Slashdot Mirror
Blogs Are Eating Tech Media Alive
Heinz writes with an article in Forbes on how advertising in tech media is drying up and going — where else? — into specialist blogs and Google. "Silicon Valley is booming again. But if you work in tech media, there's blood on the floor. Take Red Herring. It hung onto its offices after getting the eviction notice earlier this month. But gossip site Valleywag is breaking story after story not just on its beat — but about its woes. Meanwhile, bigger publications are hurting too: Time Warner's Business 2.0 saw ad pages drop 21.8% through March from the same period a year ago; PC Magazine's editor in chief walked out the door after ad pages fell 38.8% over the same period; and one-time online powerhouse CNET is reporting growing losses even as the companies it covers flourish. It may be happening in tech first, but there's no reason the same thing won't happen, eventually, in every media niche."
Look at Slashdot, they don't need no stinkin' editors.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Anytime I want to research something now, I go to the appropriate forum. There are serious experts available at pretty much all of them. e.g: Want to learn about cellphones: HowardForums.com. Want to find out about military firearms: ar15.com . There's a site for everything.
Blogs are great for some stuff, but forums are just killing the tech magazines, and the special interest stuff.
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
If, and I hate to use this term, new media has taught me one thing it's that any press but a journal is horrible for science and technology. Time and time again some reporter is sent out to cover pseudoscience, or thinly disguised ads, as if it was actual technological or scientific news. I'm convinced that watered down reporting, writing to a level that should be insulting to a middle school student, is one of the main causes for the publics ignorance and rejection of science. The public isn't stupid, and they know that the watered down analogies to the library of congress are bullshit. I'm only hoping that the websites that also speak to the public at a five year olds level will follow after and people will will find themselves presented with the actual facts of the matter again.
Everything will be taken away from you.
I've had it enough with mainstream media who are incompetent when they're not being corrupt.
I think the funniest part is when the tech media starts publishing most of their articles on the "weblogs" section of their site. Like InformationWeek's 2 recent lamentable and much trashed articles about GPLv3.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
As much as I hate advertising, this is probably a bad sign. Companies won't do less advertising - it works too well, but at least on CNET we know where (most of?) the ads are. Who is sponsoring this or that tech blog? We've already seen "scandals" like that, although blogs are mostly not journalism. It is probably a lot cheaper and effective to buy out a few blogs and get consistent long term shilling than it is to buy recognizable ads on a bigger site. It has consistently been safe to predict that in the future we will be subject to more and more marketing that is more pervasive and less recognizable than ever before. It never seems to end.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
Everybody with a blog is the world's foremost expert in whatever it is they're interested in today.
It doesn't matter whether you're a hardened and experienced veteran of the industry (any industry), or a 14-year-old who has read some magazine articles and chatted with 1337 d00dz. Fame will be yours.
Oh wait, what's that? Not even your mom will read your blog? Ah well, just keep "publishing" anyway. The whole Universe wants to hear about your Theory of Rap, or how that one girl in Biology class is hot and you just know she's gonna notice you this year.
Yep, blogs are the way of the future.
What do CNET and Business 2.0 offer beyond smart alec FUD columnists and advertiser-friendly reviews?
It was sad to see most of the serious newspapers dry up, leaving nothing but wire fed papers that write to a 4th grade reading level.
It was sad to see local radio stations dry up, leaving nothing but Clear Channel fed recordings from Texas.
However, I have few tears for crappy magazines and their equally vapid online "portals" that never offered much in the first place.
The real issue is that we've sold off the Fourth Estate to advertisers, and we have very little real journalism left. We're all fed our news from the same ~5 mega corps who own everything. We are not informed because we gave up our media to capitalism, which works well as a way to price widgets, but is not really very good at providing truth. It only knows how to provide marketing spin.
Bloggers could provide some respite, but the Internet provides little in terms of a reputation system. Anyone can shout down unpopular truths, and any group can astroturf their marketing messages. Few people who follow Digg or Reddit links verify the credibility of sources they visit.
We've traded our serious tradition of journalism for a cheap bit of daily entertainment from who knows where and a media buffet prepared by a market driven media.
The fact that the least fit portions of our capitalist replacement for journalism are struggling to survive should be expected. The fact that our media is being run like a free market is the real story.
RoughlyDrafted Magazine
The reason these ads are moving to the blogs is because the readership is at the blogs. The reason the readership is there is because bloggers are picking apart opinion pieces throughout the editorial world and reshaping them by arguing against their positions. Thus, readership is fleeing commercial journalism because the commercial rags aren't offering what readers want.
What do readers want? These days, a little fucking truth would help. I think we're all sick of the clear commercial bias inherent in all these supposed tech reviews and bullshit 'secretly sponsored opinion'. The same is happening in professional news. TV and cable news viewership is down. WAY DOWN. Why is that? Because they don't offer news.
When these 'tech journals' hire a few more reporters and start publishing real news, you'll see their readers and advertisers follow right back. Because, frankly, the blog-0-sphere offers no substantial news reporting either.
99.999999999% of blogs do nothing but spam ads and storys on /. and clog the fuck out of my google searches. they contribute nothing but useless opinions. i doubt blogs are what's killing the media, it's more likely the media themselfs. they don't anyone to kick their ass's. all my information comes from forums and online chat channels where i can talk to real pro's.
No way the interwebs will take THAT away from me.
Recycle PCs and build a wireless community network www.hillsborough.org.nz
This highlights that their primary business is not writing and selling tech articles to readers, but selling advertisement space.
I stopped reading computer mags back in early 1999 when one of the CDNET rags compared the latest Netware release to the features Microsoft was promising to include in Windows 2000 the next year. A news source that is less trustworthy than Usenet simply does not deserve to live. And frankly, if I can get three drug-addled Usenet trolls to endorse a product, I'm more likely to buy it than on the recommendation of PC Magazine.
A few years ago, Upside magazine went bust. Since I own Downside, I looked into buying their domain, but the assets of Upside were eventually acquired by another tech publishing firm. The article didn't mention Upside, although they mentioned The Industry Standard and Business 2.0, which also tanked.
We also lost Silicon Valley's newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News. It's been purchased by an outfit that runs cheesy suburban throwaways, and is being brought down to that level. It's still published, but nobody cares.
