Out of Print

Yesterday’s announcement that InfoWorld is discontinuing its print edition is one that leaves me with decidedly mixed feelings. On the one hand, as someone who has been writing and/or editing for InfoWorld for over twenty years, it’s pretty devastating to think that soon nothing with the InfoWorld banner will be arriving in my mailbox every week. On the other hand, as someone who moved to the weblog side years ago, I’m not directly affected and I fully believe it’s the right thing for InfoWorld to do. But I think it raises a question for readers, and not just readers of InfoWorld, as to how long the content they value is going to be in print.

I will admit that it’s only with effort that I’m resisting the temptation to wax nostalgic about my experiences at InfoWorld and the many outstanding journalists, insightful technologists, and even one or two brilliant business people I’ve know there. And I reserve the right to do that some other time, but not right now. After all, perhaps InfoWorld’s best days are yet ahead of it.

Anyone who has been getting InfoWorld in their mailbox for a while no doubt is not any more surprised than I am that they finally decided it no longer made sense to have a print edition. Given how thin it’s been, maybe the only surprise is that it took this long. The action for InfoWorld has been online for some time, and they’ve decided that’s where their business is. And that’s decision you can expect many other publications that you read to make in the coming years. And not just computer trade mags, but everything from your local newspaper to scientific journals.

I will share one reminiscence with you, but it’s not a warm and fuzzy one. Back in the early ’90s, I was the Editor of InfoWorld, so I was the one in charge of the editorial budget, including the Test Center. As part of that, I had a pretty good idea of what our competitors in the IT weekly space were spending. I’m far removed from that now, and I have no inside intelligence on InfoWorld or any of its competitors (or former competitors, since we certainly can’t call InfoWorld a weekly anymore). Still, I am relatively certain that the combined editorial budgets of all them today, adjusted for the brief weirdness of the dotcom boom, would only be in the same ballpark of one of the individual publication’s budgets back then. And the reason I can be sure of that is you only have to glance at an issue or two of any of them to know they are living with a fraction of the advertising revenue they used to enjoy, and with a fraction of the editorial staff on their masthead.

Think about what that means. The amount of money being spent to produce content of interest to IT readers has been cut in half, and then maybe cut in half again. Can that content be as good? And, yes, I believe in the blogosphere and I believe in citizen journalists, so maybe that same content that an InfoWorld or one of its competitors might have published ten or fifteen years ago will today be posted by somebody who does it for free. But will you find it? And if you do find it, why would you trust it compared to other things that are posted that may contradict it?

Of course, it’s not that there isn’t still a lot of money being spent to advertise to IT readers – it’s just that a lot of those advertising dollars are going to Google and Yahoo and others who don’t actually have anything to do with producing the content. And your local newspaper has probably found its classified ad revenue decimated by eBay or Craigslist. Other kinds of print publications – maybe all kinds of print publications – face the same conundrum.

I’m not saying that the way ad revenues are distributed in the new paradigm is a bad thing – hey, that’s just the way the world works now. Google, Craigslist, etc. are too valuable to all of us to say their revenue models have to take a backseat to how an InfoWorld used to make money. But doesn’t it also mean that, more and more, that some of the content we used to love is soon to be out of print? Be it on dead trees or online, either somebody pays for the creation of the content or, ultimately, it will not be created.

Are you worried about who pays for the creation of content in the Google era? Write me at Foster@gripe2ed.com or phone the Gripe Line voice mail at 1 888 875-7916.

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