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Are Computer Magazines Dead?
CitizenC writes "C|Net is currently running an article on why old school computer magazines like PC Magazine are dying rapidly.. it brought tears to my eyes reading this." Reminds me of Byte. I've never thought much of most computer magazines - they have too much stake in promoting the products of their advertisers to be believable. The floor is open for suggestions: what would make a good computer magazine to you?
I'm really sick of magazines that are at least 50% advertising. Every once in a while I buy a magazine and rip out any of the pages with ads on both sides. It's amazing how much of those things is made up of their very thin content. How do they even survive?
I remember the days when the table of contents was on the first page on the magazine, not page 6 or 7. Magazines will kill themselves unless they smarten up and increase the content to ad ratio.
æeee!
What else can they say?
THe german C't is imho the best computermagazine in the world. It comes out every two weeks, has extensive coverage of a broad range of computernews, including politics, new technology, hard and software reviews, tips and tricks, along a broad array of platforms, is quite objective, is quite critical of intel and microsoft but do not do microsoft/ intel bashing, but give critical reviews with argumentation instead, and will also point out the good things of a microsoft or intel product. Doesn't follow hypes blindly, has good practical sections and stay critical of products of companies that advertise in them.
The only drawback for some: it's in german... for me that's no problem but for some it is. Well.. there's also a Dutch version..
Besides, I like reading on paper better than on screen.
I actually like Dr. Dobbs' Journal quite a bit. Sure, it's full of ads, but I like their ads. Occasionally spotty quality (and one or two VB-related pieces!) don't overwhelm the good stuff that's still there. --JRZ
I hate to say this, but I have yet to figure out how to read online magazines in the bathroom. I suppose dragging a laptop with a network cable might be an idea, but .....
. waterwingz
Are we all supposed to write on the magazine and pass it around to eachother?
--
Joshua C. Stein
Superblock Information Systems
Is the bundled CD. I'd spend the money to get demos of things on CD that I don't want to spend 4 hours d/ling. I got a copy of MacWorld once just to get the copy of the BeOS that came with it.
I buy PC mags now just to get demos/patches and whatnot that I don't want to spend the time to d/l.
However this goes out the window when I can get phat-pipe bandwidth.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Eh, as you can see, history is replete with people proclaiming the end of X technology...which then promptly goes on to become insanely popular. Windows is the exception - it sucked from the beginning, and it's *still* popular. Eh, the general rule holds true however... newspapers are in no danger of vanishing for the same reason people prefer having a nice book to curl up with in bed instead of a CRT monitor to read the latest O'Reilly book. Which, btw, I have tried curling up with a CRT. While it's a very nice way to keep warm during these minnesota winters.. it's alittle difficult to keep them from falling out of bed and throwing shrapnel all over the place. Eh.. it was only a 14" though. =)
Yes.. eventually all of these technologies will be phased out. However, as you can see this won't be happening with any rate of speed. Don't think that just because time runs at 20x normal speed (Unless your upstream provider is AT&T *rimshot*) online it does so in the offline world as well!
--
As a journalist working on an IT publication in New Zealand I have to tell you that we seriously don't care what ads are in the paper - in fact, as I write each story, I have no idea who or what is being advertised. We have a strict policy that editorial and advertising just don't mingle. Once in a while we get someone ring up asking to submit "editorial copy" and they are firmly set straight. You can buy an ad if that's what you want, but editorial content is written by the journalists and no-one else. If you have any blurring of the lines as you've all pointed out, your readers hate you for it. There's no such thing as being a little big compromised - that's like being a little bit pregnant.
I am a leaf on the wind
You've nailed the problem: any communications channel supported by advertising owes more to any individual advertiser than to any individual reader and more to its advertisers as a group than to its readers. Every choice made by the editors and publishers of an advertising-supported medium is suspect - the choice of what topics to cover, what writers to hire, how and how much to slant content. So it follows logically that a magazine supported by its readers would be more trustworthy than one supported by advertising. But we're a long way from figuring out how to do that. A lot of events - not only in the world of computers - are leading to the notion that we need a new model of funding journalism. Perhaps we could put some pressure on corporations and a few internet millionaires to endow journalistic media; a magazine with an endowment of a few million dollars could charge a modest amount for print copies and publish free online versions without having to accept advertising. Perhaps it could run an annual fund-raising drive, like public broadcasting stations do, to beef up its operating budget. A modestly endowed journal could pay reporters and editors well, and we could look to the internet, and especially open source software efforts, for models of how such an endowed enterprise might be effectively governed.