And Murdoch is buying the Wall Street Journal. Soon, there will be very few information sources that actually go out and dig out news.
I read through 3/4ths of a website about traditional Japanese swords before I realized it was nothing but a shill for a line of Chinese reproductions sold by the website author. What's funny is that a lot of the information was legitimate. I probably would've bought one of his products if I hadn't felt like I had been conned.
Tech media sites try to appear fun and hip, and people don't want flashy gimmicks when they just want answers. Just look at Cnet, unless you focus on it, it looks like a gigantic mess of text and banner ads. If Tech Media wants to make a comeback, they need to show clear and concise communication, and throw out the distracting crap that they litter the site with. Cnet would be much more popular if it just had a design similar to Slashdot's.
It's a type of Parrot you dolt
I, for one, welcome our blog-spewing overlords!
No, wait -- that's not what I mean at all. In fact, I mourn the loss of proper technical journalism in the world. Nobody bothers actually reviewing a product, or rendering an original opinion anymore.
Instead, we get twelve pages of ads, with only sixteen paragraphs of whitewash, er, ahem, content spread amongst them.
I miss seeing reviews produced by competent and well-qualified people about things other than the latest 7800GTX repack. Just try to find useful comparison information on printers, monitors, keyboards, or even simple mice. These products are the human interface for the machine and are therefore among the most important facets of it, but unless it's twice as expensive as it should be and is intended for a child's gaming rig then there will be no reviews of it in the blogs.
There's a thousand disparate e-commerce reviews to wade through, sure, but at least they're typically honest. Blog entries (if you can find one related) all lack any semblance of depth or integrity.
The dead-tree derivatives like C|Net and the remains of Ziff-Davis aren't any better these days, as they flail about trying to copy their blog competitor's attention-deficit formatting and lack of editorial oversight, managing only to add more misery to their already inevitable death.
Absolutely nobody ever bothers setting up repeatable tests for comparative measurement of anything in this century unless it can be done in the form of a Quake benchmark. And even then, products offering 1-2% gain for the low-low price of $200 more than everything else in the review are proclaimed to be the "clear winner" by some spineless high-school kid who is afraid to write a bad review for fear that XFX or MSI or whoever will turn off the free hardware spigot in retaliation.
The fact that I find Amazon and Newegg customer reviews by the clueless masses to be some of the most meaningful and useful information available makes me feel like we've lost something important. It's probably gone forever.
I, for one, am not very happy about it.
Kid-proof tablet..
Whenever I run across a cnet page or similar tech news site (slashdot link, google search) I'm always disappointed. Usually everything they have to say could have fit in a paragraph but it's padded with out of context quotes and general fluff. It never tells me the interesting technical details I might want to know (say like kerneltrap summaries or wikipedia articles) nor does it present any well reasoned opinions that I might want to consider. Frankly the content is just so poor it's better to flail around until you run into the blog or other site that actually has something useful to say.
The problem with sites like cnet is that they can't decide who their audience is. If they want to pitch their writing to the general public then they probably should stick with reviewing the iPhone and stay far away from stories about Linus's comments on the GPL3 or the latest groklaw controversy but the mainstream media has that pretty well covered. On the other hand if they want to appeal to people who are more informed about this stuff then dumbing it down and spending the whole time giving context just won't work.
Maybe the problem is they hired journalism majors with a bit of tech knowledge rather than tech guys who can write reasonably. That's the right strategy for the NYT tech section not cnet. I dunno.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
most of the so called tech media simply is, that it is not tech media it is more business magazines with articles in between which are close on the border of rewritten ads. There are exceptions like the Sigs magazines or Dr. Dobbs but those wont get into problems anyway, the magazines like WindowsXXX Magazine and something alike are the ones getting problems. If I want to read ads I am not going to pay for it. All I can say is, bring serious content then the readers wont run away.
You'd think they'd learn from other media such as music and movies. You either adapt to the internet and reform your business model to include it, or you suffer the consequences.
Seriously, wake up and smell the javascript.
Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday July 17, @02:00AM
from the advertising-in-tech-media-is-drying-up dept.
CmdrTaco writes with articles from various specialist blogs covering the closing of Slashdot and its affiliates, due to the large decrease in ad revenue that has moved on to real blogs with commentary consisting of real substance and editorial content, instead of Soviet Russia, Netcraft, All your base, you must be new here, natalie portman, and other internet memes. Users will have two weeks to burn all their Karma, and subscribers will be priveledged to know that their remaining subscriptions will pay for the editors' unemployment.
> slashdot, memes, karmaburning, yes, no, wontsomeonethinkofthechildren (tagging beta)
The innerweb is a disruptive technology! Why didn't someone warn us?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I think the trend of print media succumbing to the "blogosphere" makes some sense for tech media like those discussed in TFA but I don't like where it's heading when it comes to the standard news print media.
I read articles in the New York Times and other major newspapers with a warm and fuzzy notion that the journalist that wrote the piece - even if not totally unbiased - has done some honest, well-funded research and has some authority on the topic at hand. If the news print media were to vanish and be replaced by endless streams of blogs filled with non-objective opinions I think we'd really be sunk.
Maybe a few major newspapers could continue to pull in enough online ad revenue to fund the kinds of journalism they can now, but many small market papers could not. We would then be stuck with an ever-shrinking pool of objective reporters giving us our news, and an exponentially growing pool of acid tongued, uninformed opinion spewers. Not to mention the fact that online crossword puzzles just aren't the same...
while [ 1 ]; do echo -n -e "\xe2\x95\xb$((($RANDOM&1)+1))"; done
Oh, never mind.
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
RSS helps sites by attracting busy people like me who don't have time to surf a dozen sites to find an interesting article. But at the same time it's killing them, because people like me surgically link in to read an article and then close the tab immediately, never so much as considering looking at other features of their site. (It probably doesn't help that I use adblock and overlay all Flash content with control buttons, but that's beside the point.)
I skim approximately three mainstream news sources, a handful of blogs and a few independent news sites for RSS headlines that catch my attention. I spend the rest of my online time reading select forums that are mostly inhabited by people who present what I believe to be intelligent/interesting discourse (yes, believe it or not, that *does* include Slashdot from time to time).
