It seems 2006 will be the year that everyone will have to face up to the fact that Print is dying and while you can choose to blame The Internet, cable tv, or even such technologies as RSS Feeds, the simple truth is that newspapers and magazines no longer compete on content alone. The one exception that I can think of are glam publications which are all about showing hot celebrities in bikinis like the psuedo-porn Maxim and FHM, but even the classic Playboy Magazine is a former shell of itself. Hardest hit though are technology magazines and newspapers which cannot keep up with the 24 hour world of the Internet, and whose editorials and opinion pages pale in comparison to the abundance of online blogs.
I for one cannot understand how MacWorld magazine chooses to become even more irrelevant with each passing year, when the Macintosh market is steadily growing now. Here is a magazine that had a long tradition of editorials and in-depth reviews that you could trust. Now MacWorld costs about $8 and has so little content that it is not even worth consideration. More often than not, I am picking up expensive copies of British magazines like WebDeveloper, WebBuilder, and GigaHertz. At least these magazines still have good content and honest product reviews.
If I became a tech magazine editor, I’d add more product reviews, more tutorials, and cover stories which no other magazine covered. It’s not hard. Why devote yourself to just writing another review of the lastest Mac laptop, when you can cover things like the top ten laptops not available in the US, or what schools are doing to integrate computers into the classroom (or even better a story on how they are integrating it wrong!), or go underground and do some real investigative reporting and dish out some interesting industry news.
Think Secret has a full story the decline of US based Mac magazines like MacWorld and MacAddict. Personally you can also add PCWorld and all the other PC related magazines in there too, except for CPU User which I find interesting still.
This all reminds me of something most grade school teachers tell kids all the time: you can’t expect an A, if you only put half an effort into it. The same goes for magazines and newspapers, if your content is not compelling enough, you probably can’t expect huge sales.