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The Perl Journal On The Ropes

Posted by pudge on from the help-me-obi-wan-perl-programmer dept.

rochlin writes "Looks like The Perl Journal might not make it up for air after all. This blurb is on their website. 'Time is running short and we need your help if The Perl Journal is to get another chance at being the real deal. As of a couple of minutes ago, we only have 881 subscriptions and the deadline is fast approaching. Please subscribe now. It only costs 3 cents per day to get the best Perl coverage anywhere.'" They need 3,000 subscribers to move forward.

5 of 164 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I've been at odds with CMP ever since BYTE by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    yea, right. Last time I paid for my Perl journal subscription, they got sold to earthweb, took my money and refused to send a magazine, refused to return calls, refused to return email. Why should I re-subscribe to a magazine thats till owes me a years subscription?

  2. How could it work? by ageitgey · · Score: 4, Interesting

    From the website:

    Well, sort of. We need your help. TPJ is totally reader supported. To provide TPJ to you, we need 3,000 subscribers. Bean counters and suits being what they are, our bosses won't let us publish the e-zine if we don't have enough subscribers. It's as simple as that.

    3,000 readers * $12.00 subscription = $36,000 yearly income before taxes and bandwidth costs.

    How could they survive on that? You couldn't even pay one decent perl programmer to write articles. Who is paying all the "bean counters and suits"?

    --
    Uninnovate - Only the finest in engineering.
  3. maybe expand coverage to Ruby and Python by raistlinthegreat · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Python and Ruby are becoming more and more popular. especially Ruby has many fans who came
    from a Perl background.
    maybe "The Perl Journal" should be a "Ruby, Perl, Python" Journal.

  4. Don't be so quick to show your rich tastes. by Inoshiro · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If you were living in Canada, that'd be over $55,000.

    To put this in perspective, you can live a decent life in a nice house that you are paying off for $18,000 a year (yes, that includes internet access, food, utilities, etc).

    Even after taxes you still have 10-15 grand to just piss away! I know that some US centres are very expensive to live in (NYC, Boston), but is everywhere in the US so damned expensive that you can't live on less than an appreciable fraction of a million dollars?

    --
    --
    Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
  5. old media model not working ... by beanerspace · · Score: 3, Interesting
    There is an interesting article over at HealYourChurchWebSite describing how a local newspaper in the D.C. area has turned from free content to subscription only access. In the blog, the author complains that the local paper suffers because the content is not compelling, but rather a rehash of AP and Washington Post stories.

    Could this be the problem with the Perl Journal? Are they really only offering a rehash of articles you can find at PerlMonks, PerlCircus and other online news/user sources? Look at two titles from Fall 2002.
    • Parsing RSS Files with XML::RSS
    • Does SOAP Suck?

    I mean, can't I get the same skinny the first topic from XML.com and the other from Scripting.com?

    Or is it because Perl itself has reached a plateu? I mean, other than ActiveState, who's doing anything innovative and hot with regards to Perl development tools on a commercial basis? I mean aside from the obligatory Shareware editors?

    Perhaps it because much of the "action" is occuring in the Open Source arena, such as the CPAN and SourceForge that leave the Perl Journal much less to write about than they did 10 years ago?

    I mean I'm sorry to see it go, but I can't honestly say I'm going to be handicapped without it.

    --

    healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?