Everything possible to be believ'd is an Image of Truth - Wm. Blake
I used to work for Byte Magazine. Many years ago. I even worked on BIX for a short while. I have all of 1978 in hardcover. I look at those magazines sometimes and what sets them appart from all of the magazines that cover the industry now is that they still engender excitement. Byte magazine went "commercial" in the early 90's when they changed the editorial staff due to declining sales. That staff changed the focus from computers to the business of computers. Magazines today are produced, edited and written by people interested in Business and not Computers for the most part. The ones that do actually focus on technology instead of profit have marginal sales (Dr. Dobb's is an excellent example of a mag. written by geeks for geeks.) Now that online sources of the same business data exist, why bother with the paper magazine? Also, I can read a hell of a lot more interesting stuff online than what usually fills the mags. I think I probably find only 1 article per week that is interesting in PC Week. YMMV, of course. The rest are pretty much drek. Even when they try to get technical they tend to botch it. So, don't weep too many tears. Online is probably a better way to publish anyway and kills fewer trees (assuming your electricity is coming from hydroelectric or solar power and not coal or oil!) --Pete
SJVN ( Easily the MOST cluefull editor over at ZdNet ) did a story about Linux for the print edition of Smart Reseller. As is the praxes the story was posted online as soon as the magazine hit the news stands.
:)
He made several points about what's right and wrong with Linux. 2 of his most important points however were only correct 2 months ago ( when he wrote the story ) but not at the time they were published. As the Internet lets us see more of this happening paper magazines will become less valuable as a source of leading edge information ( the old usage ) and more as a nice package of important things you may need to know even a year or more after buying it.
This means less of the "And company A is negotiating to buy company B" type story. If it hasn't happened by the time it hits print then there was probably something wrong with the source. Expect more of the "And this is how you configure DNS on *BSD or make the Easter Egg in the current version of wince come up".
These are interesting times in deed.
We can't ask print mags to start going through the whole compile -> edit -> revise -> print cycle as fast as web mags. Rob can fix a typo on the slashdot main page after only 50 or so people have seen it. A Paper mag doesn't have that option and must print a retraction the next month. Embarrassment before your entire audience 2 times in 30 days
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
just a side comment, but the only reason I've bought a magazine lately is just for what ever is on the coverdisk. (Last time one had windows StarOffice 5.2a on it). It's been years since I've bought a mag for the articles...
<OFFTOPIC>
What I would like to see everything that has appeared on Freshmeat in the last week stuck on a CDROM and sold at my local newsagent each week. I would buy that.
</OFFTOPIC>
--
Simon.
Sure, some died.
But some others have remained essential reading - even on a site like /., there's about a story a day from the venerable New York Times. And I personally read Time and the New Yorker (and I'd buy The Economist if a grad student budget could accomodate that...)
The reason is simple - commentary. Yes, shit happens, but to tell us what that means - or to at least give us one interpretation of what it means - requires more than a CNN sound bite will ever provide.
Even when you disagree with the interpretation - I regularly disagree with The Economist's ultra-conservative ideas - it makes you think. I happen to believe that there's no substitute for that.
Drawing the analogy to computer publications is obvious enough to be left as an exercise to the reader... :-)
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
I used to have a subscription to Computer Shopper when it was at it's peak. Had to stop because it actually broke my mailbox. Nowadays it's 1/4 the size and I never buy it - the Internet has everything you could want.
To me, it seems that sites like Slashdot, Ars Technica, and Tom's Hardware are fulfilling the origional purpose most of these "big" computer magazines had in the begining, informing the community, carefully reviewing products/books/ideas, building consensus, etc. Most of the big mags lost track of that and became the playthings of their advertisers. This isn't to say that Slashdot couldn't do the same thing but there will always be the oportunity for others to keep their fingers on the pulse of the true community of computer users/enthusiasts, especailly as Startup costs for a web site are minimal compared with a print Mag. ;-)) but sites like this one are really important for keeping a community pulling in somewhat the same direction.
Like others, I like DDJ (makes me feel smart when I read it and understand a good part of it
Computer Mags will go the way of the dinosaur. *sigh*
I too used to anxiously await the new months issue of several
computer magazines. These days I'm just dissappointed in the content. *shrug*
The main turn off for me is that over 90% of them are geared
towards people who don't know jack about computers.