Guess how much time I spend surfing random links and going page to page within a site using their fancy ajax navigation elements? I don't know what the percentage is, but pretty close to zero. 40 page article about Nvidia's latest Geforce gizmo? Skip to conclusion, then go to three of their competitors' sites to see if they concur. There's just too much damn noise and information out there to do it any other way. I use RSS, del.icio.us and a few simple techniques to reduce the web into my own personal CliffsNotes. If I'm representative of any significant segment of the population, then no wonder mainstream news sites are hurting.
The funny thing is that its founder Steve Ciarcia left then market leader Byte Magazine, because it was turning into an advertorial marketing rag. Guess which magazine no longer exists :-)
I don't think that trend is as strong in other parts of the world as it is in the US. Print media are for the most part losing readers and ad clients, but enterprises are rather conservative when it comes to ads online. Talking about Germany, I think we're at least five years behind. Online ad budgets are negligible compared to what is being done in the US. Unfortunately I don't have the latest number, I'm sure we're catching up.
Besides, I'd like to stress the importance of printed media. We still have a couple of good magazines and I'd hate to lose them because supposedly one print magazine can be replaced with a dozen mediocre websites. (PC Professionell, certainly one of the better ones, was recently discontinued while crap like Computerbild is doing fine.) It doesn't really matter whether the end product of good journalism is being published on dead wood or online, but good journalism costs money which you can't make online (yet). At least in some parts of the world.
I mean, the money has so completely destroyed tech media by turning into basically eternal corporate advertising. Even the little actual tech substance that was left has been rapidly drying up.
When was the last time you found out something new in a Ziff-Davis magazine? 1982?
They don't cover beryl and Ubuntu much, so there's nothing there interesting to read. I like blogs and youtube about stuff, though because it's not just advertising it's interesting and relevant.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Print and other traditional media are dying. Hell, even the coherent article is dying. Trouble is, What if you like to read material in that format? Plenty of mags have already bit the dust, and many more have been reduced to unreadable pap ("Games for Windows" is nowhere near the calibre of "Computer Gaming World" in 1990). And while some of bigger circulation giants seem to be holding up well, Like "Rolling Stone" and "Playboy" I worry even about their long term viability. At the very least, where is Rolling Stone going to recruit writers, or Gods of Rock help us, editors in 20, even 10 years? What's going to be left but the incoherent ramblings of Scruffy McBlogger and Ahab al Troll?
This has mystified me for ages. A monthly magazine can be something like three months out of date by the time it's published. It's not the Wireds and Red Herrings of the world that suffer from this so, but Computer World and PC User and such, who have to plan ahead for their reviews and for the component sales ads, who must have to make a prediction on how much they will have to charge in two months for volatile items such as memory. Either that or they are wasting their money on two page adverts which have been superceded by their websites.
I can only think that they must be there for the kind of CEO who still has his email printed off by his secretary every morning and who dictates replies on a dictaphone, but who still thinks that he needs to be on the cutting edge.
To be honest, I stopped reading computer magazines because of the sort of irrelevant ramblings that often appeared in them. While everyone can write a blog, ultimately only the ones that have any worth will be relevant, just as in printed media. Yes, it will come back to reputation.
I have no problem with this in principle, except for the fact that the blogs aren't often much of a source of original media output. For the most part, they are part of the digestive process, and so much of what we get through blogs comes through them from the original media in the first place, so as the original media degrades, so will the value of what comes through those blogs. This will give more strength to those blogs that do provide original research (e.g., http://dpreview.com/ a halfway point between blog and tech media), but as good reporting and good analysis is expensive, they will have to avoid suffering the same problems as the original tech media they are supplanting as they work their way down the food chain (here I think of blogs as being "higher" on the food chain in that they consume the text media and we consume them. They are essentially sitting between us and the tech media, which is sitting between us and the tech industry).
Yours is a reasonable opinion, but at the same time a little unfair. Take Slashdot, for example. Everybody is always complaining about the lack of editorial quality, yadda yadda yadda. But very few people recognize the fact that Slashdot doesn't break any news.
Slashdot is really a glorified blog. It aggregates news sources from all over, stories that its members think are interesting. But without the original sources that generate these stories -- media outlets who pay writers to produce stories -- outlets like Slashdot disappear.
You claim that readers want "a little fucking truth." Fair enough. But, by definition, Slashdot isn't in a position to generate anything but "a little fucking opinion." And you can't hate on it for doing so. That's what it's here for.
I spent three years as a senior editor at InfoWorld, and I certainly have a lot of criticisms to offer about the tech trade media industry. But I can say, with absolute certainty, that when trade media outlets like InfoWorld disappear you will all be sorry.
It goes against almost every fiber of my cynical being to say this, but your subject heading is full of shit. The problem is one hundred percent structural, zero percent editorial.
There has never been a tech reporter who has picked his baggy-eyed head up off a table and blurted out, "You know what? We need to do more stories about the iPhone." Not one. Editors might think that a 300-story onslaught about the iPhone sounds like a good idea, but only because we have people breathing down our necks, too -- people who are beholden to bullshit metrics like hit counts, which look a whole like hard statistics, but are infinitely less reliable than the reader surveys that they used to conduct on newspaper readers.
The good tech reporters who have stuck with this industry know what they're talking about. They write the stories that blogs like Slashdot link to. They might get it wrong from time to time -- fine. You're all there to call them on it. But they're still providing a valuable service.
What's really wrong with this industry is the same thing that's wrong with every industry -- the willingness to suck cock for money. If you're putting out a blog, and somebody offers you an opportunity to make a lot of money -- money, you gloatingly think, that won't be spent on a mainstream tech media outlet -- shame on you. The only reason that company was able to buy a story is because you sold it to them. Hope you brushed your teeth afterward.
You can pull a statistic out your ass that says the readership is all going to blogs. Fine. But can you really blame the management of the media outlets when they hear something like that? The answer is predictable: More blogs.
Blogs on blogs on blogs. It's great! Blogs don't cost us anything and readers trust blogs more than they do reporters, so screw the reporters' salaries and let's hire more bloggers. The answer is more corporate blogs. And folks like you eat it up.
