Infoworld: InfoWorld folds print mag to focus on online and events

March 26 2007

"Daddy, what's a 'magazine'?"....

As of April 2, 2007, InfoWorld is discontinuing its print component. No more printing on dead trees, no more glossy covers, no more supporting the US Post Office in its rush to get thousands of inky copies on subscribers' desks by Monday morning (or thereabouts). The issue that many of you will receive in your physical mailbox next week -- vol. 29, issue 14 -- will be the last one in InfoWorld's storied 29-year history. ...

Now, I don't want to sound glib about print's demise. I've worked on print publications for nearly 30 years, and I enjoy the physical feel of a magazine, its portability, the way you can spread it out in your lap and dog ear pages for future visits. Online bookmarks may be more efficient, site searches retrieve information faster, but it's hard to beat a magazine for its tactility and visceral thrill.  ...

So this is publishing's immediate future, and I expect other trade publications will be following InfoWorld's lead soon enough.
It has been literally years since I read an IT publication in print.  Consumer-oriented ones?  Sure, but not the work stuff.  This move only makes sense for InfoWorld, and many others will follow in time.

Link: Infoworld: InfoWorld folds print mag to focus on online and events >  (Thanks, Karen)

Ed Brill Highland Park, IL USA Category:  In the news  Add/View Comments [15]

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  1. 1  dan holzrichter  | 3/26/2007 10:23:02 AM

    I've been expecting this for a while. Their paper has gotten so much smaller in recent years and contains the same things that were on the web site already, so not a real big loss.

  1. 2  Tim Bennett  | 3/26/2007 11:08:36 AM

    I look sadly at the demise of printed media. I sit for 2 hours each day on a train (I say sit, but frequently stand) and this time is spent reading journals, magazines and books. Whilst I understand the move towards "on-line" content, it just isn't the same. I READ a magazine, I just take sound bites from a web site.

    A magazine fits in your pocket, folds back on itself and doesn't rely on batteries - so you can read them during take off and landing on a plane.

    Let's hope that not too many follow suit.

  1. 3  Keith Brooks http://www.keithbrooks.com | 3/26/2007 12:39:36 PM

    I must admit I spend a few minutes here and there, off line READING. While it's true most of the info/articles were posted online, the bottom line is I don't read a whole website, just the pieces of interest.

    But in a magazine I will read more, venture beyond comfort.

    Well I guess no longer. Maybe in a fully connected world, but those of us who take the weekend off, well, I guess its back to mysteries, scifi and anythign else that is of interest.

  1. 4  Tony Austin http://notestracker.com | 3/26/2007 4:38:04 PM

    These days I travel very little, and with a recently purchased high-end desktop system (having dual high-res LCD monitors, as compared with a tiny notebook screen) it's now pleasant enough to ready digital magazines. The same goes for digital books. Certainly print versions still have value in various situations. One advantage of digital is the ability to build up a library of them, index them with a search tool -- such as Windows Desktop Search, Copernic Desktop Search, IBM Omnifind Yahoo Edition (all free, and with their individual pros and cons) -- and that makes it extremely easy to find stuff later. It's a case of "horses for courses" and saving a few trees is a good idea. It's fascinating to contemplate what it will be like in the not too distant future when we will be able to read print quality text from a thin-sheet monitor that we can roll up (or maybe even fold up flat) and put in our briefcase. Even further ahead, how about direct brain implants, straight from publisher to your gray matter?

  1. 5  Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 3/26/2007 5:50:39 PM

    @2 & 3 - Allow me to introduce you to this handy new thing: the PRINTER. ;-)

    Seriously, they might want to consider posting each web issue as a PDF so people can print at least sections of it. Each article is already printable, but how much better would it be to get a 100-page booklet that you could grab and take on a plane? Might be nice to be able to do it all at once.

  1. 6  Peter Smith  | 3/27/2007 3:12:31 AM

    @5 Maybe the future is e-newsagents, with a terminal / console where you are presented with all available publications, and it just prints off the magazine / newspaper you want.

    Stops all the waste of unsold copies and easy to distribute.

    Of course, that gives rise to a new generation of excuses, with "we're out of blue toner" replacing "We haven't had a delivery"

  1. 7  Keith Brooks http://www.keithbrooks.com | 3/27/2007 7:10:11 AM

    Nathan, of course the Printer exists, but the issue is also time, unless as you pointed out they have the "magazine" available as a pdf download to print.

    But if they are killing the printed version, why would theybother killing themselves to do a whole formatted one for pdf?

    I like Peter's idea, but you know they will always be out of paper too :-)

  1. 8  Karen Lilla  | 3/27/2007 8:32:58 AM

    @5 Dr Dobbs has already embraced this idea by posting PDFs of their magazine to their Dr Dobbs portal. Very handy to print, grab and go.

  1. 9  Kevin Mort  | 3/27/2007 8:39:15 AM

    I recall in my IT Manager days where I got all these things free for filling out some survey once a year or so.

    ComputerWorld, InfoWorld etc. I had stacks of them. But this was before these media outlets moved online. Today I see the business as changing so quickly that online media just seems the right thing to do.

    My only subscriptions right now are to Wired, Racer and Forza. Wired I have been with for many years and while they've changed format slightly they still produce interesting content in print. Racer, well I could probably get most of that online but there are some good features you don't see online which are in the print mag, and Forza, well....they're of such size that they just recently got a website (within the last year or so).

    K.

  1. 10  Chris Miller http://www.IdoNotes.com | 3/27/2007 10:15:00 AM

    I love the digital print. Yes I like being able to read a book or magazine during takeoff on the plane, but the in-flight ones suffice for the 20 or so minutes. I can then carry numerous books and magazines with me at once.

    I have had the RCA eBook for about 8 years now and still use it on each trip

  1. 11  Danny Lawrence  | 3/27/2007 3:31:01 PM

    "It's a book. Non-volatile storage media. Everyone should have one."

    Once again, life imitates Max Headroom!

  1. 12  Mike Robinson http://www.invcs.com | 3/30/2007 10:03:13 AM

    I friend of always told a joke. Had paper been invented after the computer, it was had been an earthshattering technological breakthrough. You can fold it, crinkler it up, it can get wet (slightly), no external power needed, and completely disposable. Sometimes low-tech is the best tech. But in the case of a mountain of magazines, nah- just send me the last 10 years on it :)

  1. 13  Turtle http://www.weightlessdog.com/shell.nsf | 4/2/2007 1:58:02 PM

    InfoWorld... wow. I actually got a couple of pretty good jobs through InfoWorld because they were starting a "situations wanted" section in their assified clods section back in the summer of 1987. To promote it, they offered free ad placement for the first X number of people who sent in an ad looking for a job. I put an ad in, and it eventually got me a couple of jobs. I was lucky, because they were so overwhelmed they cut it off after just a few days.

    On the other side, I had to stop receiving all those free industry print magazines years ago because of the structural threat to my porch. At one point, I had a mountain of old, unread InfoWorlds in a stack about four feet high on the back porch of my old house in Pennsylvania and the sheer weight of it plus the weight of the nearby three-foot stack of ComputerWorlds was threatening to tear the porch off the back of the house and dump it all in the back yard.

    By the way, does anyone remember when IW briefly went from paper tabloid to shiny-magazine the first time? That screwed up my stackology bigtime.

    And our old friends ePro Magazine were, of course, pioneers in the "let's stop printing on paper" gig. I will actually hope Advisor and VIEW decide to go all-online as well. Nothing is quite so dangerous as old copies of tech magazines in the hands of executives who don't know how outdated they are.