Computer magazines have been the same for years and years
and years and years. Someone needs to come up with an
entirely new format. What this would be I have no idea... *shrug*
but as things stand now, I don't see a whole lot of them being in business in the next 10 years.
(hell, even 5 years)
What I WOULD like to see are E-print E-Zines. Someone
mentioned that it's kinda hard to drag the laptop or desktop
into the bathroom... I understand how they feel.
AND... Given an E-Print reader, one could download the magazine (from a secure site for a fee??) and
have it easily transportable. That would actually be nice.
This method would also allow them to make updated
news available constantly. Now if you can just figure
out a wireless update method... (neat) you could have
updated news all the time. (leave some way to seperate
the news you haven't read from the updated, eh?)
Just my take
Friends don't let friends buy Compaq's. (Dell/Gateway... same same) You want a good computer? Build it yourself.
Magazines, especially those that purport to give unbiased information but in reality bow down to the advertiser dollars (pick any Ziff-Davis zine), are especially vulnerable today when anyone can utilize a search engine or peruse usenet postings to get the real scoop.
Just because information is found on the web doesn't mean that it's better, though. Just take a look at those rigged Linux vs Windows security tests that were put out months ago. I forget the particular magazine but the bonehead who wrote up the stories neglected to apply requisite security patches to his Redhat box because they were too numerous and were not found in a standard place. His boss had been on the hotseat for similar incidents in the past. Once the unfairness of the testing was pointed out by the vociferous linux community, they were forced to rerun the tests.
If you are in the business of providing content, you better make sure come correct or your audience will move on.
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
This is C|Net tooting its own horn. Yes, IDG has stumbled in the last few years, with a bad web strategy and a tendency to make wild, random changes to its strategy.
But how about Ziff-Davis? ZDNet is a very successful web venture, and very competitive with C|Net. And their editorial content remains much, much deeper in both quantity and quality.
Yeah, something like Computer Shopper is an anachronism, what with most hardware geeks now shopping online. But the likes of PC, Infoworld and PC Week, among others, will continue to flourish until full-color e-books become pleasant to read on a commuter train, or over a meal in a cramped luncheonette, or on the toilet. After all, most computer magazines are really sublimated pornography.
So yeah, they're doomed, and they'll eventually be the first genre to go all-e-book, but there are a few good years left, and it will only happen when e-book interfaces (and readability, and dot pitch) are better than a vintage-1999 "web browser".
And on another note, Byte collapsed because they changed into an enterprise computing magazine. 10,000 CTOs do not a viable newsstand magazine circulation base make. Their original formula--voracious eclecticism--was poised for a comeback thanks to the open-source revolution, and the editors and publishers didn't see it. The computing world was once again ready for its original mix of hardware projects, programming theory, treatises on chip fabrication techniques, code snippets and stringent product evaluations. If Linux Journal were any good at what it tries to do, it would be very much like the old Byte. Instead, they've got some high school intern reviewing Oracle 8i on the basis of how easily it installs and how easy it was to set up a 3-table CD-catalogger. And worse.
Apart from Pournelle's column, the magazine that shut down some time back was Byte only in name.
...however I guess the place has changed over time.
/.'ers) used to buy magazines for two things: technical articles/reviews and updated info on new products.
/.-form, one is even no longer bound by the magazine/reporter/editor's potentially biased point of view.
I - and my friends (And I guess most
Now, such information is more available on the WWW than in printed form. It's more updated, easier to access etc. And in the
Another issue is, that while the popularity of computers have spread, the magazines have much more people to appeal to. Not only techies, but also the techies kids, parents, grandparents - and (ohh boy) PHB's. Thus often - at least from what I have sean - the depth is sacrificed in favour of broader appeal.
There are very few magazines out there - be that the general magazines such as Byte, PC-Magazine as well as Linux-specific magazines - which appeal to real techies. All tend to focus on what I believe is the largest segment of the market: home computer users and management/IS-dept guys.
I guess that the magazines will continiue living - to a PHB, the phrase "...but says that...." will almost always be better accepted than "....Anonymous Coward writes on slashdot that...". And to the home computer users.