Yeah, you heard me right. Is the media industry going to shit? Corporate media is on the blame list, for sure. But first on the list is you. Have you ever written your Congressman? Probably not. But even if you have, it's probably futile to ask that you write to your favorite media outlets and ask -- even beg -- them to cover real news, and not just fluff pieces and fake stories.
Media outlets cover bullshit because the metrics tell them that bullshit is what people want, plain and simple.
Hell, the only reason that I still read Slashdot (check out my user ID) is because the demographic of the stories is so narrow that I can guarantee that 5/6 of the stories posted are about something I'm at least slightly interested in. I bet that's not true for half the Slashdot readers, though.
Yes, the world of media is going to shit. Yes, I hate it. Damned if I can do anything about it on my own, though.
Breakfast served all day!
but with more fiber!
/.?
Seriously, though, at what point will ABC/CBS/NBC start running prime time news headlines ripped from
How many reports/blogs have we seen in the past few years are wildly inaccurate, just wrong, or completely blown out of all proportion? Astroturfing, bought studies, fanboyism.
I'm guessing that the blogs are so popular:
1) People go to blogs where they get to read stuff that agrees with their own ideas/attitudes
2) People don't want to spend time to read anything substantive (ie, RTFA)
3) Ok, this one is good- narrow focus on a subject that you want to learn about
4) We shall totally refrain from the topic of political blogs.
5) Main stream media can be/will be/usually are behind in reporting things that have been mentioned on blogs. Supposedly, main stream media does fact checking, plus camera shots, background, live shots, etc. With a blog, you can pretty much just type anything you want with no reprecussions (with the usual caveats)
I know that mainstream media is abhorrent now, but at least (again, supposedly) they do some background into seek before splashing the "bad news" over anyones' walls.
Cheers
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
I know why I stopped reading "tech media". Because each article is at least 10 pages long, and 90% of each page is ads. Get it through your heads. The internet does not require pages. Just shove all the info onto one page. A banner up top I can handle, one down the side I guess. Don't clutter our screen with ads and minimal content, and then whine when we stop reading.
Rags are losing ad revenue as they are losing readers.
They are losing readers because their content is shoddy as it is mostly about getting more advertisement hence corporate appeasement oriented.
So in wooing advertisers and making them happy tech mags lost readers... Bottomline they forgot their core business.
Ads may bring revenue, but ads come only when magazines sell. And magazines sell only on the back of good content. Ads are peripherals - they don't sell magazines. Content does.
If your magazine dishes a product the company will still advertise in your magazine as long as its circulation is high. Ads are not about good rep, its abt visibility.
Its the same with music or tv or movies... content has gone weak and so have sales.
People will not pay unless you give them good content. Corporate media houses seem to have forgotten this. They keep trying to sell what they want to sell instead of going out and finding out what people want to buy.
Movies and stories may paint people as drones that accept whatever is thrown at them, reality is far more different. People are not drones and they have limits to what shit they take.
a person maybe smart and people foolish, but people becomes persons when it comes to giving away money.
The article mentions that advertisers are moving from tech news advertising to search keyword advertising.
I've said it all along; "don't pollute the page with in your face cover the article advertisig" The flashing blinking text covering beeping roaring advertisements are the reason I pulled Flash out of one system by the roots. Now flashblock tames down intrusive advertising. When reading an article on an RIAA court case, I have no intrest in the new Dodge Pickup. It's a wasted advertisement.
When I am shopping for a product, be there in the yellow pages, the search engine (revelant results only) and other proper locations. If I want your product, I'll find you.
Just tonight I was searching for alarm monitoring. I was able to compare prices (varied widely) features (varied widely) and was able to narrow my search for the type of monitoring I needed (online latchkey monitoring by user + pages of events to my pager).
A banner ad for some cheezy X10 cam as a security solution just doesn't cut it anymore.
The downside is the online publications take a hit. Bummer.
The truth shall set you free!
Only tech news is so fragile that it can be conveyed by blogs. For other subjects (international analysis, arts, music, politic), most subjects treated are not really news. It might be for some readers but it's not the point. The editorial policies are what makes the content worth reading. Automatic RSS aggregators poorly replaces editors.
Personally, I find that even if I can customize to a point the content I get from the net, I got the huge problem of being spectator of what already interests me. I still have the curiosity to look out for new things that could interest me. My bookmarks or my subscribed feeds do a poor job for bringing me new sites (have you noticed how many blogs never change their subject and then die out of exhaustion ?).
Until there is a GoogleBot ready for handling the way I discover relevant intellectual information, I will need some human piece of advice. That's why journalists always were for I think. That's why they would stay. That started without an audience, I don't think audience is that relevant for journalism.
I read some comment saying that "paper press is dead". It's not. At least I seriously hope so. The ad-driven papers are suffering, I hope they will suffer more and more. Ad-free media has a price, pay for it if you can! Don't you think that ad-driven news will abuse you again, and again, and again, and again ... until the last drop of ink on earth will have been spent on attempting to make you buy something you didn't even think about before; on feeding you altered news; on conveying lies in the sole purpose of the interest of something or someone or some people that is not you, nor your family, nor your friends or anyone else for that matter ?
Cmp bought it (along with many other CompTech mags). Dismantled it. Then left the shit on the floor. I hate CMP Media. I hope CMP rots in Hell.
I haven't read magazines for over a decade except for individual articles pointed to by RSS.
This was because of three reasons:
1) Magazines were always late, you read about it somewhere else first;
2) Magazines don't have the best people. The best people are out there doing it, not reporting about it;
3) Their advertisers are equal to the subjects of their articles.
This all combined means I can read on dead tree or C|NET the not-so-critical article about Foo, by someone who has less expert knowledge about the subject, just after we finished discussing it on blogs or fora and moved on to the next subject. Yeah this is great.
Because of 2) I don't think there is much one can do about it, if you'd wish to. There are always better experts elsewhere. But if they want to try to salvage some, perhaps they should start by targeting other advertisers. Writing about Foo and wanting ad money from Foo doesn't combine well. But tech readers don't only spend money on tech stuff. For example, they have to shave, and many have to shave more regularly too. Seek Gillette, not Logitech or Novell, as advertisers. Then maybe we can start to trust them.
