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?

Comments

The salvation of "Old School" magazines...

[Lord Kano]

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

He He Ho Ho Ha Ha He He Ho Ho Ha Ha

[Signal 11]

I love it. Back when the presses were invented, pundits predicted only the rich would ever have books. Ah, that was wrong. Then they predicted newspapers would never take off. Eh, wrong there. Then telephones came out. Who'd ever use such an erry device? All it's good for is listening to organ music! Whups... AT&T didn't listen to them, and look what happened. Oh yeah, then you have the phonograph, where you could *record* and *play back* music! Wow.. that would never catch on either. Funny how popular the old vinyl 72 rpm's got, eh? Then you had the 8-Track. Well, they were right about that - 8-tracks sucked. Virtually every invention they said was going to die... gee... they're still here. I can go down to the end of my block and find a newspaper. Go across the street to Disc-o-round, and I got my vinyl. Down the road a few miles to Best Buy (shudder), and I have CDs.. which were only a "temporary" technology, right?

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!

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What makes a computer magazine useful?

[maya]

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.

Byte is a great example of why they are going away

[pmancini]

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

Newspapers/magazines have already faced this

[pq]

... and some have died, and some have come out stronger than ever. When CNN began 24 hour news coverage and a majority of consumers moved to TV as their prime source of news, people crowed over the impending death of newspapers.

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... :-)

Computer Magazine Solution

[belswick]

So far, the Internet has not developed a charge model that supports a meta-magazine for techies that can afford to pay its authors. This will come, but for now there is a publication where you can read 3 years of 30 magazines, including Dr. Dobbs, C User's Journal, Sys Admin, Unix Review, MSJ, etc. on a CD-ROM. Unfortunately, this doesn't carry any Linux-specific mags yet, but it saves trees and is searchable. It's called Developer Source, and more info is available at the publisher's site .

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with these guys, just a subscriber.

Needs to be Consumer Reports for Computers

[Tsarnon]

There really needs to be a magazine for computers like Consumer Reports. It would need to follow their rules:

• No advertising.
• The ratings cannot be used for advertising.
• All tested items must be bought through retailers who do not know the item is for the magazine. Items donated by the manufacturer must not be accepted.

Re:Advertising sucks

[Lumpish Scholar]

Did anybody every buy COMPUTER SHOPPER for the editorial content?-)

Some magazines dying != All magazines dying

[Christopher B. Brown]

I certainly agree that it is immensely unlikely that magazines will go away altogether; after all, there is still continuing to be growth of them even now.

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:

• What sorts of magazines can persist?

  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."

• What sorts of magazines would it be nice to have?

  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.

As a longtime reader of Computer Shopper...

[Surak]

...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.

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 .... the information tends to be more timely and less slanted in product reviews, especially on /. where you have so many wide and varied opinions...

So I have to say...out with the old and in with the new...