However there are always exceptions, of course. IEEE Computer Society and ACM provide excellent publications with a high-tech content. Of course mostly research-based, but still.....however they also come as electronic magazines nowadays....
Ohh......apologies if this came out partially in a previous posting. Netscape blew up in my face while copy-pasting (cannot wait for mozilla...)
-- "Life is a bitch - and she hates me..."
But it doesn't have to be that way and, at one time, it wasn't that way.
Anyone around when microcomputers were new stuff can remember Creative Computing, the original Byte, and once the IBM PC came out, magazines like IBM PC Technical Journal (or was it just Tech Journal. It was always great looking forward to a new Don Lancaster or Steve Ciarcia article for new hardware ideas or some nifty assembly code tricks in ``Some Assembly Required'' (I can't remember now; was that column in IBMPCTJ?).
Once I moved into larger systems, the newspaper sized magazines like Digital Review were staples of your tech reading. It had great multipart articles on tuning VMS I/O performance, and stuff like that. Product reviews were geared toward those with a technical bent with real benchmarks (not puff pieces sponsored by vendors).
Then the technical magazines started insisting that there was a good reason for abandoning their newsprint publications in favor of the glossy paper versions. Instead of continuing their original mission of providing a place for the dissemination of technical information for the people involved in IT, they seemed to turn into vehicles for graphics artists and magazine layout designers to try and win design awards. Enter the age of content-free but visually exciting magazines. Here's a clue for the publishers: It's the content stupid! We're not interested in eye candy. Technical magazines aren't supposed to look like Vogue.
Also, for those of us who were attempting to be somewhat ``green'', this was disturbing because, for a long time, glossy paper magazines wouldn't be accepted for recycling. Even more troubling was that the format of the magazine always changed to more of an advertising rag than a magazine targeted for the technical person (that was, after all, the real reason for the shift to glossy paper -- increased advertising revenues are possible if the ads look fancier).
Now the ones that are left are, by and large, nothing more than product reviews targetted for non-technical management. Heck, the advertisements are so outdated that they're less than worthless. (The vast majority of the ads are all selling the same products but can't even publish actual prices, instead urging you to ``Call!!!'')
I can't even bring myself to read PC Magazine at the public library anymore let alone buy an issue.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with these guys, just a subscriber.
The reason I buy a magazine is to either be entertained, or to learn something. Computer magazines are generally bought for the latter reason. Most computer magazines being sold to day are just advertising tarted up with 'content' designed to work up enthusiasm for the stuff being advertised.
Right now the only computer magazine I subscribe to is the Perl Journal. Computer magazines with real content like the Prel Journal are what I would be attracted to.
Personally I just don't see that there will be any mass computer magazines three years from now. Everyone is putting their advertising money on to the internet. Stacks of dead trees have to be a very inefficient way of delivering advertising to an audience that is wired.
Well....
/.-client for Palm (not a traditional www-browser - though palmscape would work too, given that /. could be available in a "lighter" version without graphics), cutting all the graphics etc., and enabeling off-line reading/posting.
:)
I have a PalmIII and a mobile phone with IrDA-interface. What would really make paper obsolete would be a
Would DEFINITELY make time spend in the subways more interresting
-- "Life is a bitch - and she hates me..."
I don't mind that a lot of mags die a slow death, there are too many of them around anyway.
Why would a mag die?
-Lack of interesting content.
Very easy to keep publishing the same kind of info, that was once very interesting, but may have become really annoying because times have changed. So a mag should be aware of why it exists.
-Too high a price.
There is a limit to what the masses want to pay for a mag. Keeping advertisers happy can be difficult, but giving your advertisers better reviews then others is a sure way to die. It will get noticed by the readers, they will stop reading your mag and the mag fades out like a candle. So keeping the readers interested is of vital importance.
-Wrong layout.
The wrong layout can really be devestating. A mag should look inviting, be easy to navigate, but all of this shouldn't be a problem when the right people work in the right places.
-Outdated information.
Well that can be a real problem. The net provides the most up to date info there is. But a lot of people don't want to look for it on the web, or read it on a computer screen, they want to receive a mag on a regular bases, so they can read of in the bathroom, in bed or in the train to work.
All I'm saying is, the ones that remain are the onces I would the to read. Some mags disappear, but they disappear for a reason, they weren't good enough, they published info too few people were willing to pay for, the published info that was old when it hit the shelves, they didn't replect the times we live in.