To fix 2, if it's possible, they should try to become respectable aggregators of expert content by buying articles from them, where ever they are, instead of having an inner circle of writers, employees or freelance, who are economical depending on them, and thus are no experts, or they would have had "real" jobs. The guy who wrote that excellent insightful comment on the tivo forum should write an article, not some guy in an office who just finished his latest ipod review. This could be interesting for both sides, as the forum guy now makes a buck of his content and moreover his piece has much more eyeballs and a wider audience (if things work out).
In the UK PC magazines have been closing in recent years at a fiendish rate although blogs or forums have just sped up something that was already happening.
Magazines go through cycles. When something new comes out or is changing in popularity, magazines flourish as people try to learn as much as possible about a subject. Then once things get to a point where said item is either so easy to use, you don't need help or becomes so mainstream people just accept the state of the art as is and don't bother investigating further.
The result is sales fall, ad revenue falls and the market consolidates and we're seeing that now in the IT press.
Previous victims include HiFi magazines - huge in the 70's and 80's when you could read all about fine tuning turntables, building concrete speaker stands and all that good stuff. Then CD and reasonably OK stuff for cheap came out and suddenly only real HiFi nuts cared - for most people an all-in-one set up was good enough. In the UK HiFi magazines went from a dozen and a half titles to 2 or 3 thin efforts.
Further back, we were awash with Microwave magazines, freezer magazines and so on. Once people became confortable with the products, they stopped buying them.
Most editors I've worked with since about 2000 reckoned IT mags in print were dead or about to be and it's surpring they've lasted as long as they have. You want reviews? Why wait a month - get it online the day it comes out. Help? Tutorials? it's all here for free on the web. The only real difference is the quality. Some websites go in to far more detail on a product than a magazine would ever bother but equally, general editorial tends to be better in a magazine where an editor has tidied up bad prose or woolly thinking.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
OH NOES! The market is evolving!!1 Customers are asking for different stuff and stuff!! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!!1111
Perhaps I'm alone in this, but I think the most basic reason is a lack of interest.
If I go to the local newstand, I'll see about 10 magazines containing PC-related drivel, 1 magazine containing MacOS related items, and about 4-5 Linux-related publications. Now, I'm a Linux and perhaps even to a degree, a MacOS user, so the PC-related magazines hold no interest, but I doubt I would like them anyway (they're the thickest but also the most content-sparse). None of the magazines except Linux Journal holds anything of interest for me, and even then -- its hardly interesting anymore. The content is simply obsolete by the time it hits print. I hardly ever see anything new, surprising, or otherwise containing value. Perhaps I'd like to review the IEEE journals again, I haven't seen them since my university years.
When I go to the newstand, I now pickup The Economist and, for lighter reading pleasures, Newsweek. Perhaps to people more closely following such events these too are obsolete, but they are a great suppliment to my daily reading of the BBC's RSS feed.
For technical knowledge, I've begun to simply glance over slashdot's rss feed, dive deeper into the subjects I'm already familiar with, and look for feedback from my users. The users tend to keep up on their own interests, and I get reports from them on whats the popular thing today. If my users mention something of particular interest, I'll research it or (if its of questionable interest) get someone to research it for me.
Then again, I might be in a minority -- perhaps there really is a strong market for these more trivial publications. Other than those I already own, I can rarely find technical books for sale at local outlets for which I hold an interest. For technical books, I've instead moved to looking at Amazon, pre-owned, and university bookstores where I can more easily find materials for my research (such as books on lambda calculus, set theory, writing compilers, x86 assembler, etc)
the people who read tech media are smart enough to block ads!
there, I just did your expensive study for free!
They're using their grammar skills there.
The distinction between the traditional sites and the blogs is the level of skill of the people writing the articles. If I'm looking for a well-written piece on a new product I've never seen or some comparisons between products, I'm going to hit the trade rags. If I'm actually using the product, though, there isn't a "journalist" in the world with the skills to help me use it right.
Similarly, if I want to know how to attract the hottest young ladies, I'll ask my 20-year-old cousin. If I want real sex advice, though, I'd ask my 45-year-old uncle driving the VW love van. That old fart may be banging the same chicks he's been banging for 15 years, but he's a pro at it!
0 googlesyndication.com
0 google-analytics.com
0 doubleclick.net
0 doubleclick.com
0 doubleclick.org
et al ad nauseum
Plenty of sites compile a list of the bad boys, if your hosts file is smaller than 20,000 entries you're not trying.
in the past, the tech media have priced their advertising beyond the reach of most small-to-medium company budgets, and this year (in particular) advertising rates were significantly increased. they end up relying on the goodwill of the larger corporations' marketing departments for survival. this creates a bad situation where the tech media publications are no longer truly independent reporters, but hand-in-glove with a handful of very large, very well-funded corporate machines. readers notice and go elsewhere for truly independent viewpoints that might point out the larger corporations' flaws. no surprise here, just that it hasn't happened sooner.
Using a hosts file is a poor solution. What do you do if you want to block "www.example.com/ads/*", but nothing else from "www.example.com"?
No. As is true in most free markets, we have only ourselves (writ large) to blame. We have changed our culture gradually (or not so gradually) and are reaping both the benefits of connectivity and the penalties of short attention spans.
Our media is already too easy on our government... how would this change if the government ran it directly?
Now, a privately run charity would perhaps do better in most instances. This is what the Wall St. Journal was in part until the family that owned it rolled on to the next generation who realized they wanted money more than to keep providing the service.
IMHO the main obstacle to such a charity emerging is the same shift in our culture. If you read the writings of the wealthy and powerful from previous generations, there remained a feeling of obligation to use that power wisely and in general for the greater good. See Thomas Jefferson, Franklin, or Paine. There were several reasons for an individual to pursue noble ends, and some of those were in fact ignoble (wanting to look like a good person, etc.) But there were other motivations, most rooted in the Judeo-Christian / medieval notions of social responsibilities of lords to those who owed them fealty. For today's wealthy there isn't even social pressure to be high-school educated. Just keep having flings and vapid press interactions.
Yes, these relationships were imperfect and uneven, but they provided our society with something we have destroyed while rooting out other things. Something we are just now coming to understand we've lost. The last major establishment of charitable organizations happened just before 1900 because of the robber-barons. Sure, we've seen one or two in the interim, but not on the same scale. The MacArthur Foundation, some of the work being done with Buffet and Gates' money.
