The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

I don't know why you think that; it isn't true. Maybe you don't read unless you're in front of a computer; I've worked in the magazine industry for 25 years, so I've got a little perspective. Right now the magazine format is much healthier than, say, the Reagan-era recession; the monthly magazine I work for (not in the computer field), over the six years I've been here, has finally leveled off at an audited circulation of well over 1.2 million, from somewhat under 800,000 in '02. So you're saying magazines are dead, and here we are jumping some 50% in about five years. Whom do I believe?

The trade sources I read show that every month, between eight and two dozen new magazines are launched -- that's eight to 24 new *regularly published* magazines *per month*, mind you, pretty contradictory to your claim -- and publishers of extant magazines are releasing more and more special issues and one-shots. Those are risky investments but pay off handsomely when they hit.

If all you read is computer magazines, your view might be skewed because so many of those are platform-dependent that as platforms come and go, so do the magazines. I've worked for computer magazines and won't get into that industry again. Those publishers *are* too slow to adapt.

That said, I wish MacTribe luck, but after watching MacAddict's slide into irrelevance and its transformation into the near-beer of computer magazines, I'll assume they're going to be among the two-thirds of magazine launches that don't make it five years. (That's a stat that long predates the Web, incidentally, and hasn't changed since it matured.) If they do survive, more power to 'em.

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You make good points. Perhaps I look at all print as the same, like newspapers, which are not doing well (the NYT now sees its print version as secondary to online), but thats *news*, magazines do contain a different kind of content... I was more specifically thinking about tech magazines, and it seems we mroe or less agree on that :)

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Yeah, fair enough -- and even I don't expect this utopia to last too much longer. The Kindle is the TRS-80 of ebook readers, but once there are decent (bright, thin, and sturdy) color displays and more reliable transfer methods, the print magazine format *is* going to take a good hit. We've been looking into PDF distribution for years, but none of those things are there yet, and it's still expensive and slow enough to distribute that it doesn't have a big advantage over print yet.

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