Some mags remain and other will take the place of the onces that have gone. These are the mags we want to read, these are the mags that publish interesting and up to date stuff, these are the mags we read in the bathroom and the se are the mags we read when commuting to our work places.
So if some mags go out of print it's not a sign of the end of all mags, but more a sign of renewal.
Yo.
And I'd bet most of us on Slashdot did the same. They're written for a lowest common denominator that I find myself far, far above. How many times have you read this:
"Linux, an alternative to Windows developed by Finnish college student Linus Torvalds..."
or
"...by TCP/IP, the "language" used by the internet for one computer to talk to another.
I have found all the ZD pubs - PC magazine especially - to be far too mundane to even bother perusing. The idea that the printed pub will die soon is a self-fulfilling prophecy - any zine that I even bother reading is forward thinking enough to already be on the web for my perusal either by PC or Palm. I doubt that they'll go away anytime soon though - the PHBs of the world have to have something to read on the john, and I've found that PC Magazine and/or Wired has filled that niche nicely.
--
"Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
The prediction of their demise is premature, although not implausible; consider that newspapers have not been seeing big growth lately.
Magazines should, nonetheless, still remain for quite some time now.
The point to this thread is not that of when "magazines go away;" it is about:
In the Linux realm, there are presently Linux Journal, Linux Magazine, and Maximum Linux. One good question is of which ones of these will still be around in a couple of years.
We've seen Byte Magazine go through "phases," including a period of "going out of business."
Personally, I see little value to the Maximum Linuxes of this world. I look back with some longing to ancient byte of the '70s and early '80s. I look back with some regret at the failure of Micro Cornucopia. (Few will remember it.)
In the long run, magazines may be a "dead" concept, but as Lord Keynes said, "In the long run we're all dead." The point is to try to assess which magazines are likely to rise and fall between now and then, as well as which magazines we might like to see rise.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Croaker says of AvantGo (italicized text):
:)
'course, it's Windows only.
Actually...no, it's not. There's a program called malsync that will suck down AvantGo pages from a Linux shell prompt pretty as you please. This was the last of the utilities I needed that allowed me to use my Palm completely in Linux without ever having to reboot into Windows.
I suspect that there's a similar thing out that will download websites and translate them into doc format. If not... there should be. Hmm... sounds like a job for Perl
There's one of those, too. It's called SiteScooper and you can either run it yourself or download the fruits of its labors from this webpage in Doc or iSilo format.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
...and especially 'The Hard Edge', the column Alice Hill cowrites with veteran writer Bill O'Brien, I'm not especially surprised that traditional computer mags are coming to an end.
.... the information tends to be more timely and less slanted in product reviews, especially on /. where you have so many wide and varied opinions...
What surprises me is that this comes from the mouth...errr....keyboard of Alice Hill. She's been writing for cshopper for more than 10 years, and is certainly a product of that industry.
Magazines have gotten a LOT thinner, particularly cshopper, which used to qualify as an occupational hazard for my mail carrier. Cshopper is maybe half the size it was in the glory days.
The article poster is right: PC magazines are very self serving to the products they advertise. But,personally, i used to read them for industry trends and op-ed pieces rather than for product reviews, which were always clearly slanted. Plus, I used to learn a lot from the "Tips and Tricks" and other technical sections, at least until they became more for newbies than for technical people, like they were in the 80s/early 90s. Cshopper still has the occasional gem...
But I've found myself buying fewer and fewer magazines and getting more of this type of information online: Slashdot, ZDNet, C|Net, Wired.com
So I have to say...out with the old and in with the new...
My journal has hot
At this location there is a mirror of the headlines and articles of /. in a Palm-friendly form.
SiteScooper will convert websites to doc. But what you really want is malsync, which is a Unix version of the AvantGo conduit, or Plucker, a GPL'd Palm HTML viewer with it's own conduit (written in AWK, currently being rewritten in Perl).
what would be interesting is say a 'weekly roundup' of the stories that genereated teh most comments over the week and have a 'summary' opinion or mini editorial etc. a recap of anything interesting that came out of the bludgeoning.. err debate. ^_^ hmm might not work tho. and who would do it. mebbe some moderators or forum manager.. hmmm... probably too time consuming.
Write your Own Operating System [FAQ]!
no sig for you
This reminds me of another place where the capitalistic model fails: Olympic coverage in the US (or lack thereof).