--
Much that I sought, I could not find.
Much that I found, I could not bind.
Much that I bound, I could not free.
Much that I freed, returned to me.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
"Perhaps the biggest advantage for blogs over traditional tech magazines would be product reviews, in my opinion. An online reviewer with dozens of user-posted comments is more reliable than a single possibly advertiser-paid reviewer."
The wisdom of the crowds again? Funny that since slashdot's position on crowd wisdom is apparent over in the political section.
I used to be the geeks geek studying the lowest level material just to get a grasp of the latest and greatest in hardware and software of all kinds. But it's not interesting anymore:
Most of the gear is commodity gear
Most of the interesting details are hidden for the sake of competitive advantage
Point in fact, PC magazine in the early '80's ran an extensively technical article about the mathematics of compression when a team from Georgia Tech announced a breakthrough in the technology. You would never see an article like that today. It would be "Wow this is great, buy these boxes they're SUPER COOL!!!!!!!!eleventy!"
In the security mags, the whole field is reduced to 'articles' by the CIO's of big advertisers and/or government agencies writing about their experiences with widget X Y and Z, followed by half the magazine filled with 'product reviews' which are paid placements in the first place.
So who cares? The field isn't interesting anymore. Why don't they publish a magazine called
Outsourcing and Outplacement Technology Journal; adventures in jobs that suck that you don't have anymore anyhow.
I'm sorry, but it usually takes readers to sell advertisements. To get the readers, you have to have compelling content. None of these magazines have compelling content.
When is the last time you picked up ANYTHING from Ziff Davis and wanted to read it? Most of these magazines are filled with either articles that don't tell the whole story, gussied up press releases, six month old tips for the novice, editorials that are just written by FUD spewing morons selling their page to the highest bidder (I'm looking right at you, Mr. Dvorak), or news I read about three weeks ago on Slashdot (four weeks ago from other sources).
Why the hell do I want to cut down some trees and PAY for that?
I actually used to have a job for a PR firm that worked exclusively for tech companies. One of my duties was to scan these rags for articles about clients, or about their field of business. In that year, I skimmed pretty much every tech publication that was worth mentioning: PC Week, PC Magazine, Computerworld, Byte, Wired, Red Herring, Dr. Dobb's Journal, PC World, CRM, etc. Not a single one can keep up in print, with the pace of the tech sector today. They barely could 10 years ago when the web was new. Now, they are relegated to informing people that only have a passing interest in technology, because all the people that are actively engaged already know.
I can't imagine why the advertisers are leaving.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
If you have a really good tech periodical with a userbase and forums, you should start charging for accounts. Paradoxically, people will want to pay you for the priviledge of being a "member" and not an anonymous hee-haw who can only comment on articles after entering a CAPTCHA.
And you can open up member-only services, like a coupon code board or something like that to entice people.
You gotta innovate...
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
That is a priceless line! I agree with you completely.
"It doesn't really matter whether the end product of good journalism is being published on dead wood or online, but good journalism costs money which you can't make online (yet). At least in some parts of the world."
You hit the nail on the head so I'll put your point as a question since the majority are dancing around the issue.
Can an information source consistently provide the needed information to it's intended audience without any funding whatsoever? Yes or no?
The exodus away from tech rags that offer little more than glossed over advertising as content is not suprising, but it does kind of serve to illustrate a conundrum of advertising: If your ads are too subtle and too well targetted, your market readership falls off because they can no longer distinguish ads from information. But if your ads are not well targetted and obvious, your drive away your readership because they find them annoying and irrelevant.
How best to walk this fine line? Comments?
Sure. The big money mass media will continue to degenerate while
the independent, energetic, and innovative blogs will slowly become
the dominant sources for quality information.
But then the big money will shift to the blogs as it infiltrates their
ranks with hucksters and shills on a grand scale. A new model of
mass corporate journalism, expressed though the cloak of the independent
blog, will have arisen. Stagnation and degeneracy will once again become
widespread and unavoidable.
The second half of the equation, the discriminating consumer, is always
completely ignored. Thanks to these dull and perennially misinformed hordes,
we will never eliminate the swell of the meretricious conglomerates.
I want to block EVERYTHING from humpyourmommy.com. If you want select blocking, use NoScript. But personally, I don't want to hear about anything at all from myspace.com on the computers under my responsibility.
Hosts files, they're a beautiful thing. And since my XP computers are run in limited user mode, the hosts files stay intact. The block list contained in the DSL router is another good thing.
I believe the correct term to describe a blogger is Pontification (to speak or express opinions in a pompous or dogmatic way).
Anyhow, How much success do bloggers have with doing their own research? If you were a blogger and called up some company's (say Cisco's) PR department, would you be able to land an interview with a high ranking officer even middle management? Dunno about that, but if you called up as "Sr. Editor of Network World" to ask them about the iPhone/Duke issue, I bet you could easily get through. I can't imagine Joe Blogger calling up Cisco's PR department and asking for an interview with the head of the wireless division...
The problem with bloggers is FINDING A GOOD BLOG. Let's say my parents (nontechies) are looking for a plasma tv. There's probably 500 people blogging about the latest plasma/LCD TVs. If they're lucky they'll find AVSForums, however, now they have to separate the wheat from the chaff in all the posts over there. However, if they hit CNET.com they'll get an organized review.
Maybe there are better reviews out there, but they aren't easy to find, in a centralized location, or targeted to the non-/. audience.
Most blogs are ill-informed, much like the tech magazines people are talking about. I run a blog, about server stuff. It's more for me than anyone else. I put down problems and solutions, ones I may come by only once a year, things I wouldn't remember. It has helped me.
The difference between blogs and online magazines is that with a blog you know you are getting opinion or bias. You hope a big company like CNET wouldn't do that. But they do, it's just behind the scenes.
Blogs are usually poorly written in comparison to online magazines such as CNET. This isn't always the case though, many professional or talented writers have blogs and it shows. They are typically the popular ones.
Another problem with blogs is that you never know if something is trust-worthy. If I need to follow instructions to do something, let's say remove spyware or dual-boot a system, I would rather trust CNET than a blog. If CNET is wrong, I have some course of action, if the blog is, who am I going to complain to? Will they listen?
