous Coward]

...and advertising revenue is directly proportional to the receptiveness of the target audience. An audience more impressed by colors and pictures - in other words, less so than by actual information - means more total advertising revenue, and more available revenue means more players in the market.

This is why you don't see many print periodicals for serious work tools (*BSD, Perl, GCC) and you see mountains of them for toys (Windows, .NET, Visual Basic).

This isn't sad news. It simply means that the Perl community's priorities are where they belong.

Re:Periodicals are advertising supported...

[Sargent1]

Advertising revenue is directly proportional to the audience of the magazine and its demographic makeup. A distant third, barely visible on the horizon, is the audience's perceived receptiveness to advertising.

You mention that there are mountains of magazines for "toys" such as Windows, .Net, and VB, and insinuate that that's because people there like ooh pretty shiny things over content. I counterclaim that a) it's because the audience for such magazines is vastly larger than that for *BSD, Perl, or GCC, leading to far more advertising revenue than is possible for a magazine centered on any of the latter three things, and b) the size of the audience is in large part determined by how little most people are willing to pay for documentation about Open Source software. "I can always just read the man pages or check Google and Google Groups. Why would I pay for a print magazine?"

To top it off, what advertisers are going to be buying ad space in your hypothetical GCC magazine? "Richard Stallman, live and uncensored, on the hot new tape, When Gurus Go Wild!"

It's not about content versus pretty pictures; it's about audience size and how much of that audience is willing to pay for things.

Re:Periodicals are advertising supported...

[pmz]

It's not about content versus pretty pictures; it's about audience size and how much of that audience is willing to pay for things.

I still agree with the parent post. Most technical print magazines have very little useful content. The only reasons I keep a magazine subscription going is to know what the buzzwords-of-the-month are and to see what the hot-products-of-the-month are. In this respect, the advertisements are actually the content.

Quite honestly, if I were to take the things I see in a magazine seriously, I would have a record number of failed projects that no one else can maintain to claim responsibility for. The fact is, if a magazine publishes something as a bold-faced headline, odds are that technology is so immature or vaporous that it will disappear into obscurity before I even understand what it is. This is true for nearly any technology domain, regardless of which company is backing the brand names and acronyms.

Conclusion: magazines are good for buzzwords and "the bleeding edge", but look elsewhere for things on which one can risk a reputation.

Perhaps...

[ldopa1]

Perhaps the reason that nobody has reported it is that very few people read it in the first place, and as such, very few people care.

This may also be the reason that they aren't going to be continuing with the journal in the first place, don't you think?

I doubt few people lamented the end of the Ultrix journal....

No Real Surprise

[elmegil]

I think part of the problem is that Sysadmin did their best to offend the TPJ subscribers they inherited.

• Content was somewhat redundant, with perl articles in the Sysadmin section as well as the TPJ section.
• Only 3 or so real TPJ articles every other issue (at least it seemed pretty sparse) as opposed to the 8 or more in the old TPJ.
• Most damning, if Sysadmin treated everyone like they did me.... As soon as the two merged I was inundated with snail-mail spam. Eventually I figured out that some code on the address meant it came from Sysadmin, and I called and complained. They told me I could opt out, why was this a problem? At least I got opted out and the flow had slowed way down since then.

I had already renewed my subscription (boy do I regret that doubly now) but wasn't planning on renewing again anyway. Not because TPJ wasn't wanted, but because what I was getting in Sysadmin wasn't really TPJ any more, and Sysadmin itself isn't of any interest or use to me and they abused the relationship.