You could have seen this one coming a mile away. Computer Shopper, once the biggest and one of the most profitable magazines in the United States, announced today that it’s going online-only.
The days of 1000-page tabloid-sized issues are long past; Shopper went to a slick paper and normal trim years ago. Back in The Day, I was a senior editor there, responsible for about 100 of those pages a month. That’s a lot. And while Shopper may not have been the best thing I’d ever done professionally or the most fun or the most formative, it was undoubtedly in the Top 3 for all of them. It’s surely where I learned the magazine business and where I started to learn how to be a manager. It’s where I met my best man. It’s why I moved into New York City.
And it’s where I forged personal and professional relationships that have lasted decades. I’m sad to see it go. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, a friend and once one of my writers, wrote a tribute in Computerworld. Read to the bottom.
There are too many Shopper stories than can be told here; you’ll have to buy me a beer or two — and I know that my short time at Shopper is only a thin slice of a very long story.
There’s an old poster that shows a genealogy of British blues bands. Every band that’s worth a damn could trace its way back to the Yardbirds, for one member or another at one point or another. In the tech press, Shopper was the Yardbirds. Glad I got to play
RIP, Rocky Mountain News
It’s not news anymore when a newspaper closes. But it’s especially sad that Scripps has killed the Rocky Mountain News. Today was its last edition.
(I’m not going to link to the RMN, because God only knows how long the links would be live.)
For many years, it was the strongest newspaper between the Mississippi River and California. It was the scrappier and more fun of the two papers in Denver, an energetic voice of the Rockies. It was 156 years old, and Scripps — the one-time owner of UPI that did so poorly by its crown jewel — decided it wasn’t worth the financial drain. The thing is, the RMN wasn’t even the weaker of the two papers.
After the jump, there’ll be two pieces from RMN writers. Full text, because the links will probably expire sooner rather than later. The first is from a sportswriter. The second is an awfully good obit, explaining why newspapers are important — and how a great paper gets that way.
Newspapers are fine. Their owners, however…
Fascinating piece in AdAge this week. It turns out that newspapers, as a business, are doing quite well — kicking out 10 to 20 percent returns, which ain’t chopped liver.
On the other hand, the companies that own newspapers are debt-laden swine. They took on too much debt in fat times, as national chains swept up local owners. If you can keep using cash flow to pay off debt service, you’re cool. But anyone who’s played Hot Potato knows what happens when the buzzer goes off.
Compare and contrast Hearst and Philadelphia Newspapers. The latter went Chapter 11 recently — too much debt — while saying operations are fine. But Hearst’s apparently imminent closings of the San Fransisco Chronicle and the Seattle Times, shows that media companies will have a choice: kill the papers or restructure their overall operations. Since the latter runs the risk of wiping out equity, expect far-flung media companies to impose pain on their newspapers. But smaller companies, focused on their own papers, may turn out just fine.
MPA cans annual magazine conference
One of the more glittery events in the consumer magazine business has its plug pulled for this year. The Magazine Publishers Association has canceled its annual American Magazine Conference.
Given that Hachette, AMI and New York all pulled out of the MPA recently, and given that tens of thousands of people got axed in the magazine business last year, this might be a bad time to be planning a big-ticket shindig. Maybe by the time the AMC season comes around this fall, all the remaining publishers can just have lunch in a phone booth somewhere in midtown…
Newspapers cut 9 percent of staff in 2008
Ow. Ow. Ow.
From AdAge:
The U.S. advertising and media industry slashed 18,700 jobs in December, bringing industry job losses in this recession to 65,100…
Not all Lego constructions have to be complicated
Very cute. Minimalist Legos about New York.
https://niemann.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/i-lego-ny/
More and more, I love the NYTimes’s blogs. Great writing and imagination, in a form and format that’s not right for print but perfect for online.
Nice Algorithm You Got There
Google would like you to believe that it’s all automatic, that there is this army of search spiders that digs out every last page and image on the Web and decides which is “better” for any given search term. It’s true, as far as it goes, but the company tends to carefully elide the human element that goes into its search result. Until something goes horribly wrong, as it did Saturday morning. For an hour, Google said every site on the Net was dangerous — itself included.
Do URL shorterners pass page authority?
This is something I’ve got to experiment with: do URL shorteners like TinyURL and bit.ly hurt a targeted page’s authority? And if they do intercept the authority, is the added traffic they drive worth the loss?
Services like TinyURL are extremely useful for sending pages with long URLs to people over e-mail or Twitter, where you only have 140 characters. But bloggers use them, too — because shorter URLs are just easier to deal with.
But how do those services redirect the traffic? When search engines find TinyURL and bit.ly URLs on the Web, where do they assign the authority: to the TinyURL URL or the underlying page? Because I don’t recall seeing bit.lys or TinyURLs in search results — and I look at a lot of search results — I suspect that they pass the authority just fine. But it would be a big deal if they didn’t; a few good backlinks can be difference between a non-existent search position and an excellent one.
A distinct lack of cumulative learning
Note update after the jump…
A bunch of Big Thinkers got together recently to chew about the intersection of Big Media and Social Media,and concluded the following:
The overwhelming flow of information, crap, or junk cannot be stemmed, [NYU Journalism professor Jay] Rosen noted. “The way to make yourself valuable on the Web is: you edit the fucking Web,” he emphasized, sending smiles across the crowd’s faces. Journalists should serve as intelligent filters and middlemen if they hope to keep their jobs, Rosen added.
Now, I love Jay Rosen, but this makes me nuts. The idea of editors as filters of new media is not, like, new. That last link dates from 1995, and includes this:
There goes Plan B…
So now comes word that Starbucks will close 200 more U.S. stores (in addition to the 600 already slated), putting another 6,700 people out of work. I guess all my friends in publishing will now need a new “last-resort” job option.
One wonders if the severance benefits include a high-value Starbucks card and free Wi-Fi. And it this is related to yesterday’s counter-intuitive decision to stop brewing decaf in the afternoons….