Most people rather watch how some runner overcame his father's death than to see actual sports. The problem is, unlike the Superbowl, the whole concept of the Olympics is for money-making.. (At least it shouldn't be.) It should be to foster world harmony. And thus, I think it should be publicly funded.
When I happened to be visiting China during the Atlanta games, the Olympics were on 2 gov't owned cable channels 24/7.. with EVERYTHING live whenever possible. (Reruns only came when there was nothing to see.) The primary (gov't owned) non-cable channel also carried all the big games.. live, of course, and in full. Obviously, the coverage still focused on sports China was good at, but ferchrissake I actually got to see SPORTS! Can't say the same for NBC.
The fact of the matter is, advertiser-based support of Olympic coverage is NOT working, and neither is subscriber-based support (as evidenced by the ill-fated TripleCast). What we need is for the Olympics to be aired on, say, public television, with massive donations from rich people who care (and viewers), as well as the governement.
I wonder if anyone is contemplating implementing this?
Hmmm, what sets these magzines apart from the PC foo variety? Usefulness. The information found in these magazines will actually teach you lots of really neat stuff that you can use professionally and/or as a hobbyist.
Actually, this brings to mind another issue: electronics mags. It seems that the North American ones (Popular Electronics and Electronics Now) tend to go towards, "here, build this, but you haven't really learned anything applicable outside of this project." On the other hand, all the European ones I've seen (Elektor, Everyday Practical Electronics, etc) have been truly informative. They have a good balance of theory and construction articles. Too bad I live in North America...
(Caveats/credits: I wrote about half a dozen articles for PC MAGAZINE about a decade ago, before my then-employer got too deeply into the PC business for me to avoid conflicts of interest. I interviewed at c|net a couple of years ago; they and I were very interested, but there were reservations on both sides, and I turned down their not-too-strong offer.)
c|net, like Mark Twain's would-be obituary writer, might be right eventually, but is 'way too early.
Yes, BYTE shot themselves in the foot when they lost track of their audience. PC may be heading in exactly the same direction: do they want the enterprise crowd, the home crowd, or both? (They're walking the line more carefully then BYTE did.) The Web is faster, cheaper, and bigger than even COMPUTER SHOPPER at its peak.
Still, the Web has its weaknesses. Primary among them is its lack of ability to generate (and earn!) big advertising revenues. PC may get all its review hardware and software for free, but the test lab isn't cheap.
I think a lot of the dead tree publications, especially from the ZD family, are doing a good job at working both paper and electronic publication. The trick is to keep the latter from killing the revenue stream of the former.
BTW, if there's anything I've learned from watching the personal computer press for twenty years, its that "newbie" magazines don't last. Yes, the first time PC buyer will pick up a copy of FAMILY PC about the time he/she signs up for AOL, but won't be back to the newsstand, and won't subscribe.
One person's opinion. --PSRC (likely to fall asleep tonight with the current PC issue; less likely to renew my subscription, but we'll see)
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
Well computer magazines have changed over the years so whether or not they're dead depends on how you define them. When I was a kid COMPUTE! magazine was 300 pages long and published complete listings of programs and the only way to get them was to type in the listings. The writing was very technical back then and well above what a modern magazine could get away with. Then they stopped publishing software entirely and started writing philosophical articles on a very technical level. Now they're either reviewing software or writing about biotech or the meaning of life. So the days of COMPUTE! magazine are definitely over but computer magazines are just adapting to match today's less technically oriented audience.
I get PR reps or vendors calling occasionally too, asking if they can place copy in the magazine. Duh, hello! It's pretty fun telling them to go find another publication.
Certainly at PC Week (and I think at most publications), there is a huge wall between edit and advertising. I don't even know who works in our ad department, I never get phone calls or e-mails from them, and I never know what ads are going to be in the magazine. I don't even really look, actually. The only material affect ads have on my day-to-day life is they affect how many pages of edit there are, since the ad-to-edit ratio is mandated by the postal service (to get a particular mailing rate). When we have more ads in a given week, we need to write more, and vice versa.
People charging that ad dollars affect type or amount of coverage are being sucked in by a seductive argument, but one that just isn't true. Other issues, like unfamiliarity with technology x or the effectiveness of the PR company representing company y are examples of factors that actually do make a difference.