Larger companies are always slower to change. Maybe they are in the process of changing, maybe they don't want to. There have always been "blogs" on the internet, they used to be called personal websites. Suddenly every jackass (including myself) has one, and it makes it easier to post.
So why have blogs overtaken search engines and social bookmarking? Because of SEO, search engine optimization. Long gone are the days when url rewriting, keyword analysis/stuffing and proper html validation were the secret weapons of smart people on the internet. MoveableType, Wordpress, etc, does all this stuff automatically. A Wordpress blog is better "optimized" than many larger editorial sites.
Google is a search engine that places too much emphasis on backlinks. People as a whole are stupid, people on the internet are even dumber. They link to sensational news, not necessarily GOOD news. So naturally all the "important" and "true" information goes to the bottom of the SERPs.
Wow, that was a sensational rant. I should post this on my blog pronto. *grin*
I say "Good riddance!"
Microsoft knows that IT managers, stuck in time, will continue to eagerly read their snail-mail "Visual Studio Weekly" or "Information Week" far beyond the point where they are at all useful. Keeping these IT managers (mis)informed is a key strategy in maintaining revenues from large lazy corporate IT divisions.
The "tech press" have long been the whoredogs of Microsoft and will remain so. Microsoft will continue to fund them well beyond the point that other sponsors have abandoned them.
In the end the only tech press remaining will be completely Microsoft-sponsored and a great big cash black hole. Only then will Microsoft drop funding. But we have at least 10 more years of a wholesome parasitic relationship before that happens. So let the games continue.
to say, *clearsthroat* FUCK BLOGS
I feel great, old but great.
:-)
You're right, the articles in Byte, Dr Dobbs and Computer Language Magazine HAD depth. (As did AI Expert, PC AI, Hot-line on Object-Oriented Technology, and a few others.)
Another big factor is that print ads are a lot less ANNOYING than web ads.
The magazines had some persistence so they weren't as desperate to get your eyeballs. (You want persistent? I'm looking at an ad for Cromemco Incorporated from the August 1981, [volume 6 number 8] issue of Byte Magazine.
That why I'm NOT breaking up my podcasts with pre-roll and interstitial ads but instead have short reminder ads post-rolled at the end of my podcast in their own chapters, with images and web links to a full ad hosted on my site.
When you want it, its there, when you don't its not in your friggin' way.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
Steve Ciarcia bailed out of Byte when the new owners decided they wanted a PC Mag clone rather than the traditional Byte. Circuit Cellar is still publishing a lot of 'hands-on' articles and seems to be doing quite well. The Circuit Cellar website is set up as to not canibalize the magazine subscriptions (both print and electronic). One more thing - the ads complement the content.I wrote an e-mail to the editor of Byte in late 1997 wondering if Byte was not long for the world - last print issue was July 1998. They did make an attempt to get back to the original idea of Byte in the last few issues. One constant was Jerry Pournelle's column, which is probably the first blog.
It has been interesting to see what's been happening on the professional side as well - EETimes was pretty fat ca. 2000, much thinner now, Electronic Design is holding its own, EDN has actually improved a lot over the last 10 years. Rags like Computer Design and Integrated Systems Design have folded.
... is not constant. Most of the news on Vista and iPhone will be obsolete by the time it is read. Most news on gadget benchmarking have a life of about year (if trustworthy.) Most editorials on social/technical trends have five years (if insightful.) Most wikipedia information and technical know-hows have very long lifetime (but details may be revised.)
Guess which of these are produced en masse?
Exactly. The value of information depends on timeliness, accuracy, and relevance. Media lives on ads and marketing, so we see corporate news releases and flash a lot, often duplicated ad nauseam on every site. But to the serious consumers of information, it is probably the least valuable of all. Good tech blogs and forums are usually the ones that thrive on higher value information. WSJ, IEEE, and medical journals are not free, yet people continue to subscribe to them due to the value they still provide (this may change if they cannot offer what the readers really want. By the same token, government-published monthly journals can die quietly without anyone noticing.)
The inherent death trap for tech media is bloat, just like everything else. A magazine increases in page counts slowly over time without actually providing more information to the readers (same with the Camry and Accord growing larger over the years.) Well, everyone knows that not every headline is worth reading, and the bloat means readers have to filter the content themselves - customer as co-producer in MBA-speak. Now the value of the information is not increased, but further decreased by the cost to the reader (so much for the value-added mentality of these publishers.) At some threshold a reader says, "Why am I reading this junk when I can find a better source of information?" Oops, another kitten just died.
This is equally true for web searches. Google, for all its sins, is still a very good provider of value. Yahoo, MSN, even Baidu and Sohu, just don't provide such value for me - I have better things to do than to kill time on fluffy ads and junky flash. If the consumers have to work so hard for worthless morsels, they are either slaves, masochists or lifeless drones.
X-Bit Labs has got some pretty interesting reviews, ranging from the in-depth to the novel. Their LCD monitor reviews, for instance, are awesome.
Uhh... just look at the quality of reporting on Pravda during the Soviet rule, or even today...
How about Xinhua for current news and opinion?
mmm... Propaganda... yummy.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
oh yeah, and neither PBS nor BBC, nor A(ustralia)BC, nor others that are qualitatively good are *RUN* by the state. PBS is a particularly bad example on your part because they receive many private contributions from people and charitable institutions. See my first post in this thread.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
This is like winning a game because the other team didn't show up.
What I mean it, tech magazines basically AREN'T tech magazines. Some are interesting gossip sheets, but none are the kind of thing that are technically useful. When I want to find out how to do something, I never check through old tech magazines, not even the ones that are searchable on CD. The information not only isn't findable, it isn't there. The information may or may not be on the web, and what you can find may or may not be reliable...but there's a CHANCE!
In a way this is like what happened to our local library recently. They decided to go to RFID chips for tracking the books...but because of the cost of the chips they discarded all books that hadn't had sufficient use recently. This nicely stripped the collection of all historic materials. Also of all materials that were of permanent rather then current interest. I don't bother to research in that library anymore, as I know that I won't find what I'm looking for. (And I muse frequently on 1984 and the job of re-writing history.)
