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Issue #201 April 2007
Only Real Events Lead to Real Trends
by Steve Ciarcia
There have been lots of blogs and online articles stipulating that print media is dead, but let’s face it, they are mostly online publishers and have no particular reason to say otherwise. I’m not swayed by one-sided dialog. Only real events lead to real trends.
Two recent events in particular caught my attention, both at PC Magazine. In the February 6 issue, columnist Michael Miller announced that his column would no longer be in print, but that he would still write a “columnist’s blog” on the magazine’s web site. Soon after that, Bill Machrone announced in his column that he too was stepping down. To my knowledge, both of these guys are former editors-in-chief of PC Magazine and should have influence where it counts. This hardly jibes with Bill’s comment that, “As the technical publishing industry continues trying to find the balance between print and online media, economic forces weigh against the column's continuance.” (“Wrapping Up,” PC Magazine, January, 31, 2007) Admittedly, he wasn’t saying print is dead, but it sure leaves a lot of speculation about what he and Michael will really be doing for ZD in the future.
These guys aren’t the only ones. An editorial by Josh Norem at www.hardocp.com is about how he, the former editor-in-chief of Maximum PC print magazine, is now at HardOCP online magazine because he thinks print magazines like Maximum PC are dying: “These days, readers flock to their favorite website, and instead of gauging public interest in terms of the number of issues sold, we measure it in page views.” (“Magazines vs. the Web: End of an Era,” HardOCP, February 5, 2007) Of course, there is also this little thing about being priced out of the housing market where he lived when he worked for Maximum PC that influenced his decision, but heh….
Seriously, if I tone down his rhetoric a bit, I might agree with Josh to some extent. Magazines that are entirely dependent on breaking news or up-to-the-minute product reviews in a fast-selling market are in a world of hurt. Print magazines have a lead-time associated with physically printing and distributing paper that adds up to weeks. Online magazines and news sites can post things online directly from an editor’s desktop. The criticism is that why should you pay for “old” content in a print magazine when you can get it free and quicker online.
The car was supposed to eliminate the horse, television was supposed to eliminate radio, radio was supposed to eliminate newspapers, e-mail is supposed to eliminate the post office, etc, etc. Give me a break. Technology is evolutionary (and, BTW, I heard a recent statistic that there are more horses in the U.S. today than there were in 1900). Just because one segment of an industry is discovering intense competition, it doesn’t mean the whole industry is suddenly dead. It just means that the concept of publishing has hybridized to include a range of being completely online at one end and all paper and ink at the opposite end.
I like to think that Circuit Cellar is situated correctly on the curve, but it’s always a balancing act to know how far and how fast to move along it. Print magazines used to simply rely on the convenience of paper as their greatest raison d’etre—high-resolution photos, high physical content, and little concern about losing paper. This was compared to reading relatively low-resolution, low-capacity content stored on a bulky and expensive laptop that you definitely didn’t want to leave on the train. Today, the same is not true. Even though displays don’t yet reach Circuit Cellar’s 2,550 × 3,300 paper page resolution, a cheap super-high resolution OLED or an e-paper with an integrated wireless connection to an infinite amount of downloadable media is only a few development generations away. When that happens, it will just be defined as the new print media for us. Circuit Cellar intends to be right there on that OLED too.
The point that’s missing in everyone’s dire predictions is that they are confusing the words “print media” with the problems arising from “traditional concepts about print media content.” Online or paper, magazines survive only if people value their content. In a situation when the source information is presented in parallel to all media at the same time, such as news events and new products for review, the publisher who gets it to readers first is the clear winner. The only mitigating factor that eliminates publication timing as an overriding issue is where the content is entirely unique or there is significant value added to the content by the publisher. In the case of PC Magazine, its future relies on maintaining the quality of its product reviews, not just doing them quicker.
In the case of Circuit Cellar, we like to think that it is our unique high-quality content that keeps both readers and advertisers coming back for more. Yes, Circuit Cellar is a print magazine today, but it’s also part of an evolution that is always transforming. A dozen years ago we had no web site and were strictly print. Today, we are both an online and a print magazine with a very significant web presence.
And, just so you know that I follow my own advice, our hybrid methodology endeavors to dispel the greatest limitation of these traditional print media publishing concepts: content size. I did a little quick math before writing this editorial and it’s an interesting statistic. As a print magazine, we publish approximately 750 pages of design articles each year in the print magazine. However, if you want to experience some “value added” and see a lot more unique content, you should also be on our web site. It turns out that in an average year we typically post about 1,500 pages of completely new and unpublished design projects and white papers on our web site. Go for it.
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