- Tim Dyck, Senior Analyst, PC Week Labs
Since when has the Slashdot population bothered to actually read a link they didn't like the look of? :)
I think you're both right - so long as a magazine has interesting columnists writing compelling material, the dead wood magazine will live.
To further emphasis your point, I can't take Salon.com on an eight hour flight across the Atlantic.
Hell. I always pick up the local *FREE* computer mags (which are 90% ads) *for* the ads. Heck, there's a few others computer mags that are free, with less ads, and I always skip over them.
Why? The local computer companies advertise a lot in there (and because of the competitiveness, the prices tend to be better than having to shop online for it [shipping, taxes...]). So, I just use the 'net for the few things I can't get locally.
Does the palm have the protocol stack to talk to cell phones?
Well, It can speak IrDA (IrCOMM). Sadly, most phones cannot (Ericsson SH888 can, tho'....and works like a dream with Linux IrDA too)
-- "Life is a bitch - and she hates me..."
Hey, that's right! We could call it... "Old News for Nerds. Stuff that Mattered."
--
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
There *is* something wrong with the way advertising is handled in these mags. No company can be trusted to be objective when they get money from the companies whose products they review.
Of course, down deep, I'm sure all of us are aware that magazines have to advertise to survive. They *don't*, however, have to advertise computer-related products.
Computer geeks may be obsessed with computers, but generally they have most of the system they want/can afford. But do they have enough whiskey?
A magazine that wanted to make it clear that it was impartial would, in my opinion, seek out advertising that cannot possibly affect its judgement. Alcohol, cologne, watches, laundry soap, movies, cars, makeup; the things about which normal people get advertisements.
As for the computer companies who put ads in computer magazines, I think they are stupid and/or foolish. Most of their ads are for whole systems, usually advertised at around $1500, which seems totally inane to me - what kind of geek spends $1500 on a factory-assembled PC?
- A.P. (100,000 hits a month isn't much, btw...)
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"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I agree C't is a pretty good general-purpose computer magazine. However, once you want something more specialized you'll be on your own (e.g. in case you don't want all those product tests). As an example, I once got my hands on US Dr Dobbs Journal (http://www.ddj.com). It is (was at the time) quite a good technical computer magazine that is centered on what would be the Knowledge / Programming part in C't. But it's virtually impossible (and would be quite uncomfortable) to find DDJ in a library (even in a city with a university oriented towards technology), you (as a normal student) cannot subscribe to it because it's way to expensive outside of the US and you won't find but one article online (I can understand that decision). The point is, I want that information and would pay for it the adequate sum but cannot get it (once I earn that much money I don't think I have the time left for reading it ;-(). Somebody should come up with a safe way for micro payments. I could even pick exactly what I want to read. There is a DDJ article on XML query languages? I'll pay for it because going through all those W3C pages is quite time-consuming! An introduction to XML? Nah, I don't need that anymore. And BTW, I don't think it's enough just to surf the net for finding good background articles. It's a very difficult task to write an understandable, technically correct text on a specific topic, and nobody is going to write, edit, and publish this for free.
The internet shows through the failure of subscriber-based content sites that the average internet punter is of the opinion that all this information should be free. The information may be free, but the effort needed to collect, colate, analyse and present the information isn't, and we should be compensating those who do the actual work.
The number-one ranked comment as I write this is about how we should be pressuring wealthy people to fund these media services. The great american way -- get someone else to pay for it.
Even our beloved /. was grubbing for donations, and eventually ended up here with Andover.
Consider: would you pay $10 or $20 per year to use /.? Would you put your money where your mouth is? I'm honest -- I'm a cheap bastard so I'll cheerfully say that I wouldn't.
Most of those who would claim they would pay are liars.
I, on the other hand, accept the advertising as a cost of the "free" content. If a site wants me to look at a banner ad which tries to interest me in widgets or wonkies or Linux Servers, fine. I'll read the ads. (Banner ads are a lousy idea, but that's beside the point.)
Magasines may grow on trees, but it costs money to turn them from trees into Dvorak columns. That's going to come from somewhere. And if you won't put your money up for it, you have to chose between advertising and not having it.
So which is it going to be?
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you should read everything on the internet as if it had "but I'm probably talking out of my ass" appended to it.
And what makes Slashdot any different? I have a banner ad for an SGI server right over this. And you get ads from VA Linux, Linux Care, O'Reilly, yada yada yada...
--The basis of all love is respect