But if the traditional media default on their job, then even an inferior replacement is better than what they offer. Dr. Dobbs used to be a good place to go to learn how computers work. Not anymore. Perhaps it's still useful for learning C or C++. Those aren't languages that I like, so I can't speak to that. But my guess would be not. Java magazines have drastically curtailed the amount of code that they include, and seem to rarely include a complete program. (Something to read on the bus, without an internet connection available.)
Tech magazines have abandoned their audience, so naturally their audience looks elsewhere. One of a magazine's key attributes was that it was self-contained (possibly with external references, but these not necessary to the understanding of the contents). When this is abandoned, then the advantage of the magazine format is abandoned. If you need to be web-connected anyway, then magazines don't have any advantage, and have numerous drawbacks.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Did you read anything the the Byte editors wrote about the end of the magazine? Tom Halfhill's Tom's Unofficial BYTE FAQ: The Death of BYTE Magazine ? The advertising was drying up well before CMP purchased McGraw-Hill technology publications (including Byte.) By that time, enough magazines with a strong focused interest existed that it was tough for a generalist like Byte to sell advertising. If Microsoft wanted to advertise NT4, they could reach more of their potential customers by advertising in Information Week, rather than Byte. If NuMega wanted to sell a memory leak tester to developers, they could reach more of their audience in Dr. Dobbs Journal. Texas Instruments DSP group could reach more hardware designers by advertising in Microprocessor Report.
Byte was a great magazine for someone like me who was interested in how popular technology was currently used today, what advantages and disadvantages alternate technologies had, and what was coming up in the future. Articles from chip design to heterogeneous user management. I wasn't a good target for many of the advertisers though. (I wasn't interested in the Microsoft NT ads, because I wasn't trying to set up an windows network. I wasn't interested in the NuMega ads, because I wasn't developing for Intel hardware. I wasn't interested in the TI DSP articles, because I wasn't doing hardware design, etc.) and those advertiser didn't want to pay for me to see their ads. The end result is a high subscriber base for a tech magazine with lower per subscriber ad revenue. Not a good business model.
If one asks the question, "Where are these talented mines coming from?" It is only a matter of time before Sales people in the publishing business start looking at those countries to generate money. I think the advertising dollars spent in magazines published in India, Russia, Pakistan, and the Philippines would make interesting analysis. It is common business knowledge that to follow the money, one can make money more easily.
Who writes a more useful and detailed article about a tech product: a journalism/English major or an engineering major?
Who loves tech so much they write a blog about it: a journalism/English major or an engineering major?
Who gets a job a cnet when they can't get a job at a real publisher: a journalism/English major or an engineering major?
But if I can turn the snark off for a minute, let me make a deeper point. People generally do things for one of two reasons: love or money. Something done for the love of it is generally going to be of far higher quality than something done for money. Generally, the blogger writes for love of the subject, the journalist writes for money.
advertising in tech media is drying up and going where else?
For me it is going... nowhere. I am systematically blocking annoying web ads on both firewall rules and browser image filter. CNET or blogs, CNN or Slashdot, it does not matter. Centralised aggregation of ads at doubleclick and similar ads providers makes it quite easy. Why You give away your bandwidth you pay for to advertisers for free, as in beer?
There you are, staring at me again.
"Absolutely nobody ever bothers setting up repeatable tests for comparative measurement of anything in this century unless it can be done in the form of a Quake benchmark. And even then, products offering 1-2% gain for the low-low price of $200 more than everything else in the review are proclaimed to be the "clear winner" by some spineless high-school kid who is afraid to write a bad review for fear that XFX or MSI or whoever will turn off the free hardware spigot in retaliation."
What did you expect? Cheap reviews to go with your commodity products.
Web-based advertising is failing because the ad designers are using print or *gasp* TV commercial design techniques. I would actually welcome ads that contained USEFUL INFORMATION. To ad designers: the web is not a TV set or a printed page! Learn to use your medium!
Journalism was regarded as the "Fourth Estate," independent from the (first) clergy, (second) politics, (third) merchant bourgeoisie.
In that classification, its reports were held up as a way to inform people, not to tell them what they wanted to hear (entertainment) or to tell them what others wanted them to hear (preaching, propaganda, and advertising).
By selling off journalism to the highest bidder, our society has systematically lost the most important aspect of a free society: an informed populace. This is particularly the case in the US, where most TV has turned to bottom scraping, lurid entertainment, and "news" has become a religio-political farce serving the needs of those whom we really need to be informed about. Fox is guarding the henhouse, as they say.
It is now at the point where the only way to truly inform is to entertain, so we have people like Michael Moore making comical movies to inform people that the US health system is in dire crisis, and South Park and the Daily Show provide much of the rest of the US' critical commentary.
This is unfortunate. A state run media would not solve this problem, because it appears we already have that with Fox News. We need an independent system of journalism, and unfortunately, we're not going to get that as long as we are happy being passively entertained.
RoughlyDrafted Magazine
For those of you wondering, the word "blog" is literally shorthand for "boring."
If tech sites are sucking, they're doing it on their own.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
this is the taxonomy. media is dying, blogs are maxed out, flash-powered video is up, casual games are up, up
brain is forgotten
A major (big company-owned) Canadian auto-related site is similar. Every now and then a word (say, "Ford", for example) has a link attached to it. Where does the link go? To a page that the auto-related site has already setup so that you can buy a Ford through their pages. That's not informative to me but maybe the big marketing brains think that this sort of linking is useful for them.
On the other hand, said auto-related site features "women-oriented" stories on which colours are best when choosing a car.
The mentioned magazines are written by moron's. They are supposedly geared toward techies but the articles are long winded and non-technical. If the writers got paid by the click rather than the word they would hone their skills faster. Maybe back when hi-tech was celebrity-esque people would read their sensationalized crap, but it appears those days are gone.
That type of magazine is relegated to "my plane is delayed and I am really bored -browse but never buy" time at the airport.
I'm pretty sure it has something to do with writers like John C. Dvorak.
I've wondered for years why for example Wired Magazine, which is 2/3 ads, gets any advertising revenue whatsoever. I assumed the advertisers just never came around to reading a copy of the magazine.
Sounds like someone finally had a look at the way these companies operate, and moved to more effective, more accountable advertising.
Death knell to media companies: the days of putting 3 paragraphs of pasted content from an AMD press release on a page with 30 ads surrounding it are coming to a quick end. Get some real content.