Snippet: PCWorld Exits Print ☇

Harry McCracken offers some commentary on PCWorld moving to a digital-only edition:

If I have to explain why, you haven’t been paying attention to the media business for the past decade or so. The web has been awfully hard on magazines, and no category has suffered more than computer publications. Both readers and advertisers have largely moved online. Many of them did so years ago — especially the sort of tech-savvy people who once read PC magazines. At the end, PCWorld was about a quarter the size it once was in terms of pages and had lost two-thirds of its readership. I don’t even want to think about what had happened to its profits.

I grew up reading PCWorld (and Macworld) back in the ’90s, and I seem to remember both being roughly double the length of current issues. Print magazines about technology offered things that you just couldn’t get on the Internet back then—high-quality images, rich layouts, and an emphasis on bringing you a well-developed story. While the third is debatable depending on the site you visit, things have changed, arguably for the better. We have more options, rich multimedia content, and then there’s always the immediacy factor. McCracken is absolutely right, although for those of us nostalgic types, it does give a minute of pause.